INCLUSIVE OPEN CULTURE THROUGH LEARNING - Upskilling and reskilling employees to be up to the future challenges at Generali
Alberta Zamolo, Lorenzo Giordano
The world is changing at a fast, often unpredictable pace. The insurance industry is no exception. Insurance is a long-running business, yet it is now facing a deep transformation. From customers’ needs to distribution models, from product design to the role of technology. Everything is changing very quickly and the work evolution is going fast, as well.
In fact, according to the last World Economic Forum Report (2020) on “Future of Work”, 83% of Financial Services Companies will accelerate the digitalization of processes due to Covid-19 impact, the 44% of the skills within a role are expected to change in 4 years and 50% of people moving to new roles requires substantial reskilling. Finally, +13.5% new roles will increase by 2025. This means that a broad, deep and accelerated digital transformation is an even higher priority, and new skills, behaviors and learning agility are a key enabler for success. In this hyper challenging context, how can Generali ensure the long term relevance of the skills of their people to foster the transformation? By launching a strategic plan aimed at delivering profitable growth while executing a digital transformation, with the strong ambition to become Life-Time Partner to its customers. Alongside with its business strategy, Generali also developed a People Strategy which answers this need by ensuring the evolution of its own employees’ working conditions and habits and fosters a customer-centric, inclusive and open culture where everyone feels free to stand for healthy values, consistent behaviors and a common purpose.
The We LEARN Program
Aligned to this purpose, in November 2019, Generali launched the Group-wide reskilling and upskilling initiative called We LEARN. The initiative aims to equip all Generali employees with the new business, digital and behavioral skills most needed to keep growing in the digital era, succeed in the future market context, and strengthen a more inclusive, diverse and equitable workplace. Generali, through its Group and Local Academies, developed a holistic approach, which creates experiences and opportunities for the learners to be explored, requires the learners to be active participants, and challenges them to think critically. In fact, various training components have been proposed, such as foundation courses for the entire population, to create awareness on key strategic and cultural topics, or new role schools to create highly specialized new professions such as Data Scientist or Smart Automation experts or digital and virtual classroom courses with remote coaching to evolve existing roles with new skills.We LEARN ensures a common learning experience through a Group Learning Platform, available for more than 73,000 employees, accessible to support the course fruition of differently abled employees, flexible, highly customized and user-friendly. The initiative, orchestrated by the Generali Group Academy, has already achieved and overcome the ambitious target of reskilling and upskilling at least 50% of employees in 50 countries and 25 languages, leveraging on over 500 internal local trainers, content experts and ambassadors to support the communication and engagement activities.
Build an inclusive and open culture
We LEARN can leverage on a wide variety of contents and multiple levels of in-depth learning paths, designed for the peculiarity of each learner within the Group. Particular attention is paid to making content accessible to people with disabilities. For example, digital content generally refers to the information in a web page or web application, including natural information such as text, images, and sounds and code or markup that defines structure, presentation, etc. Specific training, with a wide cultural breath and target population, adopt the sign language. Examples on this direction are the “Digital Acumen”, aimed to boost awareness and a basic understanding of digital dynamics and develop a digital mindset and the “Behaviors to become Lifetime Partner” designed to foster the understanding and encourage the adoption of our Lifetime Partner Behaviors: Ownership, Simplification, Innovation, and Human Touch. Creating a more inclusive, diverse and equitable workplace and culture, that promotes innovation through diversity and aims at building an environment where each individual is valued and respected, is an ongoing process and continuing to learn about D&I is a lifelong commitment. Generali realized that D&I needs to be infused across all learning cultural programs and for this reason all the relevant culture training contents are developed in full synergy with D&I cultural guidelines, and several D&I training contents are present in the We LEARN catalogue. Rapid learning programs on unconscious biases and how to challenge them, as well as training pills on LGBTQI+ inclusion are available to all the employees.
The Generali People Strategy is preparing its employees to face complexity and market challenges, equipping them with the right mindset and behaviors that are key to live in and contribute to a more diverse and inclusive world.