Welcome to Zurich

Prologue
1969

It was November of 1969, and Mike Berrenson was in limbo. He was 18, just out of high school in Baltimore, Maryland, and, like most American men at the time, eligible for the draft – with the Vietnam War still raging. When he failed his physical because of a bad arm, he enrolled in a local community college, but it left him uninspired.

Not only was the year coming to an end, but the decade and an era – the Sixties. Woodstock, and all that it represented, was in the rearview mirror, and anyway Mike had always been more pool hall than flower power, more in tune with his hometown of Charm City than Haight-Ashbury. He needed to do something with his life, but what?

Besides eight-ball, he was also good at math, so when he heard Maryland Casualty Company (which would eventually become part of Zurich) needed an audit reviewer, he applied. The interview process, as it were, consisted of 10 math questions. “That was the extent of it,” Berrenson says now. He got the job, and today, at 70, is the longest-serving Zurich employee worldwide. “Who knows what would have happened had I been drafted?”

“Hey, start adding these field audits, kid.”

It may have been over 50 years ago, but he remembers his first day like it was yesterday: cigarettes, ashtrays and smoke everywhere; single file desks, no cubicles, most with no phones; and men were required to wear ties. He was given a huge, analog calculator from, like, the last century, and as he recalls, was told something along the lines of, “Hey, start adding these field audits, kid.”

“It weighed a ton, that thing,” Berrenson says. “You punched in the numbers as hard as you could, pulled the handle, the tape came out, and that was your answer.”

And then there was his first pay stub. “A hundred and seven bucks a week,” he says. “And no overtime back then.” Not a lot, but not bad for a teenager. “Every Friday, you were handed your paycheck, walked across the street to the bank, cashed it, and that was your money for the week,” he says.

Soon after, he dropped out of community college and just continued to show up for work. And show up and show up. “And all these years later,” he says, “it hasn’t stopped.”

Part I
The 1970s

Antonio Bico was a year younger than Mike Berrenson when he joined Metrópole in Portugal on March 2, 1970. There were no marches on the capital, no social revolution in Lisbon at the time – not yet anyway. The Carnation Revolution – the peaceful overthrow of the Estado Novo regime – would come in 1974, but there were armed conflicts in the former Portuguese colonies, Angola and Mozambique among them.

Young Antonio was still a few years from his compulsory military service, though, and could immerse himself in all matters of Metrópole, which was owned 95 percent by Zurich. The 17-year-old was introduced to a formal but welcoming group – with cigarettes, ashtrays and smoke everywhere. Men wore jackets and ties, women dresses and skirts. It was very hierarchical but there were also a lot of young people who played on the Metrópole sports teams – football, basketball, volleyball, you name it – that competed against other companies in Lisbon. That was a nice icebreaker.

If 17 seems young, consider that Manuel Duarte was hired as a paquete, a kind of bellhop, at Metrópole on July 21, 1970, a few days before his 14th birthday – and six days before the death of longtime dictator Antonio Salazar – which sounds like something out of a Wes Anderson film. “I still see myself walking through the door of the headquarters for the first time on Rua Barata Salgueiro, where it remains.” He has stayed with Zurich in a variety of roles, because, he says, “my job still gives me a lot of pleasure – I still feel motivated.”

Antonio, meanwhile, started in claims, where he wrote and received letters on mountains of paper. When he returned from his compulsory two-year military service in 1976 – fortunately he avoided war-time action – he continued to learn about every nook and cranny of the business. “I grew up in the company,” he says. Indeed he grew all the way up to CEO of Portugal in 2007. He only recently stepped down as CEO, but is staying on to consult, because, he says, “I love what I do. It’s part of my life.”

“I never saw an electric typewriter before. I didn’t even know how to turn it on.”

The Zurich office in Chicago was 4,000 miles from Lisbon, and 700 from Baltimore, but it had at least one thing in common in 1970: cigarettes, ashtrays and smoke. On June 25, 1970, another 17-year-old, Carol McArdle, commuted to the Zurich office in downtown Chicago – 111 W. Jackson Boulevard – for her first day as a claims draft typist. She was two weeks out of high school when she answered a job ad in the newspaper and was understandably nervous. She had never even gone into the city by herself.

