Simple because it matters.
Creating value by valuing People
Diversity
Our employees’ wide range of qualifications, experiences and ways of thinking are of great benefit to ERGO. We want to support and promote this diversity and our employees’ potential as an integral part of our corporate culture.
The “Diversity” team has implemented a series of measures intended to sustainably promote women’s career progress within our Company. Since then, the share of women in management positions has steadily increased: At the end of 2023, 41.1 percent of management positions Group-wide were held by women. As part of the Groupwide "Ambition 2025", the Group strives to increase the proportion of women in management to at least 40 percent of management positions and at least 25 percent of seats on the Board of Management by the end of 2025.
Another important instrument related to women's career advancement in our Company is our mentoring programme, aimed at female employees with the potential to rise to management positions. Participants have the opportunity to work on their personal development with experienced executives, primarily from the Board of Management.
In 2023, ERGO once again received the "top4women" seal. This signifies that women in the company are supported and promoted in their professional development. The jury recognized the commitment to equitable promotion of both women and men, as well as the variety of tools and models for balancing work and family life.
Different life phases or sudden upheavals in the family always exert an impact on an individual’s working life. As far as ERGO is concerned, diversity is therefore also about creating options for relieving the pressure in this field of tension. Our family-oriented HR policy is regularly evaluated and documented by the “work and family” audit. The audit process for the certificate of the BerufundFamilie Service ggmbH has shaped our measures to balance the demands of work and family life since 2002.
Qualification and awareness
At its headquarters at Düsseldorf in Germany, ERGO organizes an annual Diversity Day for its employees. With various activities we strive to promote awareness of the diversity within the work force as employees learn how ERGO supports individual lifestyles and how to overcome prejudices.
Our customers’ life plans and life courses are also becoming ever more diverse. We believe that only those companies whose workforce is appropriately diversified to appeal to a similarly broad range of customers, perform to their satisfaction and retain their custom will be able to succeed in the market of the future.
Sustainable human resources policy
Promoting development
ERGO makes best use of personnel development programmes to ensure top-quality development for employees with potential at all levels of seniority. In both initial vocational training and further training for experienced employees, when developing future executives and planning succession to senior posts, ERGO believes in giving its employees targeted opportunities to grow.
Perspectives in training
We rely on qualified basic and advanced training to secure the next generation of our workforce and want to offer young people attractive professional perspectives in the Company as well as in Sales. Apart from training as qualified Finance and Insurance Clerk in-house and in sales agencies, ERGO offers other trainings. A training is also available in the framework of dual studies.
Identifying and promoting talented people
We strive to develop our future managerial staff with targeted talent management instruments. We are particularly committed to foster the development of women. The ERGO Mentoring Programme in Germany allows our female trainee managers to be mentored by experienced colleagues. At the same time, we look to recruit and develop international talents. As part of these efforts, the participants in Munich Re’s international trainee programme EXPLORE also spent one training period at ERGO as the Group’s primary insurer. Furthermore, the ERGO Grow talent programme supports employees who aspire to management or project leader roles at ERGO.
Better protected
Promoting health
Work and health belong together. A holistic HR concept therefore entails promoting the well-being of members of staff and responding to their varied health needs in all phases of life and career.
The majority of our employees work in our domestic German market, our company doctors worker have specialised in providing assistance in acute cases and giving support to employees on all issues relating to health. They carry out preventive examinations, give vaccinations and lend assistance in first aid. They also provide counselling if people have professional or private difficulties, and give advice on how to deal with addictiveness and stress.
Are our workstations designed for maximum comfort and support for the user? How can we establish health-promoting ways of working, in sitting work postures, for example? And what to do in an emergency? ERGO's team of company doctors deal with these and other issues along with providing healthcare services such as checks, vaccinations and first aid. They are available to our employees in Germany to discuss all health issues, provide support for reintegration into the workplace and, of course, are bound to confidentiality in all cases. We complement this service with a range of company health promotion programmes at all our German locations, covering issues such as nutrition, exercise, tobacco/alcohol/caffeine consumption and stress management.
Our company doctors work with our health and safety specialists, who also provide advice to employers and employees, on a range of issues around occupational safety. Our health and safety specialists offer their support in matters such as choosing devices for employees to work with, ergonomics and creating the optimum working environment. They deal with issues such as escape routes from company buildings, adequate lighting and risk assessments to evaluate levels of physical and psychological strain for employees.
In addition to these tasks, they are involved in investigations when accidents happen at work, as well as focusing on accident prevention; a further part of their remit is to carry out safety checks of on-site systems, technical work equipment and work procedures in dry runs before they are introduced. Employees wanting to know more can visit the health and safety information portal in our company intranet.
A comprehensive package of company health promotion is available at all German locations, for example relating to the issues of nutrition, physical exercise and relaxation. ERGO sports is one of Germany’s biggest company sporting associations. Sport is organised centrally under one roof and offers more than 50 different sporting disciplines and other activities at seven sites. All year round, colleagues from all our sites and divisions come together in running, football and beach volley ball tournaments, and international events like the ERGO Cup and the Sail Challenge. Apart from find-ing joy in physical exercise, all these activities help to promote health awareness and teambuilding skills. Musical and cultural interests are also part of the scene and they include the ERGO Bands, the ERGO choir, and a theatre group which enables employees to tread the boards.
