We lead

In our Group People Strategy, we put a strong focus on developing our employees to build our leadership pipeline. In 2019 we introduced a new set of “Leadership Imperatives” – our enhanced behavioural framework to promote greater ownership and accountability at all levels. In this context, we launched a revised performance management approach to foster individual growth and development, with stronger emphasis on continuous dialogue and frequent conversations between employees and their managers, which aims to provide forward-looking, ongoing and timely feedback. This change in our performance development practice followed the encouraging results of a number of pilot initiatives conducted over the last two years with over 2 000 employees. As a part of these changes, we removed year-end ratings in 2020 to focus on developmental and qualitative aspects of performance management.

Additionally, we have continued to invest in developing fit for future leaders at all levels by identifying and developing internal top talents and recruiting new leaders. Our efforts showed an improvement of eight percentage points over the last 18 months on employees’ perception of the statement “Swiss Re’s senior leadership fills me with excitement for the future of Swiss Re”.

Investing in our leadership and a strong pipeline

We continued to roll out our behavioural framework (the Leadership Imperatives) to all employees by establishing target behaviours to “adapt at speed”, “be courageous” and ”create joint movement“. In 2020 alone, we provided training on leadership skills to 2 432 managers, with an average of 11.7 hours invested per manager.