Our staff is a key component of the successful delivery of our mission to foster sustainable growth within the EU and abroad. The EIB Group achieves its goals thanks to more than 3,600 highly qualified and diverse employees from all 28 EU Member States who work in a dynamic, multicultural environment that fosters collaboration, innovation and personal growth through exposure to a variety of different projects.

We encourage employees to stay abreast of developments in their areas of practice and to maintain and complement their skills by ensuring professional development opportunities through training, internal mobility and merit-based career growth.

We provide a competitive compensation package commensurate with staff responsibilities and challenges. Above all, we offer a satisfying and stimulating working environment where people can achieve their professional goals while maintaining a work-life balance.

The rapid growth of the EIB Group over recent years and its resulting organisational changes have provided us with the impetus to rethink and challenge the way we work. EIB Personnel, in the context of its ‘Growing Talent Project’, aims at ensuring that we manage and grow our in-house talent in an integrated way. The objective is to enhance management practices related to performance, development and careers across the EIB Group – supported by a user-friendly online solution. The ‘Growing Talent Project’ is a long-term measure, covering the probation period onwards, including phases on enhancing individual development, with talent management and succession planning modules available in 2018.

More than half of our staff have been hired over the last five years and we have developed and rolled out a new on-boarding programme for newcomers. This programme addresses their immediate needs on entry into service and offers a year-long programme of training modules aimed at ensuring they gain the relevant knowledge necessary for becoming rapidly operational. A New Managers on-boarding process has also been developed and implemented. Both on-boarding programmes include training on multi-cultural awareness and diversity and inclusion.

Conscious of the impact of the ongoing rapid change on colleagues, the EIB Group’s Organisational Health Programme further increased its activities and stepped up its structural initiatives in 2017.

Key initiatives in 2017 were the development of new policies and processes to support Organisational Health, such as conflict management and management of sickness absences and return to work; awareness-raising campaigns culminating in an EIB Group Health Week in October; further rollout of skills development courses for work relations, communication and resilience; and hands-on support for directorates, teams and individuals to improve their work situation. Workplace counselling to help individuals in situations of stress or conflict in the workplace continued to be a core activity – well used and appreciated by managers and staff.

The 2018-2021 Strategy for Diversity and Inclusion was approved first by the Management Committee in November 2017 and then by the Board of Directors. The three priorities of the strategy mirror those of the recently approved Gender in Operations Strategy, underlining the fact that the EIB practices the same approach internally that is applied in its external policies. The strategy aims to:

Protect: equal opportunities and the rights of all employees by ensuring policies, procedures, guidelines and practices are inclusive and safeguard against unequal treatment for reasons of age, gender, sexual orientation, religion or belief, disability, or racial or ethnic origin,

Impact: create an inclusive work environment that fosters enriching team dynamics, builds on complementary competencies and unlocks individual drive with the aim of positively impacting decision-making, business results and organisational health, and

Invest: in our existing and acquired talent to ensure that internal and external talent pools are diverse and that we achieve better diversity representation as a whole and at all levels of the organisation.

Underpinning these three priorities requires a robust governance, reporting and monitoring framework to reinforce accountability and foster transparency. We have introduced diversity and inclusion targets into our Operational Plan monitoring KPIs, and developed a Bank-wide dashboard to track our progress towards achieving our objectives. In addition, each Directorate has agreed an action plan to contribute to the overall aims of the Bank and address their specific areas for improvement. Managers are held accountable through their people management objectives.

Diversity and inclusion are also supported by our Joint Committee for Equal Opportunities, which serves as the formal voice for staff on diversity matters and our staff-led networks ConnectedWomen, LGBT+ and enAble, which act as fora for discussion and collaboration.