AXA is one of the world’s leading insurance companies where colleagues are a community of people who support each other. Together with Havas People, it had developed an EVP of ‘realise your potential to drive progress’. Central to this proposition is ensuring that hiring processes are inclusive, as this can supercharge the company’s potential to drive progress. To do this, it needed to get AXA recruiters to understand the power of inclusivity and their role in it, provide them with the tools to support this, and engage them on this even if they worked from home or across global locations.

Rather than provide a typical training course, AXA wanted to create something that was unexpected, interactive and fun. It worked closely with Havas to create a 90-minute online experience that included games, story-sharing and quizzes. There was an initial pre-event ‘huddle’ where teams came up with a team name, but were also asked to keep cameras off and get to know each other based on voice alone. A second email provided the interaction tools they would need for the day, and the final event included four different activities: an icebreaker, ‘unlocking’ games and a true or false quiz where recruiters needed to react to statements about candidates. The games were decided to encourage them to watch out for unconscious bias. They then shared difficult or unusual recruiting situations and discussed how these could have been improved. Finally, a quiz tested everyone’s knowledge on how to build a diverse team.

So participants had something to action immediately, everyone received an ‘opening doors to diversity’ background they could share on LinkedIn so they could communicate their learnings and encourage others to participate. Gamifying workplace training has been a hit with more than eight out of 10 colleagues and there are higher levels of retention of what they have learnt. The tools went down so well that AXA had to upscale the event, extending it from recruiters to a wider audience.