Diversity Equity and Inclusion
Our Vision
"The journey to a more Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive culture is a marathon not a sprint: awareness is the start and embracing diversity is the essence”: these are the words of Jean Laurent Granier, our group Diversity Equity and Inclusion Sponsor on the occasion of one of our Bebolforinclusion campaigns, which we run globally with all our CEOs all along the last years."
Listen to Jean Laurent Granier and Monica Possa, our Chief HR & Organization Officer to learn more about our DEI journey.
Our DEI strategy
Our commitment is to promote a welcoming, respectful, safe and supportive environment, where people feel free to express their best selves and unleash their potential. A more diverse, equitable and inclusive culture allows us to create long-term value for our people, our clients, our partners as well as the communities we serve, thus living up to our ambition to be a sustainability champion and a responsible employer.
We strive to promote a culture where Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) are embedded in how we work and do business every day. We believe inclusion is everybody’s job. All employees contribute daily to ensure an inclusive and safe workplace, where every person has access to opportunities, feels empowered to take ownership and challenge biases leading the transformation with a human touch.
We have a clear strategy supported by a structured DEI governance and we believe in taking concrete measurable actions to achieve our ambitions. That’s why we monitor our progress in this journey through several clear metrics.
Our key priorities for Generali 2022-24 People Strategy have been:
Diversity
Diversity refers to the multiplicity of identities - the whole self - of each of us: genders, gender identities, sexual orientations, ethnicities, ages, mental and physical abilities, cultures, beliefs, and perspectives.
In terms of our commitment to fostering an increasingly diverse work environment, we focus on two main areas: gender and generational diversity.
- With regards to gender, we aim to maintain a balanced distribution within the Group. In addition, we have a clear ambition to increase the presence of women in strategic positions and to further improve the presence of women in managerial roles. To achieve these goals, two rolling programs have been implemented at Group level: the Lioness Acceleration Program, a 12-month development journey for senior women managers to enhance executive presence, political savvy and strategic leadership, and Elevate, targeting women managers to foster their development and career progression through three key elements: sponsorship, executive presence training and networking.
These two Group programs have been complemented by more than 100 actions launched at local level, such as women mentoring programs, development acceleration and return-to-work after maternity leave initiatives, development activities with external partners, scholarships and job orientation events dedicated to female students in STEM subjects.
For more specific data on gender please refer to our data and performance while you can find more info on D&I in our Annual Integrated Report.
- On generations, we want to ensure the balance and coexistence between different generations, promoting the exchange of competences at all levels and attracting, retaining and engaging our people. At Group level, we have launched reciprocal mentoring programs, aimed at enhancing the know-how of our people, promoting intergenerational dialogue and an international mindset. We have also focused on our talents with a maximum of 7 years of professional experience, through the Future Owners program, which provides training, mentoring, networking as well as international and cross-functional projects. These programs have been complemented by more than 50 launched actions, including generational awareness workshops, cross-generation cooperation initiatives, reverse mentoring programs, employer branding activities for talents and programs focused on more experienced colleagues.
Equity
Equity means being committed to equitable and fair processes to ensure access to equal opportunities to all employees throughout their professional lives, endeavoring to remove all barriers, discrimination and intolerance.
We are committed to equity to achieve impactful results by promoting fair treatment and access to opportunities, while working to eliminate the institutional and unconscious barriers that limit everyone from unleashing their full potential.
To accelerate the pace of transformation, we have launched the DEI Engagement Program, a change management program which engages all our top leaders, the Group DEI Council and our HR Community - to reflect on diversity, equity & inclusion. The program focuses on leveraging neuroscience research findings to shed light on the impact of unconscious bias on decision-making across multiple processes, leveraging on concrete examples of impactful best practices.
We are also committed to achieving an Equal Pay Gap towards zero.
Since 2020 our policies, analyses, and actions have been focused on applying clearly measurable and comparable metrics throughout the entire Group and on reducing the base salary gaps by analysing and comparing males and females doing the same work or work of equal value (Equal Pay Gap) and by observing this gap throughout the organisation (Gender Pay Parity Gap).
