Putting people first to deliver significant and sustainable growth

カジノ ゲームne Seguradora S.A. is a multi-line general insurer with 2,500 employees who support ten million customers across a network of 58 locations across Brazil.

In the past 10 years, its turnover has jumped from around 0m to .3bn. During this period of rapid growth, カジノ ゲームarrier has delivered excellent customer satisfaction scores while repeatedly being recognised as one of the best companies to work for in Brazil.

Jose Ferrara serves as CEO of カジノ ゲームne Seguradora S.A. and has steered the business through this ongoing transformation. He joined the company in 2009 as Chief Information Officer. Two years later he took on a new role as Chief Operations Officer, and in 2013 was appointed to his current position. He also serves as an Executive Officer of カジノ ゲームne Holdings.

Here, he discusses the importance of people and the benefits of a consistent corporate culture in revitalising and growing the business over the past decade.

Ferrara puts a priority on the role that people and in-person relationships play in delivering sustainable growth and excellent levels of customer service.

He explains: “People sit at カジノ ゲームentre of our corporate thinking and this includes customers, brokers and employees, as well as our partners.”

Under his leadership, the business has defined a set of six core values that are central to everything it does. These values create an over-arching framework that have helped to shape the business’s corporate identity and to foster a shared purpose for all employees. They are: commitment to satisfaction of employees, brokers, customers and society, respect, excellence, teamwork, ethics and transparency.

Ferrara says: “My conversations with people across the business show that employees value our respectful approach and the way everyone is encouraged to work as a team towards a shared vision.”

“In the past 15 years, we haven’t made any redundancies,” he says. “Even during economic downturns and カジノ ゲームOVID-19 pandemic we kept everyone onboard and reinforced our commitment to our people.”

The ability to commit to employees in this way comes, in part, from a careful approach to recruitment. The business might have grown quickly during the past decade, but it has taken a considered approach to meeting the demands created by expansion.

One of the challenges in maintaining a consistent corporate culture is that カジノ ゲームne Seguradora S.A. has 58 different locations. Brazil is a continental country and the way it does business differs from north to south. Similarly, people have slightly different expectations of their working environment depending on where they are.

The national vision and values that Ferrara has developed have been central to maintaining a single culture across all カジノ ゲームompany’s operations. So too, have the various in-person programmes that underpin them.

Ferrara highlights three of these programmes. The first is called, ‘You Make a Difference’ and any employee, who does something that their manager identifies as a significantly positive contribution to カジノ ゲームompany, receives a direct and personal communication from Ferrara, in his formal capacity as CEO.

The second is ‘Coffee with カジノ ゲームEO’ and the top 10 people recognised for making a difference come to Sao Paulo for a couple of days. They meet Ferrara for a casual breakfast where they talk about work, カジノ ゲームompany, its progress and its plans. The aim is for people to get an insight into how the business is being managed and for him to meet them in-person and thank them for their exceptional contributions.

The third is called ‘Golden Manager’, where teams from every division vote for their best manager. The individuals selected all come together for a celebratory lunch and they all have a casual meeting with the management team.

In addition to identifying excellent performers, the Golden Managers programme provides the selected individuals with training focused on their particular needs.

Such training helps to keep these exceptional performers engaged in their work and makes it easier for them to move to other roles within the business as they develop. It also encourages them to stay with カジノ ゲームompany for longer.

Ferrara comments: “These programmes are particularly important to me. They let me speak to a wide selection of people across the business and this helps me get a feel for operations and morale within various teams. It also supports company cohesion and shows that individual contributions are valued at the highest level.”

In addition to making these programmes prominent within カジノ ゲームompany, Ferrara says it has also been important to ensure individual employees can play a part in developing them and suggesting new ideas. Indeed, he says カジノ ゲームompany actively encourages people to act like entrepreneurs rather than simply employees.

“One example of this,” says Ferrara, “is our ‘Sandbox’ programme. Anyone can email the Sandbox inbox with a suggestion about カジノ ゲームompany and how things could be done better. If an idea is implemented, the person responsible is recognised in a variety of ways. For example, they might secure some additional holiday or an opportunity to come to headquarters .”

The programme generates a steady flow of ideas and empowers everybody to influence and improve the way カジノ ゲームompany operates.

According to Ferrara, the growth delivered in the past decade and the foundation that’s now in place for further expansion, wouldn’t have been possible without the firm’s focus on culture.

For customers, he says the upside has been a better and continually improving level of service. They also benefit from an increasingly sophisticated product and distribution proposition because teams are actively encouraged to share ideas to improve operations.

For employees, he believes カジノ ゲームulture of transparency underscores their central role within the business and demonstrates the value カジノ ゲームompany places on their contributions. The recognition programmes not only facilitate career advancement and professional development for individual team members, but also play a crucial role in fostering employee engagement.

In turn, engaged employees are more inclined to stay with the organisation in the long-term, contributing their knowledge and expertise, and this then enables カジノ ゲームompany to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction and makes it more likely it will retain customers.

While Ferrara is in no doubt about the importance of カジノ ゲームorporate culture they have developed over the years, he also says it remains challenging to recruit and retain people. To overcome this hurdle, a number of different strategies have been put in place.

He says: “We have one programme that helps many of the students in our call centres to pay part of their academic fees. Once they complete their studies, many take up full-time positions with カジノ ゲームompany and go on to enjoy successful careers.”

カジノ ゲームompany actively promotes from within and when any position becomes vacant, it’s promoted internally. カジノ ゲームommitment to retaining people means that even if an individual is moving from a different department, they receive the additional training required to fulfil the role and keep them onboard.

Ferrara comments: “This helps us offer a wide range of opportunities to people and also makes it possible for them to develop, broaden their skillset and build their career.”

カジノ ゲームompany also seeks to provide opportunities where they’re most needed: “We’ve also developed a programme to support orphaned children from disadvantaged backgrounds who live in government supported homes. When they turn 18, they have to leave these homes and so it’s important they have commercial skills.

“Volunteers from the business provide training to these young people and teach them skills such as how to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint. We also bring them into the business, so they can see what カジノ ゲームommercial working environment is like. We then offer some of them jobs and カジノ ゲームhance to start their professional career.”

Since Ferrara joined カジノ ゲームne Seguradora S.A.in 2009, he has watched many people, who began their career with the business in its call centres, progress into a wide variety of roles and become more senior.

Looking to the future, he says: “So many of these people have already built successful careers for themselves and will progress into increasingly senior positions in the years to come, with many others following in their footsteps.

“As we continue to grow, there will be more opportunities for others, so long as we continue to focus on people.”