Seguros Equinoccial: Measuring Happiness & Engagement During Merger
Seguros Equinoccial, a leading insurance company in Ecuador strengthens its programme to measure the happiness and engagement of their employees using The Happiness Index platform.
The company, a part of Grupo Futuro, was established in 1973 and employed, until November 2021, 350 people across 8 of the largest cities in Ecuador: Quito, Guayaquil, Cuenca, Manta, Ibarra, Ambato, Machala and Loja. In August 2021, Seguros merged with Equivida Compañía de Seguros SA (Equivida), another company backed by Grupo Futuro, creating the largest insurer in Ecuador with a combined headcount of 685 people. The HR team felt it was important to expand their existing happiness framework with a programme that enabled them to listen to their people during this critical period and help them to create longer-term cultural alignment.
Gabriela Armendáriz, Senior Analyst for Organisational Communication at Seguros Equinoccial explains: “Our organisation has always focused on investing on the human side and creating a thriving culture, including measuring their happiness annually since 2015. When embarking on our merger with Equivida we wanted to use The Happiness Index platform to create a more constant employee listening programme. This provided us with data and insight we needed to ensure a smoother transition and understand how our people are thinking and feeling about the change.”
The Happiness Index platform offers 20+ pre-built neuroscience backed employee surveys including some specifically created for mergers and acquisitions. The platform also identifies key focus areas to prioritise and provides live insight to take action.
Héctor Castillo, HR Director adds: “We believe that listening to our people both at the beginning of the change process and regularly throughout will help us to measure how our people are thinking and feeling at each stage. Both Seguros Equinoccial and Equivida have similar values and cultures with little differences that enrich us throughout this process. This philosophy and our programme with The Happiness Index will enable us to undergo a process of cultural integration and work with our people in the medium term to create together a shared vision, mission and aligned values and support them through the change.”
As well as measuring how their people are feeling about the merger, Seguros Equinoccial recognised the huge impact the Covid pandemic was having on the health and wellbeing of their people. Part of their listening programme includes Employee Voice 24/7, which gives their people the opportunity to give feedback 24/7 regardless of location or time, asking 2 simple questions: “How are you feeling today?” and “Why?”.
Gabriela Armendáriz continues: “Seguros Equinoccial has always advocated empathetic leadership. We know that to succeed in this merger we must co-create a culture based on innovation and digital transformation, not only as an organisation but also in all our processes that aim to increase our people’s wellbeing. We’ve had excellent feedback on The Happiness Index platform from our people who love that we are listening to them and can take action in real-time.”