In 2024, our ongoing commitment to this path led to further progress in our pay equity journey, culminating in the successful achievement of our strategic target of zeroing the Equal Pay Gap on base salary (0.35%).
Inclusion
Inclusion means creating an environment and a culture where each person feels safe, appreciated and capable actively contributing to drive Generali’s sustainable success. An inclusive and welcoming environment supports and embraces all differences and offers respect to everyone in words and actions. Moreover, it empowers everyone to unleash their full potential.
We promote mindsets, behaviors, processes, and practices to fully embrace all the different identities we have across our organization to create an environment where each person can contribute with their talents to our innovation, growth and success. We fight any form of discrimination to ensure real inclusion of all individuals. We launched multiple initiatives to increase awareness on unconscious biases, and allyship as well as to foster a culture where meritocracy is one of our key levers.
With a view to anticipating the ever-changing global context, we believe that attracting people with new skills as well as reskilling and upskilling our people is fundamental for our business to thrive. We want to attract and retain people with different backgrounds and global mindsets and we strive to keep up the engagement of all our people by promoting sharing of competencies (through initiatives such us shadowing, reciprocal and reverse mentoring), providing the right opportunities and developing skills to accompany our transformational journey. To support this goal, WeLearn, our internal global learning platform, features +200 upskilling and reskilling programs.
We also believe that it is important to embrace the full spectrum of diversity and, in particular, promote inclusion of:
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Disability
We support the inclusion of the diverse abilities of our employees enhancing workplace accessibility and promoting inclusive practices so that persons with disabilities feel able to contribute their talents on an equal footing with their colleagues. In this context, the Group has entered into an important international partnership with Valuable500 through which we participate in Generation Valuable, a program designed to support future leaders with disabilities and have access to multiple resources to keep raising awareness on disability inclusion. We recently released our Accessibility Manifesto, a guide that establishes the leading principles to provide our stakeholders with accessible digital products, and we carried out an accessibility assessment of our global digital assets. -
LGBTQI+
Significant progress was made in the inclusion of LGBTQI+ world. We strive to continuously promote inclusion of LGTBQI+ people by raising awareness through WeProud, our global LGBTQI+ ERG launching new products and organizing global campaigns. We participated in the 2023 and 2024 Pride Month celebrations, joining the Milano Pride Parade, which along with numerous local initiatives launched across the Group, testifies our commitment to advocate for inclusion in our workplace, recognizing and valuing our diverse identities and uniqueness.
The Group initiatives are complemented by more than 300 locally organized inclusion actions, including communication campaigns on unconscious bias, awareness raising programs, corporate wellness activities, numerous collaborations with LGBTQI+ and disability association, etc.
Our Communities and Employee Resource Groups
We believe that each one of us can contribute as an agent and ambassador of DEI, and that is why we leverage the voices of hundreds of colleagues forming the Diversity Equity & Inclusion Community of Practice who want to participate in the cultural transformation, promoting DEI by sharing best practices, scaling up local projects and bringing fresh ideas to launch innovative projects.
We also count on our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) which are led and participated by colleagues with shared identities or similar interests. In Generali there are currently more than 20 ERGs in different countries focusing on parenthood, gender, LGBTQI+, generations, disability or, more generally, diversity, equity, and inclusion. At global level over the last years two ERGs have been activated: the first one is We PROUD, gathering more around 1000 LGBTQI+ community members, and playing a critical role in highlighting the importance of inclusion. The ERG raises awareness of the challenges LGBTQI+ employees face and improve understanding of the needs of a diverse workforce and customer base. The second is TOGETHER, counting more than 800 members the Global network of women and allies whose mission is to advance Generali’s efforts to promote a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment and reach the ambition to become a sustainability champion. The network creates space and opportunities for women, allies and colleagues to share experiences, learn and encourage the advancement of skills and growth as professionals and human beings.
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