People
With a corporate history spanning more than 100 years and generations of loyal customers and employees, we understand the importance of long-term relationships. The COVID-19 pandemic greatly tested our resilience. As we were forced to find new ways to work together and communicate, it was our strong relationships that allowed us to prevail. While the world recovers, we have renewed appreciation for the human connections that tie us to our employees, customers and communities.
Amica’s simple formula of respecting others and keeping promises starts with our employees. These values are reinforced through our focus on equitable employment opportunities and robust benefits for our more than 3,400 employees.
When it comes to our customers, our mutual structure allows us to focus on their needs. In a world of often-anonymous interactions, Amica offers a more personal touch. That’s why more than one in three of our policyholders have been insured with us for more than 20 years. This speaks to our willingness and ability to adapt to their changing needs – and to constantly improve and reimagine ways to serve them better.
In our communities, we’re dedicated to being a corporate citizen our employees and customers can be proud of. We champion programs and events that foster growth and stability where our employees and policyholders live and work. Each year, we invest more than $2 million in community programs across the country. As a corporate neighbor, we recognize the benefits of supporting the communities we serve.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) describes policies and programs to support and celebrate employees of different ages, races and ethnicities, abilities and disabilities, genders, religions, cultures and sexual orientations.
At Amica, we know our differences make us stronger, and we encourage employees to be their authentic selves. Our DEI strategy centers around building a diverse employee base, because we believe one that’s representative of our customers and communities creates richer experiences and enhances our corporate culture.
Refining our DEI Strategic Plan
Ongoing efforts to diversify candidate pools, encourage diverse hiring, and focus on the promotion and retention of underrepresented employees continued in 2021. We strive to create a place of belonging for all employees. The use of biennial engagement surveys was introduced to review all aspects of diversity and analyze diversity-related metrics, while continuing to research additional business intelligence reports as they become available.
Involving Employees Across the Company
We have a cross-functional DEI Committee consisting of diverse employees who bring unique perspectives and ideas to guide our corporate initiatives. Committee members connect with employees from their respective areas to ensure we address issues important to them.
Our Inclusion Committee is comprised of employees from traditionally underrepresented groups. Through this committee and our Impact − Excel & Elevate mentoring program, we work to develop, engage and support employees from historically marginalized communities.
Through our longtime affiliation with Year Up, a workforce training program for economically disadvantaged young adults, we’ve mentored 130 interns and hired 52 full time. In addition, we hire adults through The Groden Center, a program that serves individuals with a range of learning and behavioral disabilities throughout Rhode Island and Massachusetts. These programs have helped us steadily increase our workforce diversity over time.
Our employee representation on regional DEI-related boards has grown as we work to stay well-informed on key issues, including diverse relationships, community and justice, immigration and principles of nonviolence.
Supporting DEI From the Top
Amica CEO Bob DiMuccio has joined nearly 2,000 other top executives in signing the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion pledge. These CEOs share the belief that diversity, equity and inclusion is a societal issue, not a competitive one, and that collaboration and bold action from the business community – especially CEOs – are vital to driving change.
Included in the pledge are four main goals that business leaders commit to:
- Continue to make our workplaces trusting places to have complex, and sometimes difficult, conversations about diversity and inclusion.
- Implement and expand unconscious bias education.
- Share best – and unsuccessful – practices.
- Create and share strategic inclusion and diversity plans with our board of directors.
Seeking Out Diverse Business Partners
In addition to employee-focused activities, we also have a Supplier Diversity Program. Through this program, we incorporate minority-owned, women-owned, LGBTQ+-owned and service-disabled veteran-owned businesses whenever possible, to ensure our suppliers are representative of our community, customers and employees.
The Employee Experience
Our success is bolstered when our employees thrive. Our employees trust us to provide competitive pay and benefits, a safe and healthy workplace, and professional and personal fulfillment. By doing so, we create a supportive culture that benefits all.
As we see with our customers, many of our employees stay with us for the long term. It’s commonplace to find parents and their children working in different departments, or be introduced to siblings who work in one of our regional offices. We’re proud to say that the average tenure for our employees is 11 years.