“I didn’t want to go to college,” she says, “and back then you didn’t need a degree. I didn’t like typing – I hated typing in school – but I passed their test. They didn’t want speed, they wanted accuracy. But you couldn’t make a mistake, so it was very intimidating. And though the people were nice, they were all a lot older than me. I think the next youngest person was probably in their 40s.”

There were plenty of other women in the office, but they weren’t allowed to wear pants, just skirts and dresses. Men were in jackets and ties. Phones were only on supervisors’ desks. What was new were the typewriters. Gone were the big old manual typewriters. In were the big electric typewriters. “I never saw an electric typewriter before,” she says. “I didn’t even know how to turn it on.”

After three months, Carol found typing monotonous, so she went to her boss and asked if there was anything else. He said no. But that weekend she saw more job ads at Zurich for all kinds of positions, so, with the encouragement of her father, she went back to the boss and was like, hey what gives? He relented and she was transferred to the accounting department processing cancellation credits for three months. Then she moved into the rating and coding department, where there were more young women her age.

“That first year, I did this for three months, then moved over there for three months, and started learning new things. My dad said at the time, ‘Don’t give up.’ And it ended up all working out.”

Like Carol, Kathie Grierson was nervous, petrified, on her first day. It was September 1, 1975, and the 20-year old Australian, like so many at the time, loved Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie and had Fleetwood Mac playing in her head, especially ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide.’ She also loved the Eagles, ‘One of These Nights’ and ‘Lyin’ Eyes.’ It’s no wonder she was attuned to the pop sounds of the day; she had, after all, come to Melbourne from Perth in Western Australia three years earlier to take up a career in dance but thought it might be time to find a day job. She had gone to night school to be a secretary and, through the government employment service, applied to Guardian Royal Exchange (which would be acquired by Zurich).

She sat in on reception, helped in the mail room, ordered stationery and filled the copy machine with toner and paper. “I hated doing the toner,” she says. “It got all over me.” If she hated the toner, she loved her managers: Mr. Lush and Mr. Cohen. No first names were ever used, and if you didn’t know their last name, you called them Sir. “To this day,” Kathie says, “I still find it hard to call them by their first names when talking about them.”

“A lot of deals were signed on a drink coaster, or so I was told.”

Certain things were the same Down Under – smoking, of course – but miniskirts were allowed in the office, as were bellbottoms and platform shoes. This being Australia – and the 1970s – men would often come to work in safari suits or (heaven help us) Bermuda shorts with socks to their knees. Supervisors had their own room in the canteen and could also have beer and wine. On Fridays, everyone went to the pub for lunch.

“A lot of deals,” she says, “were signed on a drink coaster, or so I was told.” There was also a ‘tea lady’ that came around with tea and biscuits – savory in the morning, sweet in the afternoon. “Mary was her name – I can’t believe I remember.” And there was a ping-pong table – long before they became de rigueur at hip tech start-ups.

At the end of 1975, Kathie went back home to Perth for Christmas to see her family. They saw ‘Jaws,’ which had just opened in Australia – “between you and me, I had my feet up on the seat screaming when the shark came up to the boat” – and had a great holiday. They were happy she got that day job, one with a future. “Little did they know I would still be here nearly 47 years later.” Or, put another way, in the words of her beloved Fleetwood Mac: ‘Don't stop ...’ well, you know the rest.

Part II
The 1980s

Zurich, the city and the company, is often known in clichés by those on the outside. Staid, reserved, orderly. As Zurich employees, we know this isn’t true, right? And Zurich, the city, was in an irascible mood in the early 1980s. In fact, the city was burning, or as those years are known locally from a well-known documentary, ‘Züri brännt.’ Students and young people battled with police over funding for alternative arts spaces. It started outside the opera house on May 30, 1980, and spread to the other main thoroughfares around town over the coming months: Bellevue, Limmatquai, Bahnhofstrasse. Windows were shattered, cars burned, tear gas was used by the police, scores were injured, one person was killed, and thousands were arrested.

