Nordea Bank : Working on diversity and inclusion – every day, all year round

During the summer of 2019 Nordea has once again been a proud partner of Pride. This is one way in which we seek to live up to our commitment of being an inclusive workplace. We strive to include diversity in everything that we do - in all our interactions, when we recruit new co-workers and in our corporate culture.

Nordea is the largest financial services group in the Nordic region with over 9 million customers and approximately 29,000 employees. We have co-workers from all the corners of the world and on any given day about 50 different languages are spoken somewhere in a Nordea office. Our different backgrounds, as well as our different experiences and skills, give us a broader perspective on things. This diversity enables us to provide better services to our customers, to contribute more to society and to attract and retain great employees.

Being a big corporation that already plays a key role in society we want to take a stand for equal worth and equal opportunities, which are part of the Nordea core values. We work continuously on being an inclusive and equal-opportunities workplace and have implemented a range of measures to make this happen (see fact box below).

'Random or simple measures won't be enough to achieve inclusion and diversity. This is about changing your entire mindset and reinventing the methods you use in your daily work', said Åsa Billme, Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Nordea.

She stressed that diversity and inclusion efforts need to be integrated throughout the company and include all levels of the organisation: from top to bottom and vice versa, involving both management and employees.

As part of our work, members of Nordea's Group Executive Management are engaged in our Nordic diversity committee, currently chaired by our CEO Casper von Koskull. We support our managers in their roles as people leaders by giving them policies to lean on and the training and tools to live them. As our employees are the experts on working at Nordea, we also encourage employees to form work groups dedicated to the promotion of diversity and inclusion within the company.

'It's so incredibly important that people are able to bring their full selves to work every day. It enriches us as a company and drives development forward', says Åsa Nilsson Billme.

Read more at A diverse community and Our culture.