Meet our N26 ERGs (Employee Resource Groups)!

Building a bank the world loves to use takes strong foundations, and the communities that we build within our company allow us to have the collective voice that we need to grow as a whole. The N26 Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are communities of employees who are linked together by personal characteristics and/or share an interest or goal within an organisation. They commit to foster a diverse and inclusive workplace, which align with our values. We’ve developed the ERGs to embrace and celebrate our people, and to raise awareness for the issues faced by under-represented communities at N26. Creating a safe space for our employees to combine their voices is the key value of ERG initiatives, ultimately promoting a work-environment where we can bring about change for the things that matter most.

In this piece we want to share more about some of our N26 ERGs.

Aptly enough, the idea for the Mental Health ERG came up on World Mental Health Day 2019! What started as a thoughtful comment on a company-wide Slack channel soon evolved from a conversation into a fully fledged ERG, with a team of around 20 N26ers.

Our mission statement is to advocate for mental health friendly policies in the workplace, and improve the wellbeing of our employees across the globe. Working in a rapidly growing and evolving company presents its own set of challenges and obstacles, and we firmly believe there is much we can do to improve and support our colleagues throughout their journey.

Everyone is welcome to join the public Slack channel, or to get involved with the ERG. It doesn’t matter if you have personally dealt with mental health before — the desire to make a difference is the most important thing.

Individuals at N26 who identify as womxn are represented by just over one third of the total employee population. Our mission is to ensure that their interests are represented. We would like to make N26 a more diverse, gender-balanced and inclusive company.

Our ERG is focused on:

• Developing mentorship and professional training opportunities.
• Organising internal events and community outreach initiatives.
• Making sure that working at N26 is a fair and safe experience for all.
• Supporting in making recruitment practices more inclusive.

At the end of last year we organised the Balanced Work event, a day dedicated to providing visibility, community and sources of empowerment to the womxn at N26 and their allies. The day included a workshop on negotiation, a keynote speech on effective communication, as well a panel discussion on allyship.

The Parents ERG was created in 2019 with the mission of improving the employee experience of parents working at N26, to make our work life more compatible with our family life.

Our ERG is focused on:

• Gathering and sharing information about parenting laws and benefits.
• Advocating for the interests of parents at N26.
• Working with our People Team and C-Level to increase awareness of N26 as a parent-friendly employer.
• Promoting our N26 community of parents, with an emphasis on mutual support, inclusion and friendliness.

At N26 we have many employees from different countries, some of whom are going through the experience of being a parent in a foreign country, often with little or no additional family support locally. Last year, we worked on creating collaborative local FAQs where N26 employees can find information on important topics such as bureaucracy, medical support and, of course, how to keep the kids entertained (among others).

The second and third pillars of our work are increasing in importance in 2020. We are looking into having a more open relationship between N26 and our families, structuring guidelines about working hours for parents in all departments and, finally, increasing external visibility of N26 as a company parents will want to work for.

We communicate constantly through our Slack channel where we share our thoughts, experiences, support each other and of course, share some very funny parenting memes!

We founded the Green ERG in fall 2019. We join forces with everyone interested in environmental issues and sustainability. Our main objective is to contribute to a more sustainable world. We have three main lines of activities:

• We raise awareness around environmental topics through sharing content on Slack, and organising Lunch and Learns, events and community actions (the clean-up day or awareness cinema).
• We educate people at N26 about concrete actions they can do both personally and professionally to help — with articles on intranet on the most impactful climate actions, divestment, donations, minimalism, sourcing of food and goods.
• We work on improving N26’s sustainability as a company and also as a product.

We are currently collecting data on N26’s environmental footprint in close collaboration with a variety of departments. We follow the recommendations outlined in the GRI standards for sustainability reporting with focus on the environmental section. Once we have the data we can identify the biggest contributors and advice N26 on actions and measures to improve the overall footprint.

One main initiative we carried on was on Cleanup Day 2019: we gathered employees across our Berlin offices to clean the area around our HQ and give back some love, by also planting some greenery. The results? ~5L of cigarette butts, ~80L of trash, ~150L of weeds and Autumn leaves, a more colourful office entrance at our HQ and a lot of fun meeting colleagues from other offices 😊