SOCIAL

Wellbeing

To support wellbeing, this year we have:

• Helped colleagues with a variety of initiatives, including:

• Mental Health Leadership & Management training sessions

• Introduced Mental Health Champions

• Announced post-Covid working flexibility and recognised the need for a more informal dress code in-line with this. Introduced a ‘Dress for your day’ policy.

Skills

To support skills development, this year we have:

• Continued to be only 3% of 36,000 companies in 55 countries with the Investor in People standard that have been awarded Gold status.

• Continued to run our annual development programme called ‘Shooting Stars’, designed for high achievers.

• Our apprenticeship programme, ALEX (Aspire Learning Experience) is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year. From an initiative to recruit talented young people, it’s grown to a platform which now caters for those at all stages of their professional development. There are myriad opportunities within insurance services and our associated businesses, and our ALEX apprentices and colleagues are uniquely qualified to give insight to students and share their own experiences. We’ve supported 56 apprentices via our Aspire Learning Experience programme this year.

COMMUNITY ACTIONS & CHARITY

To contribute to the communities we operate in, we have:

• Increased our budgets for Motiv8 (our charity committee that supports colleagues by donating a ‘Helping Hands’ (cash bonus) to the charity of their choice) in recognition of colleagues’ personal charity endeavours. We also recognise quarterly community heroes with a cash bonus to the charity of their choice.

• Partnered with Matchable, a global volunteering platform (wearematchable.com) and promoted our free volunteering day available to all employees, whilst advertising the hundreds of opportunities to support a charity or cause via the Matchable platform.

• Committed to adding ‘volunteering’ as an objective in our annual appraisal process, and will measure the uptake of volunteering days via our employee payroll platform, SDWorx.

As an organisation we have supported the following Charity Partnerships:

• Auditory Verbal UK (AVUK.org) We are a corporate partner of AVUK and have created a fundraising page for policyholders of Brightside Insurance and Lancaster Insurance to support this charity (donations per policies).

• FutureFirst (futurefirst.org.uk) We are a corporate partner.

• The Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal - Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC). Colleagues Choice: We have pledged our support via JustGiving, and all proceeds raised from our annual Markerstudy Day (12/10) were donated to the DEC.