Bruno Pfister was caught in the middle, metaphorically but also literally. In November of 1979, the 21-year-old started at Altstadt (acquired by Zurich three years later) in customer service, but before that he had considered a career in the police force.

“It was a different culture back then.”

On his first day, the general conditions guidelines were dumped on his desk, and he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. “Is this job right for me?” he wondered. The people seemed nice enough, he recalls – and yes, they smoked in the office – but it was all Sie (you, formal) not du (informal). “It was a different culture back then,” says Pfister, now a senior product manager. “Today in the Oerlikon office, it’s always du.”

Out in the streets in 1980 and ’81, the language wasn’t formal or informal, just angry. While driving home after work one evening, Pfister was confronted by a police water cannon on Quai Bridge, one of the most beautiful spots in Zurich. He had to swerve into the tram lane, and then had to be careful not to run over the large stones that were scattered everywhere.

A few weeks later, while heading to a movie, he was faced with police on his left and protesters on the right. He ducked into the theater just in time. “It was better for my health,” he says. “I knew people in the youth scene, and it was not so nice to hear what our police were doing.” At the same time, he didn’t like the approach of the protesters. “I don’t think that’s the way to solve problems.”

Anita Blom-Pozdnik steered clear of the riots altogether. She may have started her apprenticeship at Zurich, in the main Mythenquai office, on April 21, 1980, nine days before the movement began, but she was a mere 14 years old. Plus, she had protective parents, especially her mother, who “had a lot of fear about everything.” They told her the protesters were up to no good and that she should come straight home to Thalwil, a few towns outside the city limits. “It was a conservative environment,” she says.

The young Anita was happy Zurich took her aboard. A prominent Swiss bank wouldn’t on the basis that she was an Austrian citizen. And although she didn’t know much about the company, her father had insurance with Zurich and a sales agent named Ernst Blättler would visit their home once or twice a year. “He was friendly and helpful and knowledgeable,” Anita, now a business performance analyst, remembers. “My father trusted him so much that he told us if something should happen to him, we should get in touch with Mr. Ernst Blättler and ask him for support. I can still picture him.”

She was, like many 14-year-olds, shy and nervous. “I was in awe, like ‘Wow, everything is so big.’ ” With that, she noticed, came hierarchical distinctions within the office – and mostly in the hands of men. In titles, but even in signs and gestures. Normal workers, in her recollection, had chairs without armrests, while managers had armrests – and their own canteen. Different desks, curtains and carpets also conveyed levels of importance.

When Anita turned 15, she committed a gaffe. Her boss asked her to bring a paper to a director for a translation and then added, “Tell him to improve his handwriting so I can read it.” So Anita handed the director the paper and relayed the message. He looked at her aghast. “Did she really say that?” he asked Anita. Yes, she said, and when Anita got back to her boss’s office, she was proud to tell her that she passed on the message. “No, please tell me you didn’t. That was just a joke.” Her boss thought it could have severe consequences. It didn’t. “And his handwriting was better from that day on.”

In the following years, there were odd comments and ‘jokes’ along the lines of, “Oh, I’m sick, but if you were laying at my side, I’d feel so much better.” She says, “It was nicely meant in a way, but misguided.”

“He couldn’t believe that a woman could program.”

What was even worse, in her opinion, was always being considered a secretary – even if she was one of the best apprentices, with the highest scores – while the young men had more interesting opportunities. Finally, she said, “ ‘I’m sorry, but I’m much better than this. I’ll be wasted in this job.’ They said, ‘That’s all we have,’ and I said, ‘I don’t believe that.’ I was appalled.” And when word got out, other departments did want her, since she had developed a reputation as a good worker. Even later in the mid-1980s, when she was 19 and met with someone to discuss a new task she was supposed to program, he asked her several times if she was really the programmer and not the secretary. “He couldn’t believe that a woman could program,” she says. When she originally wanted to cut back to 80 percent, she was questioned whether she could still lead her small team. She remembers company parties where male employees could bring their partners, but women couldn’t.

