Awards

Never change a winning team. On the contrary: invest in it, to make it bigger and stronger. The Hera Group knows this well, and continues to dedicate resources, attention and commitment to its 9,000 employees. All of this has been certified, for the eleventh consecutive time, by the Holland-based Top Employers Institute, which has been researching quality standards in people practices since 1991. Hera has once again been recognised for its strategy, focused on people, and its best practices in terms of welfare, workplace environment, development and training.

Top Employers is one of the most prestigious awards in this area, internationally. The exacting process through which companies are selected and certified is based on data analyses and detailed assessments concerning: investments in training and development, welfare policies and on-boarding for new hires, careful planning of selection processes and career paths, strategies aimed at increasing talent, corporate culture and a constructive workplace.

Attention towards human resources is a key part of the Hera Group’s strategic management. After all, the rapid changes seen in its external context, with factors including the environment, society, markets and technology, call for businesses to become increasingly agile, geared towards continuous improvement and able to do business while pursuing goals that are in the common interest. The Group’s organisational procedures themselves are highly innovative, based on getting all employees involved, so that they can give meaning to their concrete operations, in line with the company’s purpose.

In so doing, Hera relies on a few of the best practices that have distinguished it for some time. Most importantly, “Hextra”, the integrated corporate welfare plan intended for all Group employees (with investments reaching 4.9 million euro in 2019), which is characterised by an amount of monetary resources that can be “customised” by each worker, based on their own needs, as well as the possibility of converting part of their bonus for results into further welfare benefits. In order to improve work quality and agility, offices and workplaces have been made increasingly comfortable, functional and collaborative. As early as 2017, smart working was introduced, which, after a trial phase that produced positive and significant results, now involves over 1,500 employees. The Group’s commitment to guaranteeing equal opportunity, along with inclusion and diversity valorisation, remains constantly present, as is proved by its recent inclusion in the 2020 Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index and the Refinitiv (priorly Thomson Reuters) “Diversity & Inclusion Index”, which in 2019 saw Hera rank third in Italy and fourteenth worldwide, furthermore qualifying as the leading multi-utility overall. These are important results, considering that diversity and inclusion is an increasingly central issue for the international financial community, with investors becoming more interested in listed companies with excellent policies in this area.

Lastly, Hera has confirmed its ranking among Italy’s top companies that invest in their employees’ personal/professional development, providing almost 29 hours of training per capita each year, well above the national average in the sector, with a total of roughly 250 thousand hours offered, thanks to an investment coming to 1.7 million euro. Hera keeps apace with a rapidly evolving employment scenario, promoting digitalisation and new skills among its workers, in order to develop a technological and technical know-how that can proceed alongside and sustain the growth and complexity now shown by the Group. In this area, a fundamental role is played by Heracademy, the corporate university that allows the Group to communicate with businesses and the main local institutions.

"Receiving this certification for the eleventh consecutive year proves that the path we have taken is valid", states Hera's Executive Chairman, Tomaso Tommasi di Vignano. "This does not lead us to believe, however, that it is sufficient. Indeed, we wish to continue dedicating significant resources to our employees, in terms of development, wellbeing and training. We will thus offer them the best working conditions possible, which also means guaranteeing an inclusive and participative workplace. Hera is a constantly growing company, and its results are due to the commitment shown by its employees, who with their daily activities create value in the areas we serve. The path before us leads to the best services for citizens and local communities, and without people, without putting them at the centre of value-creating processes, without giving them a sense of being protagonists in the business and the challenges of our times, no strategy could be converted into reality".