Our employees

Our employees are TrygVesta’s most important asset because they are our face to the customers in their everyday experience of our provision of products and services that offer peace of mind. The labour market continued to tighten in 2007, and employers intensified their efforts to retain and recruit the best employees. We launched a range of activities in 2007 designed to prepare ourselves to meet the employees of the future and strengthen the Group as an attractive workplace.

TrygVesta’s HR efforts in the future

The need to work with employee well-being and competency development and to make these efforts an integral part of our business strategy has never been greater. We restructured the Group’s HR efforts in early 2007 with a view to strengthening the HR area, creating a framework for the classic HR disciplines that ensure management focus on employees and their skills. The new structure enhances focus on management, competency and organisational development, making HR work and the Group’s strategy and action plans more coherent.

The new structure links TrygVesta’s Management Academy closely with our management secretariat, which is responsible for ensuring that developing our management resources ties in with our business strategy. Employee training has been moved to Corporate Branding to ensure a direct connection between branding and employee development. HR administration, whose tasks include salary and negotiations, has been moved to Group Finance, which is already in charge of budgets and financial matters.

Optimising the physical working environment

TrygVesta wants to be a modern workplace that promotes innovation, collaboration and our corporate values. Over the next two years, Danish and Norwegian firms of architects and designers will work with TrygVesta to transform the physical office framework in Ballerup and Bergen into modern workplaces. Key words for the project are trust, security and transparency, which translate our values into a design framework. The modernisation efforts aim to forge closer relations between employees and improve the work situation of individual employees. These aims will be reflected in open-plan office environments, quiet rooms and café environments. The project is scheduled for completion by the end of 2010.

Working with values and theme packages

We continued to work with our corporate values in 2007. The entire Group worked with theme packages of topical interest, the 2007 focus being on dilemmas, well-being and stress. The theme package dealing with dilemmas in everyday life aimed to make visible the  relationship between the Group’s values and actions using a dilemma game that was played locally in all departments. The theme package dealing with well-being during a busy working day comprised an e-learning module about stress and stress management as well as a game on well-being. Both theme packages comprised a board game, which has proved to be an efficient tool to promote important dialogue in the departments. The theme package dealing with well-being and stress also enhanced knowledge about how to handle busy periods and stress in the Group and increased awareness of the risk of negative stress, enabling colleagues to help each other before stress develops further. A theme package in 2008 will deal with environmental issues.

Status survey 2007

TrygVesta’s ambition is to be a development workplace where everybody is open to learning and improving on a continuous basis. We conduct a status survey every two years to stay focused on the activities launched in the Group, determine employee satisfaction and follow up on our employees’ knowledge about the Group’s strategy, values and balanced scorecard benchmarks. The status survey is also used as a tool in the follow up on results from the full-scale employee survey made in the intermediate years. The 2007 status survey indicated, among other things, that 90% of the Group’s employees were very satisfied or satisfied with working at TrygVesta. Furthermore, employee knowledge of the Group’s strategy and use of the balanced scorecard had increased significantly compared with the 2006 employee survey. A full-scale employee survey will be conducted in September 2008.

Competency building

Today, nurturing employees is very much about creating the right basis for facilitating the development of the competencies of each individual employee. At the same time, competency building helps us achieve our strategic goals and remain competitive. At TrygVesta, we want human competencies to be on the agenda of all managers, and we want all employees to have a development plan. We created several new employee training programmes in 2007, and we intend to continue this development in the years ahead:

• In the autumn of 2007 we launched a large-scale training programme under the heading “Your role as a peace-of-mind provider”, which will initially be attended by customer service and sales staff. Subjects taught include showing empathy and being attentive when talking to customers. After the new peace-of-mind providers have completed the programme, we will follow up on their competencies with initiatives such as status talks and role plays. The programme will run from September 2007 to May 2008.
• In the autumn of 2007 we also introduced a new training programme that is intended to contribute to promoting innovation competencies throughout the Group. The Innovation Driver programme was completed by 16 employees in 2007. Our Innovation Drivers are intended to support innovation processes throughout the Group. Read more about Innovation Driver training in the feature articles.
• In 2008, we intend to launch a Nordic talent development programme for qualified and ambitious employees with good potential for building a career in our Group. We will use a systematised process to identify, develop and incentivise employees with management and project management potential. The programme targets young talented employees with management potential. The programme is intended to build a Nordic talent pool of highly qualified candidates with potential to perform key functions in the Group.
  
   

New attractive employee initiatives and employee bonus

We want to be a healthy workplace where employees thrive and enjoy working. We intend to launch a number of initiatives in 2008 to enhance employee health and well-being. These initiatives include making fruit available for employees in all departments, an agreement with a Nordic fitness chain, an extended health care plan and organising family days and a corporate party in 2009.

As was the case in 2006, the 2007 employee bonus benchmarks were combined ratio and growth. For 2007 the bonus per employee will be DKK 10,000, which will primarily be paid in the form of shares in Denmark. Read more about TrygVesta’s bonus and incentive programme in the section on Corporate governance.

Recruitment and employee branding in the future

We want to improve our ability to retain and attract employees because this is vital in the present competitive labour markets in the Nordic countries.

We intend to perform an in-depth review of our recruitment processes in all four Nordic countries in 2008. This will include charting the requirement for present and future skills and employee profiles. The project is carried out in a collaboration between a number of  departments in the Group.

The project is intended

• to simplify the process of recruiting the right employees and make it more efficient
• to reduce the number of employees who leave the Group to join other companies
• to enhance the profiling of the Group’s values and communicate them better
• to enhance awareness of the Group as an attractive workplace among students and other job seekers.

Initiatives designed to achieve these goals include restructuring our recruitment process, working with the content and layout of job advertisements and being a more pro-active participant at career fairs organised by universities and business schools.