AXA UK
Increased focus on wellbeing support
Insurance is an essential service, with millions of customers needing support on a daily basis. In response to coronavirus at AXA, we increased our teams’ ability to work from home from 30% to over 95%, ensuring we were able to continue to meet the needs of our customers whilst keeping our employees safe.
Flexible working was already a growing component of our ways of working, but the pandemic accelerated our approach. Now, we’re developing a long-term strategy to embrace new ways of working, informed by the experiences and changing needs of our employees.
AXA did not use government furloughing schemes. Any employee facing a wait for tools to work from home was paid their full salary and prioritised for the delivery of equipment. We also made provisions, including full pay, for the most vulnerable to self-isolate for 12 weeks. Our priority was ensuring all employees felt supported during this period.
To support the wellbeing of our employees, AXA put in place several measures utilising existing structures and new wellbeing innovations, including:
- Flexible working arrangements: To support those working around caring responsibilities, employees were able to take an additional 15 days of emergency leave, on top of the standard five days.
- Volunteer leave: To support the national effort against coronavirus, AXA offered 10 additional days of paid leave for employees who wanted to volunteer in response to the pandemic, and four weeks of paid leave for any clinically trained employees who wanted to respond to the NHS request for help from medical professionals.
- Information and Wellbeing Hub: The hub provided quick and easy access to all support available, which ranged from webinars on home working to online yoga sessions and vlogs from AXA PPP healthcare experts.
- Virtual GP Service: AXA UK employees and their close family received unlimited access to AXA PPP healthcare’s virtual GP service, Doctor@Hand, throughout lockdown to support our employees and relieve pressure on the NHS during the peak of the crisis. Since April, the service has facilitated over 1,000 appointments.
- Employee Assistance Programme (EAP): Employees received continued access to AXA PPP’s confidential and impartial EAP - providing life management, mental and physical health services.
- Wellbeing Apps: To help employees’ mental and financial resilience, AXA has provided an app by ‘Thrive’, giving access to mindfulness techniques, and a personal finance solution, ‘Nudge’, to support employees in managing finances stress free. Collectively these apps have been downloaded over 3,000 times.