At Nordea, every employee can dedicate 16 hours per year to volunteer activities, and these hours are fully sponsored by Nordea. Social programmes run by Nordea employees in Poland include initiatives supporting children, women returning to the workforce, parents trying to maintain balance and partnership in parenting, individuals in difficult life situations, refugees and education for digitally and financially marginalised individuals and children.
These numerous initiatives undertaken by Nordea employees, both bottom-up and through the Employee Resource Groups (ERG) at Nordea, cover a wide range of topics from gender balance, age diversity, interculturalism and skills diversity. While the topics may vary, they all share a common denominator – engaged employee volunteers!
Employee engagement in social programmes also offers an invaluable opportunity to strengthen the bonds between colleagues, to feel part of a team and to have a real impact on others’ lives. Volunteering not only allows employees to step away from their daily tasks and be open to others’ perspectives but it also enables them to put the Nordea’s D&I values into practice through concrete actions and solutions.
Thanks to employee involvement in cooperation with four non-governmental organisations, in Poland Nordea currently has around 160 active volunteers.
Why volunteering important to us
Volunteering is not only about helping others but also about internal growth, building empathy and understanding different life situations, cultural, gender, intergenerational diversity as well as fair treatment of everyone within the organisation.
It is, among other things, thanks to this approach that Nordea has a gender-equal distribution in Poland – even at the leadership level. Nordea clearly communicates guidelines for supporting transgender individuals, equal parental leave for both parents, including same-sex families. By employing people of various nationalities, Nordea knows how to effectively prepare employees to work in a multicultural environment, for example via unconscious bias training.