UK 
United StatesMaking every job 'part-time' and 'flexible' was a big move for a traditional insurance firm but the well-known business, Zurich has reaped the benefits and trailblazed a path for others in the industry to follow.
It’s five years since insurance giant, Zurich UK began advertising all its jobs as part time. Back in 2019, most businesses were trying to hold onto their Covid hats, navigate the pandemic and keep their businesses afloat. This business, however, decided to go in a different direction and look at how to open its doors to talent to a wider pool. It began to advertise all of its roles as, ‘flexible, part-time or job share’ and while the world was surviving the biggest health crisis of our time, Zurich was quietly quadrupling its part-time employees and increasing the number of female part-time hires almost four-fold.
The method behind the madness:
Steve Collinson is Chief HR Officer at Zurich UK, a post he has held since 2018, just a year before the pandemic hit. He begins by saying that the initiative was driven by a desire to tackle some of the diversity challenges, primarily looking at issues including gender.
“The biggest way you can move the dial on things like diversity is by attracting the widest range of people to apply.”
The realisation was that to deploy this, the business needed to attract people at different stages of their lives and to rid the business of the ‘one-size-fits-all’ narrow approach to employee benefits. Underpinning the policies was flexibility for everyone. The offering to staff translated as time away from work for fertility treatment, allowances to manage caring responsibilities, support for menopause and baby loss - to name just a handful of the employee ‘next-level’ support policies on the table.
We’ve definitely been a supporter of flexible working for the past ten years, but in 2019 we decided to put that flexibility front and centre stage, changing the way we advertised every job in the firm to be offered on a part-time basis
“We’ve definitely been a supporter of flexible working for the past ten years, but in 2019 we decided to put that flexibility front and centre stage, changing the way we advertised every job in the firm to be offered on a part-time basis,” explains Collinson.
Working with the behavioural insights team (BIT), Collinson and the Zurich HR department started off by defining the language. Utilising key terms, including: part time, job share and full time. It was, Collinson says, a ‘psychological nudge.’
