Helvetia Case Study: The Impact of Internal Best Practices Sharing



Certified Top Employer Helvetia Insurance, established in 1858, is headquartered in St. Gallen Switzerland. As an organisation they currently have over 11.500 employees and more than 7 million customers across their different operating countries.

Helvetia have prioritised improving their people practices over the past few years as they joined the Top Employers programme. In recent years they have wanted to improve their practices not only through benchmarking but also through learning from the various Helvetia branches. This desire for improvement and learning lead them to create an internal best practice sharing session.

Download the Case Study to learn how:

• Helvetia have been able to create a unified best practice sharing session that has improved HR practices across their offices.
• They use the Top Employers programme to guide the improvement of their HR practices.
• Employees in Helvetia have experienced the internal best practices sharing sessions.

Mental Health Q&A: Bentley



In advance of #WorldMentalHealthDay, we caught up with Emma Humphries from certified UK Top Employer Bentley. Emma is co-chair of its wellbeing network BeAccessible – in this interview she reveals more about the network, how it contributes to positive change within the organisation, and how mental health has moved up the organisation’s priority list.

Tell us about yourself and your organisation?

I’m Emma and I work as a Technical Analyst here at Bentley Motors. Bentley has a proud 103-year history of building the most sought-after luxury cars, and we’re also on the most ambitious journey with our Beyond100 plans to become exclusively electric and end-to-end carbon neutral by 2030.

At the heart of Bentley are our 4,000 colleagues. Whilst those numbers might sound big, we’re a tight team with generations of families working here, which makes Bentley a very special place to be. I am proud to follow the footsteps of my late Grandfather who joined the business the day it opened its gates, followed shortly after by my Nan. Since then, there has always been members of my family throughout Bentley’s history; my father, working mainly in Security, and my three brothers working in Purchasing, Maintenance and Finance.  When I finished college, I knew I wanted to be a part of the Bentley brand and family. I’m proud to have just completed my 25 years of service, working predominantly in Logistics – a department and family that is full of drive and passion.

It’s our people that bring our vision for Diversity and Inclusion to life with our colleague led networks. I co-chair one of those networks, known as BeAccessible. It was launched following World Mental Health Day in 2021 and our ambition is simple; we support colleagues in all aspects of health and wellbeing to ensure our workplace is inclusive, and aim to create an equal environment for colleagues with disabilities. Other colleague networks include BeProud, who advocate for our LGBTQ+ community, our BeUnited network who represent colleagues of ethnic minority, our BeReady network, who support colleagues with a background in the army or other recognised force and our BeInspired network which brings together those with an interest in increasing the proportion of female colleagues across all of our business areas to accelerate our progress towards Bentley’s Beyond 100 goals of 30% women in management by 2030.

How has Bentley’s mental health strategy evolved over the past year, in what we all hope is a post-pandemic world?

The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted us all in different ways, and we quickly realised that we could not deliver a one-size fits all approach to mental health. With the support of our Head of Diversity & Inclusion, the BeAccesible network established a Positive Mental Health Workstream, and evolved our strategy to have a range of touchpoints for colleagues in a way that works for them, whether that be at work or in new home office.

So, our multi-tactic approach means colleagues can get access to face-to-face peer group support through our regular Time to Talk sessions or get more tailored and personalised support through a trained Mental Health First Aider. But we have also evolved our strategy to focus on day-to-day mental health through BeFit walking programmes, BeFit fruit giveaways etc, as well as the opportunity for colleagues to join our allotment community to enjoy the outdoors because we know helping colleagues with positive habits can help mitigate the impact of mental health stressors.

Has mental health moved up your organisational priority list?

Absolutely, in fact it is being actively championed, from board level to factory floor. It makes me feel proud to work here and excited about what the future holds for Bentley.  

Bentley offers an array of resources for colleagues. This month, along with the network’s regular monthly Time to Talk sessions, we are promoting our Mental Health Traffic Light guide, which contains several useful resources – for example, a list of our Mental Health First Aiders and information on our BeFit programs, designed to get colleagues moving and exercising. We are also sharing colleague’s experience of Ben, the Automotive Charity, and the great support that they offer to colleagues from our automotive industry. The network chairs and members have regular opportunities to meet or ask questions with the Board where we receive full support, answers and guidance, ensuring that we are all striving for the same goal of improving colleagues’ experiences.

How have conversations around mental health changed?

I’m a firm believer that the more we talk about mental health, the more we can demystify. We’ve got a supportive communications team who help make health and wellbeing a priority across our messaging, and we’ve been empowered to host monthly MS Teams sessions to reach our remote colleagues, or those working at home. We also use national events to bring awareness, for example May’s Time to Talk was about Loneliness.

This constant conversation has seen the network reach 170 members, as well as engaging with many more thousands of our colleagues in some way.

Mental health is definitely becoming something that more and more people want to talk about and support and I am really proud that our BeAccessible network has been an enabler for this.

