UniCredit Bulbank’s ESG Learning Journey

Certified Top Employer UniCredit Bulbank is the leading bank in Bulgaria and a member of UniCredit, a successful pan-European commercial bank operating in Italy, Germany, Central and Eastern Europe. It has a unique service offering and its purpose is to empower communities to progress, delivering best-in-class for all stakeholder, unlocking the potential of clients and people.

UniCredit puts integrity, ownership and caring at the heart of its decision-making in everything it does, and digitalisation and a commitment to ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) principles are key enablers for delivering this. Their commitment to their ESG values and the ambitious energy goals that have been set in the EU for 2030 and 2050 is what started their award winning ESG Learning Journey in 2021.

For UniCredit Bulbank, ESG is not the responsibility of one department, team or individual, but everyone’s duty.

Download the Case Study to learn how:

• UniCredit Bulbank Bulgaria used a pyramid approach to restructure their ESG principles.
• They created an integrated group and local learning offer for ESG that had targeted initiatives for different groups of employees across the organisation that addressed specific needs and accountabilities for them.
• UniCredit Bulbank Bulgaria created ESGpresso, an ESG education platform, for colleagues to have easy access to information about their policies.

Download the case study now, click on the button and get the complete Case study for free.

Case Study: The Saint-Gobain HR Mirror



Certified Global Top Employer, Saint-Gobain, is the world leader in light and sustainable construction. Saint-Gobain designs, manufactures, and distributes materials and solutions for the construction, mobility, and industrial markets. They have been certified as a Global Top Employer since 2016.

In 2019 Saint-Gobain began organising a global Employee engagement survey called me@SaintGobain. It covered 40 questions across five different themes to identify how motivated employees are at that moment. In doing this survey and the Top Employers Best Practices Survey they realised that they could use both surveys to create a mirror survey that would allow them to continue to get more useful information to improve their employee’s life at work.

Download the Case Study to learn how:

• Saint-Gobain created a four-stage process to mirror the two surveys and create the HR Mirror survey.
• How they implemented the survey across their global offices with a strategic communication plan.
• How they use the results of the survey to improve the working conditions and policies for their employees across their global offices.

Learn more about how they implemented Saint-Gobain’s HR Mirror by downloading the case study now.

The tips are often small but have a big impact



How do you make use of the Top Employers Community?

Since being certified by Top Employers we have been building relationships, not only with the Top Employers Institute, but also with other certified Top Employers. There is a network of organisations willing to share, help one another to progress and learn from each other. I have been brought into contact, via Top Employers, with organisations with more extensive expertise on employee well-being, which has led to virtual workshops on mental health.

How do you share successful practices and processes (with other Top Employers)?

I had the opportunity to be a guest speaker twice, to share my expertise on Talent Acquisition and D&I. Whether I’m on stage or in the audience, after a Connect & Share session I am always inspired and eager to implement what I learn at PageGroup.

How has the Top Employers community contributed to your development?

Being amongst other Top Employers gives me a sense of pride in my work at PageGroup. Reflecting on the practices of other Top Employers helps me to reflect on PageGroup and act upon what we could improve. The tips are often small but have a big impact.

Supporting mental wellbeing in the hybrid world of work



How do organizations create diverse and focused offerings that support the mental health of their employees?  

That is what Certified Top Employer Discovery discussed in a recent Top Employers Connect webinar about mental wellbeing.  

In the latest of our ‘For a Better World of Work’ series, we were joined by Jabulile Nosi, Head of Employee Wellbeing at Discovery, Zonke Mashile, Business Executive at Discovery, and Ammara Naeem, Head of Client Success at Top Employers Institute, to explore how Discovery uses personalization, data-centricity, and leadership storytelling to unlock a meaningful wellbeing strategy.  

Read ahead to get a snapshot at some of the highlights from Zonke, Jabulile, and Ammara’s engaging discussion, and fill in the form (on the right-hand side of the page) to get the recording of the webinar to watch whenever you have a moment. 

Discovery’s wellness is derived from its purpose – which is to make people healthier and enhance and protect their lives. And that’s where insights are drawn from.  

Although Discovery has a plethora of wellness resources (including bank rewards, an integrated rewards platform, webinars, corporate wellness), they were still challenged with what is missing around how they support their employee’s mental wellbeing.  

Concerns were grouped into four key themes:  

• Languishing – Adam Grant refers to languishing as the “neglected middle child of mental health.” It is the  void between depression and flourishing, in other words, the feeling of being “stuck.” 
• Grief – Not just the grief of the loss of loved ones, but also the grief of losing the last few years of being home and the grief of experiences. The loss of opportunities and experiences and social interactions. 
• Burnout – The feeling of being overwhelmed and your body telling you, “I can’t do this anymore.” 
• Anxiety – A sense of anxiety among employees given the uncertainty and stress in the environment. 

Prioritizing employee mental well-being through a series of experiments 

As a result of the four key themes identified, Discovery ran a series of experiments to see what was working and what was not working. Some of the experiments conducted were:  

• A five-part mental well-being series covering several topics (including the importance, stigma, burnout, screen fatigue, and even wellbeing for kids!) 
• Team initiatives – Power Hours, Meeting Free Afternoons, Brown bag sessions, Resilience toolkits, and bereavement and will support.  
• Measuring success – dipstick surveys, employee engagement surveys, clarity in accountability, fully leverage data science, and then ideate based on data.  

