Great place to work

We believe that a happy, diverse and healthy workforce is a more productive one. As well as providing a safe workplace, we give our people a supportive environment and the conditions, benefits and social opportunities that make Aviva a great place to work.

Flexible working and work–life balance

To enable our employees to work to the best of their abilities while maintaining a good work–life balance, we operate various flexible working initiatives including part-time, term-time, compressed hours and flexitime. We also offer a flexible benefits scheme which includes the opportunity to buy or sell annual leave.

Through our active social and discussion forums on our Aviva World intranet, our employees organise and publicise a wide range of social activities; we also offer our employees up to three days' paid leave for community activities. Aviva continues to provide enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption provisions over and above those required by legislation.

Health and safety

The health and safety of our employees is a top priority, so we are pleased that we had no major health and safety breaches during 2010. A range of initiatives and programmes continued to promote better performance in this area.

In December, we relaunched Workstation Safety Plus – our online training and self-assessment programme to encourage the safe and healthy use of workstations. We also reviewed our workstations to reduce the risk of injury.

In October, our Healthcare business staged a Health Week using Change 4 Life communications. Activities included:

• Providing free fruit for staff
• Encouraging staff pledges regarding their health
• Healthy recipes in the canteen
• Health-related competitions
• Encouraging staff to walk to their meetings and attend lunchtime walks
• Encouraging staff to select healthier food options and give up sugar
• Educational and motivational health-related talks from local charity Wessex Heartbeat, a British athlete and internal clinicians.