What will be your priorities in Mental Health in the year ahead?

The network has just advertised a companywide Movember campaign, we will be focusing on mental health during International Men’s Day with our Men’s Forum Workstream to ensure we continue our mission to remove taboo and stigma and encourage colleagues to start conversations and signpost. BeAccessible also promotes Bookboon, which is a digital learning service provider for corporate learning & development. In particular, we will be promoting titles linked to mental health and stress as a priority on awareness days and throughout the year generally.

Using HR Analytics to Make Your Corporate Culture—and your Workforce—Healthier

HR sits on a wealth of data today. Yet, when it comes to organisational culture, it’s often a struggle to analyse meaningful data for CEOs, boards, and senior business leaders and what data to present.

In this webinar, Kevin Oakes, i4cp CEO and author of Culture Renovation®, and David Plink, CEO of Top Employers Institute, explored how HR can most effectively leverage existing human capital analytics to measure and monitor cultural health.

Brandon Schassberger joined them, SVP Business Transformation, People & Capability at Mastercard and Richard Lobo, Executive Vice President & Head HR, Infosys, who shared how they use HR analytics at their respective companies.

The session started with a poll: 

The number one answer was “Our culture somewhat healthy” (62%), followed by “our culture is very healthy” at 23%, making that a very good cumulative score of 85% of respondents saying somewhat or very healthy. i4CP, across various webinars and events, has asked this question, and the results are very similar.

i4Cp recently launched a survey to understand how companies deal with toxicity, even pockets of toxicity in their culture. And on the positive side, look at the elements of a healthy culture and what companies are doing to sustain that.

The risks of not using data

A notable trend is that many companies now have a lot of data – but many are not necessarily using it. There comes naturally with his associated risks. Kevin Oakes book “Culture Renovation: 18 Leadership Actions to Build an Unshakeable Company” emanated from a study done on corporate culture and the elements of a healthy culture overall.

And specifically, if companies want to change culture, how do they do it – a question many CEOs and senior executives posed. While the inherent importance of culture and the urgency to change it was understood, very little literature existed on ‘ how to do it. The book outlines 18 action steps that the organisation can take to renovate its culture.

Companies like Microsoft and Mastercard feature heavily in the book, as they have changed their culture over the last few years. They didn’t completely transform those cultures. Instead, they carefully renovated those cultures to keep what made them good, to begin with, to keep the unique elements of that organisation.

Kevin noted, “One of the very first steps, though, before you start changing our culture, is to understand the cultural elements today. And I tell executive teams this all the time. If you lock yourself in a conference room and decide amongst yourselves what the  Culture is, you’re going to get it wrong.”

It’s important to understand the employee sentiment, probably even more so today where we got remote, flexible or hybrid work. Understand where employees feel the problem is before you set out to change it.

Engagement surveys are good for this, but they are at one point in time, and you don’t get a lot of great information in just one annual engagement survey. More companies are using newer technologies to listen on devices using natural language processing and a little AI to understand what’s happening in the workforce.

How Top Employer Infosys uses HR analytics to improve their corporate culture 

Richard Lobo explained that Infosys has always used data for its clients. And unfortunately, not enough of the good work done by companies in the consumer space translates into the people space. The pandemic presented a great opportunity to accelerate the use of HR analytics.

Infosys, an organisation with close to 300,00 employees, provides lots of data. Data that allows you to predict, like an automated guidance system to your car or aeroplane.

In the pre-pandemic stages, many of us used to have water cooler conversations and would run into each other in corridors, and most of these moments have now moved into a virtual  / tech space. As a consequence, the data produced by systems got that much richer.

Infosys uses HR analytics in various ways. 

• The first is through a program labelled Hale (Health assessment and lifestyle enrichment. Through this, both mental and physical well-being data is collected. Based on the various application uses and programs, they can link them to absenteeism metrics. Furthermore, it provides input into how teams are doing and how many hours they can work without having a negative impact.
• The second program they use is called Lex – Learning Experience & Careers Adaptive Learning and Digital Career paths, based on employee insights on interests & skills. The online system can extract data to understand which skills are more in demand.

Conversely, Infosys also uses analytics to improve the employee experience and make work more ‘human’.

• On average, an employee goes through 200 touch points (for example, when they want approval, mark attendance, access employee data, etc.) through one mobile app. Improvements are made along the way by understanding how employees use the app through the data collected.
• Finally, through a program called MCode – Manager effectiveness, Infosys can collect data to develop managers and provide people insights on the go through interactive dashboards and nudges.

Richard also noted how the Top Employers Programme assisted Infosys “Because the whole certification experience, the interaction with the Top Employers team, has helped us advance the impact of people practices through shared learning.

Because we’ve learned so much from other companies because no company can get everything right. Being able to drive change because the whole certification process, the process regulation helps you use your data better, and they might apply some of these things on an on a real-time experience.”

