The Sky’s The Limit

The writing is on the wall, the walls in this case being the spanking new hallways of the Quai Zurich Campus HQ: “We empower people to take optimistic actions for the future.” “It’s time to be bold and to drive positive impact.” “Invest in Optimism.” “Forward Doing Starts with Forward Thinking.” And finally: “Optimistic Minds Create Positive Impact.”

As cranky, acerbic New Yorkers might say, “yada, yada, yada.”

It may all sound good on paper (and look nice on the wall in Ogg, 300-point type) but does it really reflect the employee experience here?

Now, 55,000 people will never agree on everything, whether it’s the 55,000 or so employees on Team Zurich or the 55,000 cranky, acerbic fans at New York’s Yankee Stadium, but for Nicolas Amiel, those words on the office walls do indeed resonate. The 33-year-old originally from Narbonne, France, was hardly a corporate type when he came to Zurich in 2019. Anything but. He was a manny – a male nanny, that is – an occupation that, years ago, may have inspired a Ben Stiller comedy or produced chuckles around the collective water cooler of private industry. And Zurich may well have been one of those companies. But not the Zurich of today.

Nicolas, who is in the Integrated Talent Management team, fully admits that he had reservations about working in insurance at first. “I didn’t know anything about it,” he says at a bistro table in the sun-dappled Forum, the corridor between the old and new buildings in the Quai Zurich Campus, a bridge, if you will, between what the company was and what it’s moving toward. Next to him is a sumptuous, five-paneled print by Pop artist extraordinaire and New Yorker Roy Lichtenstein (though by all accounts neither cranky nor acerbic). It’s titled “Wallpaper with Blue Floor Interior, 1992,” – a deadpan scene on the surface but filled with nuance and subtext and dotted with primary colors.

“I came from a very, very different field,” Nicolas continues. “If anything, I thought insurance was dark.” Then he pauses and corrects himself. “Not dark….”

Maybe cold and distant?

“Yes,” he says, “exactly.”

But soon after he started a training program and internship, he found that it was “a place where I could work, feel safe and accepted, feel included and thrive, and not be judged in any way.” He also appreciated the company’s openness to the LGBTQ+ community and that it had EDGE certification regarding equal pay.

“Zurich is lively, it’s challenging in a developmental way, and modern,” he says. “What I like, and what I always say, is that Zurich allowed me to bring to the table my other life, which is my own experience, my interpersonal skills, my sense of organization, and the management skills that I developed.”

New joiners in Latin America enjoy the good vibes

Nicolas’s optimism and can-do spirit is emblematic of what the company has been driving toward since 2017, when the first Organizational Health Index (OHI) was ushered in. The OHI is a diagnostic tool that enables companies to track and focus on those aspects of the organization that they want to shift and change. The 2017 results illustrated a company culture that was broken and in need of upgrades – in terms of leadership, motivation, and work environment. Upper management got onboard, and the next survey in 2020 showed double-digit improvements. While the work continues – as it always must for a company to remain relevant in a fast-changing market – the momentum has had staying power.

Alessandra Magnavita, joined Zurich’s São Paulo office – in the shadow of the iconic Octávio Frias de Oliveira Bridge – just seven months ago. She arrived from the banking sector and was attracted by Zurich’s commitment to diversity and inclusion as well as sustainability. She did some research on professional networks and spoke to someone she knew at the company for feedback. It all sounded good – on paper.

“I was a little nervous wondering if I had made the right decision,” the 41-year-old Alessandra says, “but I was more excited about all the possibilities, the opportunity to learn new things, to be involved in new projects and also to be in contact with colleagues from all over the world.”

She’s quite happy with how it’s turned out thus far. “It has pleasantly surprised me,” she says. “More than I expected. People here really enjoy what they do. There’s a lot going on at the same time. Zurich is thinking about the now, the present moment, but it’s also thinking about the future. It’s always one step ahead, not only on issues related to employees, but also with our customers….We have groups of people thinking about how we can really make a difference, and as part of Zurich we are always somehow involved in all these challenges and feel part of the improvements and changes, it doesn’t matter our role and area of expertise. I realize that everyone feels important.”

And put another way – one that’s simple yet telling – she adds, “the hours fly by.”

North by northwest of São Paulo, in the Swiss-like altitudes of Quito, Ecuador, Yani Acosta actually was familiar with insurance when she applied a year-and-a-half ago having worked in the industry in the past. She knew the cliché of it being dull wasn’t necessarily true nor was she tentative about starting since she got such a good impression during the interview process.

