I am honoured to be considered for the Head of Diversity and Inclusion Award. I joined Munich Re (MR) in 2022 as the first-ever Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) for the UK & Ireland and recently expanded my role to include Europe and Latin America. Over the past year, I have accelerated MR’s DEI efforts through several initiatives focused on embedding inclusion into our everyday practices and processes. This journey has involved collaboration, learning, and dedication, and I am grateful to share our progress.
Upon joining MR, there was no DEI strategy, governance, team, or budget. Leadership buy-in and colleague engagement were minimal. In my first year, I established a DEI governance structure with an Executive Leader Steering Committee for strategic direction and an employee DEI Council and Champions network. I also built a DEI team by hiring a DEI Manager and Associate. Together, we developed MR’s first DEI Strategy, which outlines three strategic pillars: 1) attract workforce diversity through inclusive recruitment, 2) grow workplace equity through inclusive sponsorship, and 3) Inspire an inclusive culture through continuous learning. The strategy is underpinned by four foundational elements: Data, active employee engagement, consistent communications, and multidimensionality & intersectionality. This strategy guides all of the activity that my team produces.
One of my proudest achievements this year was leveraging my previous experience in diversity recruitment to create a 20-page inclusive recruitment guide for our Talent Acquisition (TA) team, detailing 30 interventions to diversify candidate pipelines and make our process more inclusive. To ensure its implementation, I secured agreement to hire our first DEI Talent Acquisition partner. Since then, we have introduced a reasonable adjustments process, partnered with MyGWork, and launched ‘Recruit the Best’ training for hiring managers. Feedback indicates our diversity recruitment focus is valuable, with candidates citing positive experiences.
To bridge the DEI knowledge gap among employees, I designed a DEI 101 workshop to clarify DEI concepts and establish a common language around DEI. The workshop explains how to view diversity through the lens of social identity and encourages colleagues to build their literacy of privilege and marginalisation so they can be more inclusive of others. The workshop also explains the difference between equity vs equality and the importance of understanding intersectionality. Finally, the workshop covers the basics of inclusion as a foundation for future learning. After refining it with executive feedback, I developed a “train the trainer” approach for DEI Council members to deliver the workshops and expand its reach. To date, 61% of our workforce has completed this training, and the workshop has a 98% satisfaction rating.
As part of our focus on inclusion, this year my team developed a bespoke inclusive mindset framework for MR by partnering closely with business leaders to identify the key inclusion traits that we value. Together we created a guide that outlines how to demonstrate an inclusive mindset and we partnered with Consultant Byrne Dean to bring this guide to life in a training to help leaders and individual contributors demonstrate an inclusive mindset in their day-to-day. To date, 42% of our workforce has completed this training, and the training has a 94% satisfaction rating. To ensure that this work leads to actual behaviour change, we recently obtained SteerCo support for establishing inclusion as a core competency by which we evaluate recruitment, promotion, and development decisions. My team is now working closely with HR, Talent Development, and Recruitment to operationalise this and go through a change management process to ensure colleague and manager adoption is seamless.
I am proud that my leadership has led to significant advancement of our DEI efforts. From developing a comprehensive DEI strategy, to creating impactful training programs, and embedding inclusion into our everyday processes, we have truly begun to transform the organization. I know that our efforts are working because this year we were awarded 5-star recognition for our DEI programme by Insurance Business UK for the second time. In order to obtain this award, employees are asked to complete a survey to determine the effectiveness of our efforts. We had hundreds of employees proud to complete the survey and we received a score of 4.42/5. I am immensely proud of the journey so far and I will continue to work tirelessly to drive meaningful change, ensuring that Munich Re remains a place where all individuals feel valued and included.