How Mastercard used a Cultural Health Index to measure cultural trends

Brandon explains that Mastercard started their culture journey maybe 3-4 years ago, as they looked at things such as ISO categories and looked at metrics and the industry standards – which didn’t resonate with their cultures.

It’s great to have these metrics externally, but it didn’t provide any understanding or a way of measuring things that were important to them.

At the same time as undergoing this exercise, there was a lot of unrest in the USA. There was a strong push from stakeholders and asset managers to be much more transparent.

Through collaboration with i4CP, Mastercard had a breakthrough moment in conversation with Kevin Martin (Chief Research Officer at i4cp). Mastercard noted the modelling for reporting and the use of indices. So, instead of using 30 different KPIs, they could arrange them into indices: Innovation, Inclusion, and Employer Brand.

When these indices are aggregated and incorporate the retention statistics of Mastercard’s succession plans, they provide an objective, outcome-based view into the cultural trends that impact their organisation.

Breaking down one of those indices (Employer brand) – Mastercard recognised that they are one of the most valuable brands in the world – but this was not necessarily seen in their employer brand. Instead of only looking at their Glassdoor rating, for example, other perspectives were now being looked at  – such as early career hires to customer voice of customer feedback to the engagement level of active people, Net promoter score, exits etc.

And thus, creating the indices helps you figure out what levers you have to pull and how they influence others.

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 below and get the full 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.

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.

Why Developing an Effective (Remote) Offboarding Process is Important

Remotely onboarding and offboarding employees are becoming the norm across organisations globally. These practices are revealing new challenges and opportunities in these new and established practices. While we explored some of these opportunities in our past article about onboarding, this article is focused on current practices around remote offboarding. The article will explore how people practices around offboarding are being adapted to meet the virtual digital landscape many employees are currently navigating.

What is Offboarding and Why is it Important?

Offboarding, which is the process when an employee parts ways with the organisation they have worked for, is often overlooked as much of the focus usually falls on onboarding processes. But offboarding should not be forgotten.

Offboarding is likely neglected because many often see offboarding as a necessary process for returning company equipment and deactivating company access to various systems. They forget the way the process of offboarding affects the transferring of responsibilities and knowledge, feedback from employees and the last impression they have of the company.

Let’s take a moment to look at some of the reasons why having a good offboarding process is important and should be on the HR agenda

• Past employees can become future employees – The reason that employees leave companies is not always because they do not enjoy working at the company. There is a multitude of reasons why employees leave. They might leave for personal family reasons, because they are relocating, or because they feel that they may be challenged more at another organisation. In the future, it could become advantageous for both parties to work together. When employees leave on a sour note this possibility is diminished.
• Past employees strategically impact a company’s employer branding – The impressions of an organisation that an employee leaves with are built over the length of their employee journey. And the final days of their employment can cement their feelings about the organisation. While they may not work for the organisation anymore, if asked, they will likely report positive feelings. And as employer branding moves higher on the agenda, this good feeling can funnel into social posts and other word of mouth stories that help the business attract new employees.
• Past employees can aid in assisting new employees – One of the more pertinent reasons for properly offboarding staff is the need for a smooth handover process between them and the new employee. When there is a well organised and empathetic offboarding process former employees are more likely to be willing to smooth the transition of knowledge and expertise to the next person.

How Offboarding has Gone Remote

While the larger shift to remote offboarding, like remote onboarding, was increased due to the global pandemic and with many jobs continuing to operate remotely it is sure to be a practice that not only stays but innovates to better suit the needs of the organisation and its workforce.

To create seamless and effective remote offboarding processes HR departments need to work closely with their Digital and IT departments to develop the right digital employee experience that helps to create an empathetic work environment, so as to make employees feel empowered and engaged in making their steps out of the organisation.

The support of digital systems can lead to the creation of a well-thought-out dashboard or portal that can make the transitionary process seamless.

The portal could include a guide to how employees can return their equipment to the employer, best practices for virtually handing off responsibilities and other tasks that aid the offboarding process. The HR department leads in the knowledge and experience around what is needed in the process and the IT department aid in making this process a digital reality. Working together to tackle the challenges of offboarding remotely is eased when these two departments work together.

One of the best ways to make the offboarding process an easier procedure is to have it operate in an environment that is already adaptable and empathetic to its workforce. While how a business can do this work cannot be covered, even briefly in this article, we have many other articles on our insights page that can lead you in understanding how that environment.

Companies and leaders that are more keen to listen to employee insights and HR analytics, and are open to it empathetically will be able to make sure that as their former employees leave on happier notes.

Concluding Thoughts on Offboarding

The need to have a successful offboarding process is supported by HR and IT departments. As remote work becomes the standard, or at least an option, in many organisations creating processes that support these workers is integral.

Are you curious of Offboarding best practise? By joining Top Employers Institute Program you will have access to an immense library of best practise that will help your company grow.

Get in touch today for free to become an employer of choice!

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.