Creating options
Career & family
ERGO gives its employees access to a wide range of flextime models to help them combine their careers with their personal and family lives. We are certified as being a company aware of the issues surrounding employees’ family lives, and have developed a range of instruments to meet their needs, including part-time working arrangements. For child and elder care, employees in Germany can rely on family services of external providers.
In the light of demographic change and an impending shortage of specialists on the labour market, the importance of supporting employees with family responsibilities is set to keep on increasing in the future. We at ERGO are acutely aware of this issue, and have responded by making employees’ ability to combine their careers with their family lives an integral part of our corporate culture. Above and beyond this, ERGO is active in encouraging family-friendly corporate policies across society; for instance, we are a member of the “Erfolgsfaktor Familie” (Family as a Success Factor) network initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth.
Family-friendly – and that’s official
In 2002 the first ERGO site in Germany received the German “Career and Family” (berufundfamilie®) certifica-tion for its policies helping employees to balance their careers with their family lives and for further objectives of its HR work that demonstrate awareness of employees‘ family issues. The certificate is awarded by the BerufundFamilie Service ggmbH in the context of a three-year process of development and monitoring. ERGO regularly undergoes the independent audit. Independent studies confirm that higher employee satisfaction translates into higher-quality work. Taking this principle to heart, ERGO places value on sustainable, family-friendly HR policies and aims to con-tinuously develop them further.
Employees at ERGO are able, in line with country-specific regulations and arrangements, to reduce their working hours for a specified period of time or take a sabbatical for family reasons without losing their jobs. In this way, employees with caring responsibilities for children or other family members are able to manage their work flexibly around their role in the family. One example of such policies that exerts a strong appeal to employees in Germany is our company parental leave, which employees can use to extend their legal parental leave by up to three years – without losing their right to return to work full-time afterwards. Parents can also split this period up and use part of it later on in their child’s life, such as during their school-starting phase. In order to keep in touch with new mothers and fathers, ERGO has initiated a parents’ network, among other projects.
In addition to all this, employees can convert special payments such as Christmas or holiday bonuses into up to 44 additional days of annual leave, enabling them to work four-day or 30-hour weeks without losing their full-time status. Furthermore, we are guaranteeing employees taking a family sabbatical of up to a year a position of equal value in the same area of the business upon their return. We also allow employees to take a short-notice “family break” of up to twelve months to care for family members, receiving half of their usual salary during this period and for the period of the equivalent length after their return to work.
An external family services provider (“pme Familienservice”) supports our employees in Germany when looking for day nurseries, baby minders or au-pairs for child care. In case of emergencies, such as illness of the child's regular carer, our cooperation partner can also organize ad hoc care. Another specialized assistance service provider (“wds.care”) is available for advice and active support for employees taking care of elderly family members, and also informs about related financing and legal frameworks in elder care. Our employees can use the company’s advisory and agency services free of charge, and there is a round-the-clock hotline for them to turn to in emergencies.
All major German locations have parent and child offices for employees to work in for a day at a time, featuring one or two desks with all required equipment and a play corner for the children. Furthermore, at major locations such as City Nord in Hamburg and Lindenthal in Cologne, we reserve places at a range of day nurseries for our employees; we are planning to extend this service step by step to other locations, with particular emphasis on places for under-threes. In Düsseldorf, our cooperation partner “pme Familienservice” operates a childcare facility (“E-Kids”) at our Company headquarters for children up to age three with employee-friendly opening hours.
School holidays frequently prove a particular challenge for working parents, whose annual leave usually falls short of the time in which schools and nurseries are closed and for whom finding appropriate holiday childcare is often a difficult and expensive undertaking. In response to this need, ERGO cooperates with other organisations at its various German locations, for example with "kidz-playground" at its Düsseldorf and Hamburg locations.
Fair and transparent
Remuneration & benefits
At ERGO, we reward our employees for their work in a fair manner that does justice to individual performance. Remuneration is structured transparently; in Germany, it encompasses a range of supplements and additional special payments as well as basic salary. Over and above this, we offer employees flexitime arrangements, an attractive company pension and plenty more besides.
Remuneration in ERGO Group companies is structured according to clear country-specific rules; employees receive a basic salary and allowances, and are categorised in a comprehensible system of salary groupings. In Germany, salaries are made up of a number of different components.
Fair and transparent salary structures
All employees at our German locations receive a salary in accordance with the German wage agreement for the insurance industry. As members of the AGV, the employers’ association for insurance companies in Germany, ERGO and Munich Re are bound to follow the wage agreements it reaches with employee representatives in collective bargaining; these agreements classify roles within insurance companies according to the requirements of the position.
In addition, employees receive a special payment each in May and November. Other variable salary components employees may receive include a monthly performance bonus, based on the Company’s performance, an annual bonus linked to the achievement of individually agreed targets, or a one-off payment for outstanding performance.