Things have changed a lot since then, Anita says. And she’ll always fondly remember how Zurich supported her during her advanced education. She went to school full-time and was still able to work for the company at 50 percent, putting in those hours on semester breaks and weekends. The company was also supportive when she had children and worked part-time. “Zurich offered me possibilities to combine my education and my family life,” she says. “Plus, I had really good bosses, and I liked my work so it made it easy to stay.”

Dublin wasn’t burning on June 8, 1981, Paul Croghan’s first day at Irish National, which would eventually be absorbed into Zurich, but there was unrest. The previous year saw 350,000 stream into the streets of the Irish capital to protest high taxation rates. There were strikes, high unemployment and a ‘brain drain’ among young people.

The 20-year-old Paul had been working, but he still felt particularly lucky to get this job, which appeared secure. “And wasn’t I right,” he says today. He was, and still is, in reinsurance underwriting, but back in 1981, his direct colleagues all had worked together since 1952. “So you had to break into this very settled circle,” he says. “People had a very different attitude toward their colleagues back then. They were more like family. Sometimes they actually were family. There was a culture, at least in Ireland, of people getting their family into the company. That doesn’t happen so much today.”

His first salary was 48 pounds a week, but his rent was 25 pounds. Do the math: He had 23 pounds a week to live on. So he’d go to the local pub – Horse Show House – rather than put the heat on in the apartment. “It was my sitting room.” And one that was popular with colleagues.

It added to the familiarity in the office. One woman was known as Ms. Tipp-Ex because she used the correction fluid to fix typing mistakes. “It wasn’t in any way insulting, and she embraced the name,” according to Paul. “Another colleague whose real name was Eamon was always called Benjy because he looked like a popular TV soap opera character, and he wasn’t insulted because many of us were better known by our work nickname. But now if I told a colleague that I was going to call them something that’s not their name, I don’t know how they’d respond. Now it’s more businesslike and formal.”

“You know what, if that car crashes, and they all get killed, I’m the manager tomorrow.”

In his early days, senior staffers would take off during the day for Leopardstown Racecourse to bet on the horses. They didn’t appear worried that there was no one in the office to cover. One day, Paul was standing outside the office when a carload of them left for the track. His young co-worker, with a bit of macabre humor, said, “You know what, if that car crashes, and they all get killed, I’m the manager tomorrow.”

The combination of familiar and formal showed up in other ways. Shirt and ties weren’t enough for men; you had to wear a jacket as well. And even shoes had to conform. “Sometimes men would wear shoes other than black,” Paul says, “and, I’ll never forget, they would get a tap on the shoulder from their manager who would say ‘Never brown in town.’ In other words, you should be wearing black shoes.”

Barbara Knost in Germany remembers a casual and collegial workplace in the 1980s – and, she says, one that was “unbearably hot in the summer since we were on the fourth floor under a copper roof in the old building on Bonn’s Talweg.” There was never a dress code and, she adds, “It was like a big family with the trainees integrated directly….The annual company party was always good and contributed to the working atmosphere. On Friday afternoons, we ended work early and ate and drank together.”

The ’80s ended with two earthquakes, a literal one and another of the geopolitical variety. At 5:00 p.m. on October 17, 1989, Vicki Trindade was driving home from the Farmers Insurance office in Pleasanton, California – east of the Bay Area – to her home in Tracy over the Altamont Pass.

Traffic was light that night since it was about a half hour before the start of Game 3 of baseball’s World Series, which was being played, coincidentally, between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s for the first time ever. In fact, live coverage of Game 3 from Candlestick Park had just gotten underway on national TV. At 5:04, the video on ABC began to break up and the legendary announcer Al Michaels, losing his famous cool, said “I’ll tell you what, we’re having an earth….” And the signal went off. When the audio portion of the broadcast returned shortly thereafter, he said, in typical California showtime-style, “Well, folks, that’s the greatest open in the history of television, bar none!”

