AXA Affin General Insurance Berhad (AXA) is a joint venture between AXA Asia (a company under the AXA Group) and Affin Bank Berhad. AXA offers comprehensive protection solutions to individuals and businesses in all areas of general insurance. The Company protects over 1.4 million Malaysians, supported by over 800 employees in 22 offices and its multi-distribution channels which include brokers, bank partners, franchise and more than 5,000 agents nationwide.
Driven by a strong purpose to empower people to live a better life, AXA recognises that its business goals and commitment to customers are engendered through the actions of its People. The Company strongly believes that employee empowerment will accelerate them to their full potential in supporting and delivering greater value to customers and partners. In order to deliver its strong purpose to empower its customers to live a better life, AXA is committed to build:
DIVERSE & INCLUSIVE WORKPLACE CULTURE
AXA takes pride in its well-founded diverse and inclusive workplace – achieved through recruitment, development and retaining of a diverse workforce that emphasises on gender diversity, multi-generation mix and ability. The Company believes that being different yet working together for the same goal can bring out the best in each other. With that, AXA has established a set of 4 core values — Customer First, Courage, One AXA and Integrity, which acts as a compass to guide employees’ values at work.
What is also critically important to AXA is its employees’ voice. The Company has adopted a structured approach in gathering feedback via:
- Global Pulse Survey: conducted every 3 months to listen to and continuously find innovative solutions to improve the workplace for employees.
- Deployment of Amber: CEO’s artificial intelligence chatbot assistant to seek employees’ feedback throughout their journey with AXA. Since its launch in February 2019, Amber has reached out to more than 700 employees, receiving 87% positive feedback.
WORK LIFE INTEGRATION
Recognising the changing needs and priorities of its diverse workforce, AXA has developed initiatives to provide better work-life integration. AXA is the first insurance company in Malaysia to implement Compressed Work Schedule Arrangement (CWSA) to give employees the flexibility to take 2 Mondays or Fridays off in a month, by working an extra 45 minutes for 9 consecutive days. The Company has also rolled out Flexible Work Arrangement (FWA), offering the option of staggered working hours for those who prefer to work shorter working hours in a day to achieve better work life integration. To cater to varied parental needs, AXA has increased maternity leave to 4 months and introduced paternity leave of 1 month.
The Company also proactively brings all the employees together through regular engagement activities such as International Women’s Day, JomFit coaching and exercise programme, Corporate Responsibility Week and Family Day.
STRONG CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY CULTURE
AXA is committed to promote Corporate Responsibility as a continuous, year-long agenda in the areas of Environment, Health and Social Inclusion. In 1991, AXA introduced “AXA Hearts in Action” Programme to encourage employees to carry out volunteering activities in the form of giving time, sharing skills and raising funds. Since inception, the programme has rolled out several activities to engage the public and contribute to a sustainable society, including the annual CR Week. The Company has also introduced Employee Social Responsibility Leave (ESR) and incentivised 2 days of ESR to employees annually to encourage them to volunteer in programmes that are independent from company-sponsored activities.
LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME
The Learning and Development programme is an important topic for AXA to ensure a future-proof workforce. Besides a strong on-the-job training and mentoring, the Company has allocated at least 3.5% of employees’ annual salary for L&D activities to increase their competency and facilitate their career growth.
To strengthen the employee development programme, AXA has leveraged on technology to enhance the learning experience through online learning portal and gamification. Some of the training programmes introduced are Coursera: an online learning portal with over 500 certificated course made available to our employees to enable them to learn on-the-go and AXA Pocket Coach: an engaging ‘mobile learning companion’ to supplement traditional learning with gamification. The Pocket Coach has received overwhelming response, with 82% employees downloading the app as coaching buddy.
PROGRESSIVE & INNOVATIVE HR PRACTICES
On the efficiency front, AXA has moved beyond traditional approaches by investing in Robotics Process Automation to drive innovation and simplification efforts in recruitment, engagement, rewards and recognition as well as performance management.
AXA is the first in the industry to introduce Alex, a Robot designed to streamline HR recruitment, compensation and benefits processes via a robotic process automation system. The deployment of Robot has successfully reduced recruitment turnaround time by 70%, replacing labour intensive administrative tasks with value-added activities focusing on achieving the Company’s Payer-to-Partner strategy.
AXA has invested handsomely in building capabilities among employees by organising Agile and LEAN workshops nationwide, and kickstarting the AXAPRENEUR Project to accelerate employees in preparation for Industry 4.0. These initiatives are driven to foster a culture of innovation and agility in AXA to enhance customer experience and enrich customer value.
“The value and purpose of this Company is what drives me to do better everyday and everyone collaborates and acts as one team.”
— Brian Soon, Creative Web Designer
“Empowering people to live a better life means allowing them to create their own success stories. In AXA AFFIN General Insurance, that’s what we do.”
— Syukri Sudari, Chief People Officer
“I am proud to work in an organization that has a strong brand promise (Know You Can). It motivates and empowers me to deliver this promise to our customers.”
— Pearl Wong, Strategic Initiatives & Branding Manager
