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CASE STUDY
Talent & Organization

Empowering employees to experiment and grow

How culture change and training initiatives have helped insurance company UNIQA start a movement.

Call for change

Accelerating a culture change

UNIQA Insurance Group, established in 1811 and one of the largest insurance companies in Central and Eastern Europe today, knew that attracting and retaining top talent was a critical step to becoming a market-leading service provider.

The company wanted to enable its people to react quickly, learn from mistakes and collaborate beyond conventional boundaries.

To do this, UNIQA established a Culture Office to lead internal cultural change. Using its UNIQA 3.0 strategy as a base, the company prioritized four guiding principles in its transformation: customer, ownership, community and simplicity.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Sparking new beliefs with stories

UNIQA and Accenture developed an unconventional approach to encourage employees to try new things and learn from failure. The Culture Office began piloting culture-change initiatives in which employees could address and solve everyday challenges through storytelling and small experiments.

A "Train the Trainer" program built the capability and confidence of employees to train others. Participants then led 15 cohorts of up to 12 experiment leads to kick-start their own experimentation and storytelling journeys with their teams.

These "micro" experiments—which would eventually number in the hundreds, if not thousands—then laddered up to cultural change in service of UNIQA’s strategic ambitions.

A valuable difference

The art and impact of storytelling

In mere months, the initiatives had a positive impact on UNIQA’s culture. Participants designed and tested more than 150 behavioral experiments, while UNIQA’s people conducted over 3,000 hours of coaching and workshops during which experiment leads received intensive training to ultimately empower colleagues.

Based on the encouraging feedback from participants, the Culture Office plans to conduct additional training sessions to accredit more leaders.

Employees are now better equipped to face everyday challenges, take ownership and collaborate. Using the art of storytelling, employees share with their colleagues their experiences of risk-taking and innovation—to turn culture change into a real movement.

"As we spoke to potential partners to help us on our culture journey, Accenture’s capabilities to create an innovative approach to culture transformation truly stood out. We were energized about the prospect of doing something different."

— JACQUELINE GO, Head of UNIQA’s Culture Office

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