We have moved into the top ten per cent of employers in the European financial industry and aim to break into the top five per cent of employers in all industries in Europe by 2025. Culture, sustainability and agility are also regarded as key drivers for achieving all the other objectives of our new strategy, Simply Safe: Season 2.
Our employees are our most important resource. They provide our workforce and knowledge and are at the heart of our unique Baloise culture. As an employer, we endeavour to increase the well-being of our employees in their work by offering an inspiring and motivational working environment.
Digitalisation is changing what is required of us in terms of expertise, skills, and the knowledge we need to keep pace with change. As such, it is becoming more and more important that we all undergo continuous further development and continue to learn.
With this in mind, Baloise wants to offer employees an environment that enables them to drive forward their development themselves. “On the one hand, the idea behind this is to enable employees to continue to develop and, by doing so, maintain their employability. On the other hand, it should also help Baloise to systematically build up the expertise, knowledge and skills necessary to achieve its strategic objectives,” explains Christine Bourson, Learning Organisation Project Supervisor.
Our learning offers can be divided into roughly three categories: ‘formal learning opportunities’ such as LinkedIn Learning and Baloise Campus; ‘learning with others’ in the form of feedback talks, Mid-Year Reviews and development mentoring; and ‘learning on the job’ in the form of shadowing and changes of perspective.
Our employees have been able to use LinkedIn Learning without restriction since mid-March.
“The learning platform gives every one of us round-the-clock access from any device to more than 15,000 video seminars by leading industry experts. It has never been so easy to gain knowledge or to build on existing knowledge independently and based on individual interests,” says Sandra Schmid, Digital Learning Expert.
Since its launch in March of this year, our employees have spent a total of more than 3,300 hours learning on the platform. These are the most popular webinars in Switzerland:
1. Quick wit – speechless no more
2. How LinkedIn Learning works
3. Instagram in ten minutes.
Shadow for a Day is an opportunity provided by employees for employees to allow them to better understand jobs from other departments and to get to know other perspectives and ways or working.
A change of perspective allows employees to assume a different role from anywhere across the Group for a set time frame, either full-time or part-time. For those looking to recruit, a change of perspective offers the opportunity to fill temporary in-house gaps and to bring new expertise into the team. Simply discuss your development goals with your manager, apply for a corresponding offer, or take the initiative yourself and ask a division about the relevant change of perspective.
Feedback forms a key input for our learning. It can help us to find out things about ourselves that we never knew or to consider these from a different perspective. Feedback helps us to better gauge the way we act, to rethink it and, if need be, to change it. As such, all employees are invited to seek feedback on a regular basis.
As part of continuous dialogues, all managers and employees are required to discuss their development on a regular basis and set development goals.
Development mentoring is an offer intended to supplement the Mid-Year Review / continuous dialogues. Employees can reflect on issues relating to their development and their employability with an in-house development mentor in order to gain new perspectives and access to the mentor’s networks.
The offer our employees use depend on the respective personal development goals. Our culture promotes the slogan ‘be yourself, but don’t stay as you are’ for good reason – we don’t stand still, we adapt to changing circumstances. Which goals you define yourself and how you set about achieving them is down to you. The inspiration for your goals might come from feedback given by colleagues, from a Mid-Year Review, inspiring events or something similar.
The questions everyone should ask themselves are: Where am I going in the long term? What do I want to achieve in the long run? As an employer, we support our employees on their path because we are convinced that this is the key to long-term success.