The Swiss Re employee experience

Swiss Re has a clear People Strategy which sets out what we want to achieve in order to create an environment that enables each one of us to give our personal best. We regard our People Strategy as our “North Star”: It provides us with clarity and direction, it is embedded in everything we do and defines our ambition for the future of Swiss Re.

Four core themes bring our strategy to life:

  • Lead and develop: We aim to be known in the market both for our technical expertise and our leadership capabilities. Our employees inspire and engage each other across all levels through honest, constructive and timely dialogue and feedback. We invest in the career development of our people, which we see as a shared responsibility, with leaders investing their time and resources and employees taking ownership to drive their development.
  • Empower and collaborate: We empower and enable our people to make decisions and drive performance, while at the same time ensuring that we maintain the appropriate risk culture. We encourage all employees to work together and collaborate across organisational and geographical boundaries for the wider and ultimate benefit of Swiss Re.
  • Drive the business: We envision that our employees operate with a truly commercial mind-set and accountability. They should all take accountability proactively and hold each other responsible for performance in terms of both results and behaviour. We ensure reward is fair and competitive, although this should not be the main reason why people want to work for our company.
  • Build for the future: At Swiss Re, we embrace and build a diverse workforce that brings together the best of multiple generations, cultures, skill sets and thinking. Our aim is for our employees to live a flexible, inclusive and open culture where all perspectives are valued. We create meaning for our employees by connecting our work to the core purpose of our company.

Embedding the behaviours we need for the future

We believe that everyone at Swiss Re personally contributes to the future of our company by delivering to our clients, adding value to Swiss Re in the best way possible, and by creating an environment where teamwork is the norm. Our Personal and Leadership Imperatives set out the behaviours we need and expect from our leaders and employees to support our strategy and values. We aspire to achieve exceptional performance by embedding these imperatives into our culture and human capital processes, such as recruiting, our performance management practices and leadership development programmes.