Career and family
The Munich Re Group offers its staff an array of solutions to combine work and family. Everyone can choose what suits them best in their current situation.
Providing care for family members requires individual solutions
The pme family service – an independent nationwide counselling and referral centre for tailor-made child and family care – enhances the work-life balance in a unique way. These counselling and referral services are free of charge for our staff and are financed by an annual contribution from Munich Re. Our staff only have to pay for the care options they choose.
Cooperation with public and private childcare facilities is a further aspect of our family-friendly human resources policy. We attach great importance to finding staff the childcare facilities that meet the parents' ideas of quality and flexibility – however old the children are and however long these facilities are required.
To improve the compatibility of work and family, Munich Re favours and supports the principle of public-private partnership (PPP). In 2007, we entered into an initially twelve-month agreement with the Haar daycare centre in Munich, which specialises in looking after children between the ages of three months and three years.
"Munich Re Giants" is the name of the daycare centre which is open both to children of Munich Re employees and to children from the surrounding neighbourhood. This childcare project – crèche, kindergarten, and after-school club in one – was launched by enthusiastic parents within our company and receives vigorous support from Munich Re. It not only pays the rent but also took over the cost of renovating and refurbishing the new building, which opens in the autumn of 2007 and offers places for 54 children in an area measuring 540 m2. A bilingual German/English environment encourages intercultural openness among the children.
The family as a success factor: Examples in the ERGO Insurance Group
The ERGO Insurance Group also supports private daycare centres and kindergartens at its sites in Germany, in order to offer an optimum number of places reserved for its staff. Victoria, for example, has reserved places in a private kindergarten called Drei-Käse-Hoch (Tiddlers) near its head office in Düsseldorf. It has also set up a parent-child office: if parents need to look after their children at short notice – because the children are ill and cannot go to the daycare centre or because the daycare centre itself is closed – they can take them to the office.
In a competition sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs in 2005, Victoria was one of the five companies nominated for the prize for particularly innovative models. The extremely flexible working hours and the support for family facilities by the association called "Victorianer helfen" (Victorians help) encouraged the jurors' positive decision.
In 2003, Victoria was awarded the Basic Certificate of the Work & Family Audit. This audit does not monitor the implementation of statutory models but looks at the range of practicable measures on offer, including at the same time an evaluation of the measures and company objectives that have been implemented. When Victoria was examined again in 2005, the auditors stated that the company had set itself the long-term task of aligning work and family. At Victoria, for example, parental leave may be extended to six years, at D.A.S to four.