HR Excellence Awards Winner’s Series 2019/20 – Grand Award of the Year Cigna Worldwide Life Insurance Company Limited

What was the driving framework behind establishing the 360 Joyful Employee Experience Programme?

Cigna’s mission is to improve the health, well-being, and peace of mind of those we serve by making health care simple, affordable, and predictable.

To engage our employees, we provide them with a first-hand experience of our customers’ journey. It maximises our opportunity to improve both the employee experience and their capability to implement the company’s mission. Cigna’s employee well-being is of high importance such that we have a healthy workforce serving our clients and customers, and can instill a well-being mindset along our value chain.

Cigna conducts the Cigna 360° Wellbeing Survey globally every year, with local insights available. The 2018 survey results revealed that over 90% of the respondents in Hong Kong were affected by stress, and 50% agreed that workplace wellness programmes were important considerations in choosing between two potential employers. In view of these findings, Cigna Hong Kong developed the 360 Joyful Employee Experience Programme to promote employee well-being based on the three pillars of leveraging the expertise of our in-house health professionals and advocates; implementing employeecentric infrastructure and policies; and adopting innovative technologies.

Providing these to our employees allows them to experience the benefits and potential pain points of our customers’ journey. Ultimately, we hope our employees will become Cigna’s brand ambassadors.

What are some of the main benefits for employees and Cigna and how do you measure the benefits resulting from the 360 Joyful Employee Experience Programme?

We strive to bring an easy, engaging, and meaningful experience to our employees to ensure that they can grow personally and professionally in an empowering, agile and personalised environment.

The programme helps our employees get more equipped with health and wellness knowledge, which can be applied in their everyday lives. The programme also enables them to be more health conscious, and take preventive measures to protect their health where necessary.

We measure the success of our programme based on the factors of attrition rate, talent retention rate, engagement score, participation rate for different events, and staff referral rate. 

What is the leading role played by HR in this programme, and how does it motivate each team to make the programme a success?

We introduced this programme in 2018. While the programme design was initiated by HR, the wide range of activities required collaboration from multiple teams, which was beyond their normal job scope. Without support from the senior management team who motivated their team members, this programme would have been less successful.

As we are in the healthcare industry, we have expertise and internal capabilities in this area. HR’s role was to convince the senior management team that providing a first-hand experience to our talents would be a useful mean to bring them on board our journey.

HR had to gain credibility from the organisation on an everyday basis. In order to support the business case strategically, analytics and data from different sources were crucial in showing the senior management team the values that would be brought by the programme.

As workplace wellness programmes become an even more important attraction and retention tool, what are the areas where the 360 Joyful Employee Experience Programme could be further developed to focus on mental, emotional and financial wellbeing?

As we adjust to the new normal, employee well-being is of significance more than ever for many employers in Hong Kong. Cigna Hong Kong’s Health, Wellness and Clinical Services Team comprises professional registered nurses who support both our employees’ and customers’ health and well-being. On a preemptive basis, they conduct health talks and different types of physical and mental health assessments for our employees, to help them better understand their wellness. The team members, our Cigna Care Managers, also offer personalised advice on actions that need to be taken to help improve our employees’ health.

Furthermore, our Staff Engagement Committee and Corporate Social Responsibility Committee host different activities throughout the year which help improve employees’ emotional, physical, social and workplace wellbeing.

Under the new normal, physical engagement with our employees may not be as frequent as in the past. The feeling of isolation and loneliness could not be underestimated, and therefore promoting “relationship well-being” has become one of our priorities since the start of COVID-19. Virtual management is a new concept to many people managers and employees. We offer toolkits such as remote leadership training workshops to help people managers cope with workrelated changes. We also encourage a stress care check-in between people managers and their subordinates.

In the fast-changing world of work, how can a programme like the 360 Joyful Employee Experience Programme help empower employees to become more flexible, innovative, and ready for change?

From a “hardware” perspective, for our office move in 2019, we designed our workplace in a way which would encourage collaboration and nurture workplace well-being. Our employees were proactively engaged for their opinions and needs, from providing fitness equipment to building care rooms for new moms.

In terms of “software”, Cigna offers a wide range of benefits to our employees and their family members, and maximises rooms for flexible options to meet their well-being needs. Family well-being is also one of our priorities. Cigna Hong Kong is therefore offering various types of paid leaves to ensure our employees and their family members have enough support for critical family needs, as well as flexible return after maternity/paternity leave. During the COVID-19 crisis, we are also providing 10 emergency time off days for COVID-19 related absences.

What are some of the main takeaways and lessons learned from preparing Cigna’s entry for the HR Excellence Awards?

It was certainly a very rewarding experience for us to join the HR Excellence Awards. It allowed us to consolidate what we have done throughout the years, and motivated us to keep brainstorming new and exciting programmes for our employees.

We realised “well-being” and “digitalisation” are on many companies’ agenda, but we were able to combine these two elements into our proposition to customers and employees, to fulfil our strategy of providing an easy, engaging, and meaningful experience and achieve our company mission.

I, Constance, personally have had more reflection after the start of the COVID-19 crisis. A huge part of the programme that earned us industry awards has become irrelevant in 2020 due to the change in employees’ needs and the hybrid workforce since the pandemic. Nevertheless, I am proud to see Cigna Hong Kong’s senior management team and my team staying nimble in the face of these unanticipated challenges.