Investing in Our People

We are aiming to create a compelling experience for all our employees, and we are deeply committed, as a firm, to promoting employee well-being and offering our people around the world opportunities to develop and thrive as a valued member of our team.

Lyne Lamothe Global Chief Human Resources Officer

At Fiera Capital, we understand that our most valuable asset is our people. We are truly committed to providing a healthy and rewarding work environment where our employees feel empowered. We believe that building a respectful, inclusive and supportive culture is integral to our ability to collaborate, make better decisions and exceed the expectations of our clients.

Learn about DE&I at Fiera

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we took meaningful steps to ensure our employees had access to appropriate health and wellness resources and we invested in technology and tools to support them with remote working options and opportunities for learning and growth.

Workplace With Purpose: New Ways of Working

We recognize that the pandemic and the competitive landscape for talent have profoundly changed the workplace, elevating the need for a more dynamic and innovative work environment to attract and retain employees. In response, we created Workplace With Purpose (WXP), a hybrid work program allowing our employees around the world to choose the work environment that best fit their needs.

This new program is based on three guiding principles, used to assist employees and their managers, in deciding where and how to work:

Protecting our
culture
Keeping our
clients at the centre
of our decisions
Fostering
work-life balance

Hybrid Workplace Training Program

As we adapt to new ways of working, we introduced the FLEX Training Program, a hybrid workplace training program to better empower and support managers in successfully leading their teams.

This program focuses on ways to build capabilities supporting a variety of work styles while ensuring our firm continues to be successful and our culture protected.

Over a three-week period, managers learned how to develop a hybrid mindset, to foster autonomy, to maximize potential, to minimize bias and to hold effective meetings with their teams around the globe.

Fostering Health
and Wellness

In 2021 we launched specific health-related initiatives.

Given the various strains caused by the pandemic and the new realities of working from home, we have put particular focus on the well-being of our people. We know that helping them be healthy and thrive is not only the right thing to do, but it also enables them to better support our clients.

5 additional
wellness days
in 2021
provided home
office monetary
contributions
provided
home office
technology supplies
organized
employee
fitness events
implemented
wellness
programs

Learning and
Development

To help our workforce meet the challenges of today and tomorrow and develop the right skills to succeed, we offer various continuous learning and development opportunities and make sure they have the tools they need to grow personally and professionally. It is a key driver in employee engagement, while contributing to our firm’s success.

To better support managers in leading change and our people in their development, we launched an educational and awareness series focused on engagement, driving innovation and creating a more inclusive work environment.

Ignite Your Mind

This year, we launched Ignite Your Mind, a new thought-provoking series designed to foster a culture of innovation.

Through these inspiring conversations, employees can learn from a variety of thought leaders on trending topics, including how to embrace healthy doses of stress and anxiety, and how to create a more inclusive workplace by becoming more aware of unconscious bias.

We know that investing in the next generation is important for our long-term success.

As part of our revised internship program:

40: interns hired in
2021

30%: increase in interns
hired compared to
2020

62%: of interns were women or from underrepresented groups

28%: were hired at the end of their internship or retained for stretch assignments

We also launched a new graduate rotational program within the finance and accounting function to support and develop a wide range of skills amongst junior hires.

Attracting the
Best Talent

Attracting the Best Talent

We invested into tools to help us drive change across the organization, such as a new recruitment platform that aims to improve diversity in hiring and to help recruit hard-to-find talent.

We also developed new partnerships with various university campuses around the world and further leveraged our career page and social media reach to help us attract new and diverse talents and increase our global visibility. Using a proactive approach to market our employer brand, we were able to increase our pipeline of candidates.

We believe that diversity of thought and perspective fuels our ability to generate innovative solutions for our clients and to build sustainable prosperity for all our stakeholders.

We know that diverse teams generate competitive business insights, find the best solutions and make better decisions.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I)

Our DE&I vision: to cultivate an inclusive, safe and trusting work environment, where everyone can feel a sense of belonging and can bring their full selves to work.

In the spring of 2021, we conducted an inclusion survey with participation from our employees globally.

Feedback from the survey provided us with a foundation to create a comprehensive five-year DE&I roadmap and objectives. The detailed plan encompasses support and educational initiatives, a focus on human resources programs and policies, as well as targets to increase the inclusion of women in management roles and the representation of underrepresented groups by 2026.

We will also be using the survey data as a benchmark to establish accountability and measure progress.

Our DE&I roadmap is comprised of 5 key components:

Creating
Strong
Allyship
Revisiting
Our Policies
and Practices
Fostering
Well-Being
Tracking
Our Progress
/ Demographics
Giving Back to
the Communities
We Serve

Making Progress on Our DE&I Journey

In September 2021, we created a new role of Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, spearheading our DE&I initiatives globally, ensuring that our practices, policies and systems are equitable and inclusive, and that we foster a trusting environment.

We also strengthened our DE&I-CSR Council comprised of 20 leaders and 27 ambassadors from across our global offices and from diverse and underrepresented groups.

The Council is committed to acting as champions of diversity and inclusion and to supporting our efforts to ensure we deliver consistent and impactful outcomes aligned with our DE&I strategy. The Council reports directly to our Executive Chairman of the Board and provides regular updates to the Board and its Nominating and Governance Committee.

With our goal to increase the presence of women in management roles, we more than tripled the number of participants in the A Effect Ambition Challenge, which propels female ambition and fosters greater equality. Over 40 women from across the organization enrolled in this unique international training program in 2021.

As we continue to grow, we aspire to achieve a level of diversity that reflects the communities and organizations we serve and support around the globe. Our DE&I initiatives are fundamental to building better business decisions and value creation for all our stakeholders, and to establishing our brand and shaping our culture. Although progress takes time, we will remain focused on our DE&I vision and we will keep fostering conversations and cultivating opportunities where we can learn from different perspectives and experiences, grow and improve.

As we continue to grow, we aspire to achieve a level of diversity that reflects the communities and organizations we serve and support around the globe.