Vicki wasn’t a baseball fan, not at all, and during her drive home she didn’t feel the magnitude 6.9 quake centered to the southwest in Santa Cruz that killed 63 people, injured over 3,000 others, and caused widespread damage. But when she heard about it on the car radio, she says, “I was terrified something might have happened to my baby daughter back home.” It didn’t. “The next day at work was unusual,” says the senior commercial underwriter who started in 1971. “We had to pick up hundreds of files that fell off the shelves and rearrange the items on our desks. Luckily, no one was hurt and damage was very minimal in the office. But it was really strange. We never experienced such a strong earthquake.”

“I could not have imagined that the Wall would fall 10 years later.”

Three weeks later, on Thursday, November 9, there was a tectonic shift geopolitically: the Berlin Wall came down. “I can’t remember what was said between my colleagues,” says Angelika Metternich of the Köln office, “but at the beginning of my training in 1980 at Deutscher Herold [soon part of Zurich] I could not have imagined that the Wall would fall 10 years later.”

“Everyone was surprised that the opening of the border took place so quickly,” says Klaus Baldeweg, an international service team leader who started in 1980 in the Frankfurt office, which at the time was beside the old opera house. “We were all happy about the ‘new’ Germany but were aware that reunification meant a huge financial effort. Nevertheless, the euphoria among the population was very great.”

“I had a flexiday on November 10, and so was only able to speak to my colleagues the following week,” says Ute Stammel, who started in the Köln office in 1977. “Most thought it was good, but of course there were also naysayers.” If not everyone was moved at the time, the aftershocks are still being felt today, more then 30 years later.

Part III
The 1990s

In 1990, the ‘typing pool’ was disbanded in Paul’s Dublin office. Up until then, his colleagues never had to type their own letters; they would write them out longhand and give them to a full-time typist. That was over now. Everyone had to type their own letters themselves on computers while the typists were re-allocated within the company. “That was a big change,” he says.

In fact, a lot was changing. When Paul started back in 1981, he relied heavily on the telex machine. “That was how we did business,” he says. “It was my lifeline with the rest of the world.” So much so that he continually had ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ – The Boomtown Rats hit from a couple of years before – in his head. The song references the once-essential office tool and the lyrics spoke to him.

Gone, too, were the other stone-age tools, such as the punch-card machines and the mainframe computers Anita used in the headquarters. Even in the 1980s, she remembers, “you couldn’t even make a phone call to another canton, you had to ask the switchboard operator for a line. When eventually, we could call anywhere within the country, we were like, ‘Wow, we can call anywhere in Switzerland now.’”

“That’s one of the things that I have to say about my 40 years here,” Paul says. “The technological developments have made the biggest change to the way life was on day one. Just the fact that we’re talking here today on Teams couldn’t have been dreamt of in 1981.”

There’s a photo from 1992 of Antonio Bico, who at this point worked his way up to upper management in the Lisbon office, making a presentation with – gasp! – an overhead projector. Antonio had also worked in Zurich’s Mythenquai office and spent a period of time in Munich studying engineering lines insurance. So he’d been involved in plenty of presentations. “We used those a lot,” he says, laughing. “They seem so far away from us now, but they aren’t really. It’s not so long ago. I remember blackboards in conference rooms. So the acceleration of technology has been impressive.”

And it really ramped up in the 1990s. By the early part of the decade, along with ripped jeans and denim shorts, desktop computers became the norm followed soon by the internet and email. By the late ’90s, cell phones became ubiquitous.

“You really had to think before you sent a mail to someone.”

“In the ’80s, fax machines were revolutionary in the way we could keep in touch with colleagues and customers,” says Antonella Bernasconi-Ravasi, who started in the Lugano office on October 13, 1980, dressed, she still recalls, in blue, the company color. “But by the ’90s, everything sped up so fast, it’s difficult to remember it all.”

“It’s been a huge journey on the tech side,” says Paul, “and I think everyone would agree that it’s made us more efficient.”

Maybe not everyone. Ute in Germany, says, “I think it worked great without email. Much more social contact was maintained. Today you get an email for and from everyone.”