Employees and managers were also already equipped with resilience tools, mental health platforms along with leadership buy-in. 

But how does this translate to the employee experience?  

Discovery ensured to equip all employees with the necessary tools and programs, irrespective of where they are in their own well-being journey.  

Zonke explains that Discovery has an active approach to wellbeing:  “Prevention is seen as the yardstick for success -, we really don’t wait for things to completely fall apart, but we journey with the employee in understanding where potential issues may arise, and proactively we seek to manage those.”  

To ensure the active approach is delivered, employees have access to something called “Healthy Company.”  

Healthy company – a holistic wellbeing approach 

A healthy company is Discovery’s program with an aspirational outlook on all four pillars of wellbeing (mental, physical, financial, and emotional). It is focused on a comprehensive understanding of employee wellbeing. It is both diagnostic and proactive, which sets it apart from other tools in the industry.  

How does a healthy company work?  

Everyone that interacts with a healthy company undergoes screening. This may include, for example, biometric data of employees that may be collected at a wellness expo or a wellness day. This gives an in-depth understanding of an employee’s well-being and picks up any risk factors. Immediately if any risk is picked up, there is an intervention.  

The use of Coaching 

A coach navigates an employee through their entire well-being journey. The assessment is based on an algorithm – which then, with consent, a healthy company coach reaches out to guide the employee through whichever issue they may be affected with.  

The use of data 

The consolidation of the assessment results gives Discovery powerful data points for them to design proactive interventions, so interventions do not reside in a vacuum. Interventions are tailored on the back of the new one’s understanding of the complete complexion of the workforce that you are dealing with. Results can be aggregated across the organization and filtered down.  

The remarkable thing is that the program is not only open to Discovery employees, but it is open to the market.  

It is also enabled with an app with your own personalized health dashboard – you will have a massive repository of educational content across all the four dimensions of wellbeing that you can leverage.  

World of Work Trends Report 2023

Top Employers Institute’s World of Work Trends Report 2023 analyses the latest trends in people strategies and practices from leading organisations globally. The report examined data from 2 053 Certified Top Employers to give a broader insight into how global developments will impact workforces in the year ahead.

What’s Inside?

Our latest research shows that the top 3 people priorities for these organisations in 2023 will be to create a high-performance culture, develop new leadership capabilities and align purpose, vision, and values. These three priorities reflect the following three key trends we have identified in our research.

Our contributing researchers and HR auditors explore the changes happening in the world of work, focusing on three major trends that are shaping global people practices:

The Employee Experience will become “super-personalised”.

We will see an unprecedented level of personalisation in the everyday employee experience. The personalisation of consumer needs has been a challenge for organisations and now employees expect to be treated as “internal” customers. The rise of individual employee needs will have much further to run in 2023 – what has been “people centric” will become “person centric”. Only those businesses that can go the extra mile in providing a genuine and heartfelt commitment to their people in this way will generate the emotional reaction necessary to enable a high-performance culture.

Leaders will actively listen for the “heartbeat” in their organisation.

Leaders will develop new strategic skills, particularly that of “listening to the heartbeat” of the organisation. Leaders are effectively having to “double screen” their working world. They need to simultaneously think about long term horizons, while acting decisively in the short term to survive, not to mention to thrive. They, and the next generation of leaders they nurture, will need to place a more committed listening strategy front and centre, to win the emotional commitment of their teams for in preparation for disruptive challenges.

Positive Impact – the new “North Star” for better decisions.

A clear commitment to “positive impact” will be the new North Star for everything that enlightened businesses do in 2023. Positive impact among our Top Employer organisations can be defined and achieved in three ways:

• A “lived” purpose that works best when it comes straight from the heart of all employees after all – and remains a constant in their everyday decisions.
• The positive impact made by an organisation can only ever be as good as the views that it allows itself to hear. So enlightened attitudes regarding diversity and inclusion are not only important in their own right, but also for the forward momentum they create in all organisations.
• Sustainability is key, both in the way an organisation ensures its own continuity through a positive wider impact – and in the way it is perceived and behaves as a good employer.

2023 will be all about these three trends. They will show a powerful human shift towards respecting individuality and valuing difference. It is vital that we attend to these needs because old management models are no longer useful. The best companies listen – truly listen – to their employees, invest in the individual experience, and create a shared purpose that gives meaning to the everyday employee experience. For organisations that achieve this, the future, despite the uncertainty we see all around us, will be very bright.

Case Study: How personalised learning rapidly upskilled the Virtusa workforce



UK Top Employer Virtusa helps clients to grow their businesses, by providing digital transformation, engineering and outsourcing services across a wide range of sectors globally.  

To sustain and improve engagement and well-being in the new environment created by the pandemic, Virtusa needed to reskill team members quickly in future technologies. To transform these capabilities was something that employees also wanted, which led to the launch of Engineering IQ (EIQ).

Download the Case Study to:

• Learn more about Virtusa’s unique Engineering IQ Programme
• Discover how Virtusa has managed, through its EIQ Programme, to link employee well-being directly to a long-term focus on careers
• Be inspired by how purposeful and customised learning in a supportive environment rapidly upskilled the Virtusa workforce – and why its clients now want to launch similar programmes of their own

Complete the form to download the Case Study now.