Supporting a Changing Workforce
We have a pay-for-performance compensation model that’s designed to attract, motivate, reward and retain high-performing employees. Pay equity is a top priority, and we’re committed to paying employees competitively and fairly based upon their education, experience, qualifications and job performance. We take a centralized approach to employee compensation, in which all pay decisions are reviewed in a consistent manner to ensure fairness and equity across the organization. In addition, regular pay-equity analyses are conducted by independent third parties to ensure we remain true to our philosophy.
Employees also cite our benefits package as a major differentiator. Amica’s 2021 program included individual and family health care plan choices and a 401(k) plan in which employees are fully vested on their first day of work. Amica provides a generous 401(k) match of 6% of the employee’s pay along with an additional annual 3% non-elective employer contribution. We offer an excellent tuition reimbursement program to further employee development. In addition, we offer all employees a Student Loan reimbursement program to help pay off student loan debt. Additional benefits support Amica employees throughout their careers – from relocation benefits to financial management classes that help them prepare for retirement.
As an add-on to our benefits program, Amica introduced its COVID hardship fund to help employees who fell on difficult times. This benefit provided support for expenses that ranged from basic needs to medical expenses to childcare and eldercare.
We continue to upgrade our employee self-development program with new or enhanced offerings. We also offer internal and external learning programs to reinforce employee skills and encourage professional designations in insurance and other, related fields.
Promoting a Safe and Healthy Workplace
Amica is honored to have repeatedly earned recognition from the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island for our extensive worksite health programs. This programming drives productivity and engagement – keeping employees coming to work every day by making employee health and well-being a top priority. A few of our offerings that support the health of our employees and their families include:
- Competitive health plans
- Onsite fitness center
- Robust wellness and safety programs
- Generous leave policies that include paid parental leave, back-up care and enhanced family support resources
Our wellness initiatives support a wide range of needs for a diverse employee population. They were especially important when COVID-19 required Amica employees to rearrange their work lives from home offices across the country. Training employees to create healthy workspaces in their homes, and supporting their mental and physical needs, was a focus of our wellness program in 2021. Amica also reimbursed employees for equipment-related expenses to help them work effectively from home during the pandemic.
As employees began transitioning back to their offices, we realized each employee’s experience during the pandemic was unique. We’ve collaborated with our teams across the country to address questions and concerns, and help employees deal with these challenging times. That’s why we expanded our benefits to include free access to the Calm app, reduced mental health copays and remote access to mental health providers.
These benefits are in addition to our Wellness Wallet, which reimburses employees up to $800 a year for:
- Fitness activities
- Pregnancy and parenting classes
- Mental health and stress-management resources
- Nutrition and weight-management programs
Framing Employee Engagement
Our employees have a very strong sense of our combined purpose. One of the most common remarks we hear when an employee retires is how much they’ll miss their Amica family. These feelings are a result of a culture that allows people to foster authentic connections. They come naturally when employees, working together for a common cause, feel supported and heard.
We actively seek employee input through a variety of means, including our biannual engagement survey and periodic pulse surveys. For more than 10 years, we’ve asked how we’re doing in areas like teamwork and collaboration, community and environment, well-being, DEI, career development and leadership. Every year, we receive insightful feedback about the health of our company culture and where our organizational strengths and opportunities lie. We’ve made several enterprisewide changes as a direct result of feedback from this survey, including:
- Changing our dress code
- Providing additional parental support (shipping breast milk for traveling
mothers,expanding child loss bereavement time) - Reviewing our workplace flexibility options
Many companies recognize longtime employees. At Amica, it’s a cherished tradition. To acknowledge our employees celebrating 25 years, we inscribe their names on bricks that are placed in the center courtyard at our headquarters in Lincoln, Rhode Island. The courtyard now contains over 2,000 employee bricks.
We’re very proud of our culture and our reputation as a fair and generous employer. We’ve been repeatedly recognized as a Best Place to Work by the Providence Business News, and in 2021, we were honored as a “Best Midsize Employer” by Forbes. The Age-Friendly Institute has also named Amica a Certified Age Friendly Employer, the nation’s only certification program that identifies organizations committed to being the best places to work for employees aged 50+. These awards and recognitions inspire us to continually make Amica an even better place to work.
