The Bank was named the Grand-Prix winner in the category ‘Best staff support programme during the crisis’. The panel noted that UniCredit Bank’s support programme stands out for its comprehensive nature, scale and unquestionable focus on Bank employees and their family members.

“From the first days of the Covid-19 outbreak, UniCredit Bank has taken decisive action to protect and support its employees. We provided our employees with extensive support making it possible for them to use the advantages of work from home in order to balance work with private life minding the opportunities provided by the present-day digital environment. The issues of this sort are critical to all companies committed to dynamic growth under the new circumstances, and UniCredit Bank makes use of the relevant experience to succeed despite the change of context,” said Valentin Timakov, Head of HR Department at UniCredit Bank.

During the coronavirus epidemic, UniCredit Bank implemented an integrated support programme for employees and their family members. The programme designed and implemented by the Bank covered four basic areas:

• Mental health — an area providing for professional psychological counselling of employees along with online yoga sessions and an online chess school.
• Physical activities — an area including UniCredit Bank’s four-week Health Challenge programme intended to change the lifestyle and acquire healthy habits (health index measurement, online training sessions, experts’ lectures, diet and stress management advice, access to unmatched health content), and webinars in the relevant subjects delivered to employees.
• Social activities and communication — an area providing for the development of an online platform focusing on support of the employees working from home — employee training, development, communication, and engagement (using digital channels and tools: personal portal, confluence, and other communication channels), development and maintenance webinars, online training courses, establishment of the young speakers’ online club for employees’ children, and creation of the Well-being space with integrated content, newsfeed, library, etc. available to employees. 
• Safe and comfortable work environment — an area providing for, but not limited to, strict compliance with the regulatory bodies’ requirements and recommendations, food deliveries to certain categories of employees, and secondment of doctors by the insurance company to the Bank’s office. 

The winners of the Crystal Pyramid 2020 Award for accomplishments in human capital management in four categories were announced at the Summer Session of HR Directors Summit during the 8th Practical Forum ‘Motivation 2020: Lessons Learnt from the Crisis and HR Solutions to Improve Staff and Company Performance’. This year, the award has been managed online.

The Crystal Pyramid Award was founded by the steering committee of HR Directors Summit in cooperation with the RUIE and is awarded annually to promote the best corporate and human management practices and to draw attention to human capital management and reward the companies implementing advanced HR management methods and practices.