Building a brighter future together
Creating a brighter future for employees, customers and the communities it operates in underpins Zurich’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, writes Kathy Cahill, HR Business Partner, Zurich Ireland.
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At Zurich, our aim is to nurture a culture where all of our employees feel included and comfortable bringing their whole self and lived experience to work. To achieve this, we have made diversity and inclusion a business priority. We believe that embracing our differences and promoting inclusion across our business ultimately achieves better outcomes for everyone.
Listening, learning and inspiring action
We have created a Diversity and Inclusion Forum which is sponsored by members of our executive team. Made up of employees from across our business, forum members work closely with senior leaders to embed people practices that support us in creating a brighter future for everyone. The forum is there to inspire and influence our diversity and inclusion agenda but also to help us hear what is important and valued by our employees.
Focusing on mental health inclusion
Those from diverse backgrounds can face a lack of representation, unconscious bias, and other stressors that impact their mental health and psychological safety at work. Equally for some employees, the challenges of the past 18 months have affected their wellbeing. We have a strong record in this area with our Tackle Your Feelings mental wellbeing programme developed in association with Rugby Players Ireland.We have continued to build on this by offering mental health first aid training to a panel of our employees, training our managers to raise awareness of how to support those with mental health concerns as well as supporting our employee wellbeing resource group.
Embracing our differences
We want people to reach their full potential, not despite their differences but because of them. To support this aim, for the first time, Zurich is partnering with Pride Dublin as well as ‘Cool to be Trans’, an organisation which is spearheaded by openly transgender woman Katie Neeves. We have pledged to sponsor and partner in this way to educate and increase knowledge and build meaningful ally and advocacy programmes for all employees. Partnerships are an important way for us to learn and demonstrate our support as we embed our approach to diversity and inclusion across the organisation in this way.
While the past 18 months have taught us a lot, we continue to work to deliver our commitment on an inclusive work environment for all our employees. We are committed to building on our experience, continuing to engage with our employees and, most importantly, continuing to learn from each other about the differences that make us all unique. Diversity in our workplace brings diversity of thought, fuels our innovation and also brings us closer to the customers and communities we serve.
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