That said, Yani, originally from Venezuela, has been impressed with how Zurich appears to be attentive to the well-being of its employees – something Alessandra also cited – and encourages them to learn new skills.

“For me, each day is a new adventure, which makes me step up and give my best in everything I do,” says the 37-yead-old IT Business Partner, who previously worked at a digital transformation company. “It’s a very motivating, dynamic atmosphere, that forces you to think out of the box. My supervisors challenge me to develop the skills that I’ll need in the future.”

Her supervisor, for instance, gave her responsibilities above and beyond her tasks as a business analyst to be a project manager in a digital transformation program. “It’s also very refreshing to know that they trust my work,” she says. “I really feel as if the sky’s the limit.”

Chicago: Windy yes, but warm and welcoming, too

Not that Zurich is perfect – what company is, after all – but the efforts that have been made have been noticed by some veteran employees such Lauren Ribando, who’s been with the company for nine years.

As a young child, Ribando remembers visiting her mother working in the tax division of Zurich North America in the Schaumburg, Illinois office, just outside of Chicago, and thinking, “Ugh, I never want to work for this place, it’s so boring!” While at Augustana College, though, she had two successive internships with Zurich Community Investment and joined full-time after graduation in 2013. It was different a decade ago, a more traditional corporate environment: guys in suits, women in pencil skirts, formal meeting structures. People called her “kiddo.”

She was on the Employee Experience team, so it was her job to change the culture. There were baby steps – casual Fridays; fun theme days; networking with office-mates – and 2016 is when she started to notice changes. Still, it wasn’t easy. That same year, a Zurich leader said at a panel, “I don’t wake up in the morning thinking about your personal career path.”

After that wake-up call, Lauren started to change her career approach. In 2018, she moved over to marketing and worked on Make the Difference, a rotational program across the entire global business designed to shift the organizational health. She visited the head office in Switzerland to see how the strategy was evolving there, something that proved to be a turning point for her.

“It was a totally different way of thinking, a different way of working,” she says. “And understanding that the Group had buy-in for that was something that was really empowering.”

The still recently-appointed Group CEO Mario Greco, she recalls, “would say ‘Seek forgiveness, not permission,’ and ‘be bolder.’ It felt like a real shift for me.”

When she returned to the Schaumburg office, it wasn’t quite the same atmosphere, not yet, but once they really settled into their new LEED-certified building – with an open plan, plenty of light, a gym, family day, and more employee idea forums – the culture began to move forward.

“The company took a people-centered approach to that move,” she says. “I think that helped set the tone and say, ‘We care about our people.’ And as employees, when you feel like your company cares about you, it’s easier to portray that back to the customers, like, ‘We work at a great company, let me tell you about it.’ That kind of shows through. That’s different from before. Zurich has become more caring, inclusive, and open to change – and it’s been inspiring to watch.”

In the last year, in particular, Lauren, now 31, has noticed that the good feeling has reverberated. “Things are clicking for people,” she says. “We are talking more about the customer and what the customer could do. There’s more colorful branding….So I definitely see the optimism starting to shine through. I think there’s more that we could do there, but we’re putting ourselves in a really good position. We just need to continue to bring it to life and foster it and not fall back on bad habits. So it’s definitely different – different in a good way.”

Last month, Lauren started a new role as AVP, Senior Product Owner USNA Salesforce, “a long title,” she laughs, but one where she will help customers and distributors experience Zurich through digital platforms and help employees build more meaningful relationships. “It’s a new opportunity,” she says, “so it should be fun.”

‘Lively, bright, strong’

Back at the Quai Zurich Campus, Nicolas Amiel is asked what he would say to others who are considering working at Zurich but are hesitant because they don’t know the company or might even look askance at the insurance field.

He pauses once more, gazes out the window, then at the Lichtenstein print, and says this: “I would say, to re-use the words of our company, ‘what can go right’ if you get curious and joined one of the external events to get a glimpse of who Zurich is, what Zurich does, but also get in touch with Zurich employees, because you will be pleasantly surprised. The insurance industry, and Zurich, has changed. It’s not as cold as people think. It’s a very lively, bright, strong company.”

I thank him for his time, we fist bump, and I tell him that we went an ungodly 10 minutes over our allotted slot – very un-Swiss, in other words. “Eh,” he says with a shrug. “It’s no problem. I’m still French.”