Customer-Centric Philosophy
The people we insure are at the center of every policy we sell, every new product or program we develop, and every decision we make. It’s also important to note that, as mutual policyholders, our customers collectively own Amica and often earn dividends annually. Our dividend policies represent 31% of all policies sold, and mutual policyholders received over $241 million in dividends at year-end 2020.
Our customers purchase Amica insurance to ensure their financial security from unexpected loss – whether a simple fender bender or life-changing natural disaster. For us, this is more than a transaction. It’s a promise to make their lives whole again. It’s a relationship based on trust, which we take seriously. We listen carefully to our customers, providing sound advice and recommendations based on their individual needs. The greatest measure of our success is their satisfaction. Our mission statement sums it up nicely: To create peace of mind and build enduring relationships.
Evolving to Serve our Customers Better
We share our customers’ interest in securing the things in life they’ve worked so hard to build. We partner with them to protect their homes, help them to be safer drivers and reassure them that, should the unexpected happen, we’ll be there to help any way we can.
As we work together to do this, we provide a variety of trustworthy resources, products and services.
- Through Amica.com and our Home Check by AmicaTM app, we offer valuable knowledge and expert information that help policyholders maintain and defend their homes.
- We monitor the connected home market and test new technology that can prevent unnecessary damage inside the home. To help our customers adopt this new-wave technology, we form affinity relationships with best-in-class solutions to offer product discounts for our customers. We also offer discounts on our homeowners premiums (in most states) when these devices are present.
- Water losses from leaking pipes are a focus area as well, and we’re evaluating new solutions to help homeowners better understand their water usage over time. In addition to preventing wasted water from leaks, it will enable homeowners to identify opportunities for water conversation.
- And we’re rolling out a new product, StreetSmart by AmicaTM, that incentivizes safer driving by linking policy discounts and rewards to driving performance.
We’re always looking for proactive ways to better serve our policyholders. For example, we monitor weather patterns that could predict natural disasters and often send alerts and advice to any customers who appear to be in harm’s way.
If a loss does occur, we see it as an opportunity to keep our promise. We want our claims process to be as simple and effort-free as possible, and we’ve invested in the technology to make that happen. We offer a number of self-service and collaboration tools to supplement our in-person service. This allows us to create a world-class experience by serving customers the way they want to be served.
Through Amica’s Corporate Social Responsibility program and our philanthropic arm, The Amica Companies Foundation, we’ve developed strong bonds with nonprofits for decades. Every year, we’re introduced to deserving organizations across the country that promote community well-being, individual resiliency and financial security. In 2021, we provided more than $3.5 million in grants and sponsorships to nonprofits.
Amica’s corporate social responsibility efforts are focused on two areas: engaging communities and empowering employees.
Engaging Communities
As a corporate based in Rhode Island, we’ve been an engaged philanthropic partner to organizations throughout the state since our founding in 1907. In 1996, the Amica Companies Foundation was formally created and focused its mission on harnessing the power of enduring relationships to help individuals, families and communities become economically independent and strong. Through these ties, we’ve supported long-standing nonprofits as well as new ones that address issues facing the state.
As our business has expanded, so have our philanthropic and community efforts. Today, we’re invested in working together to build more-resilient and sustainable communities in the places across the country where our employees and policyholders live. We know this looks different in different places, so we focus on addressing the specific needs of communities we’re present in.
Empowering Employees
We encourage our employees, retirees and their families to engage with their communities, and support them with programs to increase the impact of their efforts. These include:
- Paid volunteer time
- A generous matching gift program that matches employee donations at 175%
- Grants awarded in the names of employees and their spouses who are actively involved in those organizations
Through these programs, our employees direct more than $1 million in giving each year. Another way our employees give back is by sharing their professional skills through nonprofit board participation. In 2021, Amica leaders served as board members for 120 local and national organizations.
We also come together throughout the year to support causes companywide. The Thanksgiving season has long been a special time to thank our customers for allowing us to serve them. Our customers are familiar with our Thanksgiving card, which we’ve been sending for 51 years.
In recent years, we extended our efforts to not only give thanks but give back through a countrywide month of giving, including opportunities to volunteer and a food drive in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. We’ve donated hundreds of thousands of pounds of food and engaged nearly every single employee in the effort.
We’re very proud of our presence in the communities we serve and the culture we’ve created. At Amica, we know the value of peace of mind − for our customers, our employees and our communities.
