Welcome back to the Impact blog. Today, I want to share a follow up on our previous instalment, which discussed our progress towards our environmental targets with an examination of our socially-focussed ESG achievements over the past year.

Our people are our success

Alongside our continued focus on reducing our environmental impact here at Sirius, we remain conscious that our people, customers and communities are at the heart of our enterprise. As such, over the last year we’ve been making Sirius an even better place to work by further enhancing our focus on diversity and inclusivity, as well as the types of support we are offering our employees, and by extension empowering them to best serve our customers and the communities in which we operate

Our commitment to promoting diversity and safeguarding equal opportunities

Diversity and inclusion have been important priorities for us for years. These values are at the core of our employee value proposition. Our work in this area is driven by our dedicated diversity committee and diversity ambassadors.

We take the opinions of our employees into account, asking our colleagues from across the business and at all levels what their experience at Sirius has been like and what developments they’d like see in the future. One of the actions we’ve taken as a result of this process has been to strengthen our focus on mentorship.

The membership of the Sirius team also illustrates how we treat diversity as a top priority. 37 nationalities are represented in our workforce, with51% of our team being female. What’s more, 34% of leadership positions are held by women. Our achievements have earned us a 74 out of 100 rating on the Women’s Career Index (FKi – Frauen Karriere Index), an organisation in Germany that judges companies’ commitment to gender equality.

Our Board is also embracing initiatives to promote diversity, having adopted a Diversity Policy in 2017. It’s a great point of pride to us that by the end of 2021, a third of our board was female.

Bringing Sirius’ values to life

Humility, integrity, adaptability and industriousness: these are the core values that form the base of our company culture at Sirius, and they are integral to our success.

This year, we have made sure that our daily practices are guided by these values and will continue to be going forward. Through a series of in-person and virtual sessions throughout the year, our values, the importance of these values and how to integrate them into our everyday work has been communicated across the business. Our training and culture encourages everyone at Sirius to seek feedback, demonstrate respect for others and be more open to change.

These values are embedded at the very top of our business, with them being implemented in our Board and among our senior managers first, with the help of volunteers from within the businessrs. After a successful start, we’ve started to broaden the program to all our colleagues. Moreover, we are reviewing our progress through the 2022 employee survey, and will share updates on this in due course

Engaging with our people through trainings and more

We are actively engaging with our employees in several ways, from frequent training opportunities and fundraising to health and wellbeing support.

In the past financial year we have successfully bolstered our training and development programme. We raised the number of days our people spent in training by 54% compared to March 2021 through investing €146,046 in courses and workshops this financial year. Across the company, our colleagues attended 996 days’ worth of career development programmes, to support their personal and professional growth.

While health and wellbeing have always been key areas where we provided comprehensive support for our people, the pandemic made this even more important. We’ve been able to assist our team members with flexible working arrangements, mental health training and more.

What’s more, our company immediately addressed local calls for help after the floods in Ahrweiler in July 2021, carrying out a fundraising initiative and offering storage space to the Düsseldorf Caritas Association (Caritasverband Düsseldorf e.V.).

The results of 2021’s annual survey

Every summer, we carry out an employee survey, to make sure that our colleagues’ voices are heard, that we take their feedback into account. In May 2021, our annual survey had an 86.5% participation rate. We were delighted to receive confirmation that we’re on the right track, our people feel cared for and rewarded.

Our leadership received strong approval from 77% of our employees, with 75% stating that they feel valued by their managers. 80% of our team thought that we’ve implemented positive changes in the past year, despite the difficulties that the pandemic caused for everyone.

Seeking feedback from our people

At Sirius, we know that our people are central to our success, so we will continue to work to ascertain that everyone feels welcomed and supported.

This now applies to our UK team at BizSpace as well. Our next challenge is to make sure that they, too, feel part of the broader Sirius community – so this year, they will also take part in our employee survey.

Although 2021’s annual survey had an outstanding participation rate, we hoping to go even further this time around and hear from as many of our people as possible.