Werner Rietmann, a network service delivery manager who started at Zurich’s first data center in Altstetten in April 1980, admits many things got easier with the 1990s’ technology, but that before email, you only got what was essential. “You really had to think before you sent a mail to someone,” says Werner, who in the 1990s finally stopped referring to his manager as the formal Herr, or Mr. “You had to write it, type it or print it, put it in an envelope, either internal or external, then write the address, and make copies for everyone cc’d. You would just prepare it for those who really needed it, so you received less. Today, you have tons of emails, but back then you got what you needed.”

Technology sped up so fast that there was this little kink – or potential apocalypse – to deal with before the year, decade, and millennium came to a close: Y2K, the computer bug that was thought would wreak havoc. “Today, we look at it as if we were paranoid,” Antonio says, “but we did everything we had to do. We fulfilled all the rules in the Zurich guidelines, so we were prepared.”

Australia would be the first country to ring in the new year, decade, millennium. “The talk was that everything may stop – our server, our computers, our telephone system, all communication, the traffic lights in the city,” Kathie Grierson says. “We were all waiting for something to go wrong, but with all the hype there were no issues. We were relieved. Very relieved.”

Part IV
The 21^st Century

On September 11, 2001, Mike Berrenson – who, remember, started back in 1969 – was in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Premium Audit National Meeting, an annual event attended, on this occasion, mostly by Zurich employees.

When they came down for a very early breakfast, the coordinator of the meeting said a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. They thought, as many did when they first heard the news, that it was a small two-seater. Then they saw the images on TV. All planes were grounded. He and three other colleagues had to drive back East.

“We were lucky to get the car, first of all, because there weren’t many available,” Mike says. They left the next morning, spent a night in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a second night in Terre Haute, Indiana. “There wasn’t much conversation during the trip as we really didn’t know what to say to one another about what happened. When we did stop for food and gas, we saw other travelers who were also trying to reach their homes. Some were heading East and some heading as far West as California.”

As a field auditor in the 1980s, he, as did Carol in the Chicago office, had a bag phone in his company car – think Michael Douglas in ‘Wall Street’ – but by now he was in touch with his family with a proper turn-of-the-century flip phone. They arrived back on Friday evening.

“The crisis was severe for us.”

Only about a week later did he find out that Zurich lost four employees: John Keohane, Peggy Alario, Kathy Moran and Lud Picarro. “Needless to say, it was quite sobering,” he says. The following year, Zurich established the annual KAMP Leadership Award given to team members within the company who demonstrate the leadership qualities of the four colleagues who were lost that tragic day. KAMP – an acronym made from the first letter of their four last names – also serves as a reminder about Keeping A Meaningful Perspective.

Antonio Bico became CEO of Portugal on April 1, 2007 – April Fool’s Day – but the economic storm clouds beginning to gather were anything but funny. It may have been a dream come true for Antonio, who started out as that eager, wide-eyed teenager in 1970, but soon he was faced with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. “The crisis was severe for us,” he says. “The unemployment rate went up to about 17 percent. The toughest thing I did was the restructuring of the company. We had to do a lot of difficult things, and we did.”

After the recovery, he says, “we started to see the sun come out in Portugal again,” only to face the Covid pandemic and now the war in Ukraine. “My 15 years as CEO has been full of cycles, difficult cycles, complex cycles. But as a company, working collectively, we always overcame these things, and had success. So we’re a great team, and I’m very proud of this.”

“I haven’t seen midday drinking in a good while, but it was typical in the ’80s and ’90s.”

What vanished in the new century across Zurich, at long last, was smoking. In many of Zurich’s offices around the world it was phased out in the late 1990s, but it was Ireland that led the way globally by passing legislation that banned smoking in the workplace – bars and restaurants included. In Paul’s office, that just meant the smokers went down to a specially designated spot in the basement garage. “If anything, since they wouldn’t have met people from other departments, it created new friendships,” he says, “and even a number of marriages.” Drinking during lunchtime also became a thing of the 20th century. “I haven’t seen midday drinking in a good while, but it was typical in the ’80s and ’90s.” Drinking after work with colleagues also became less routine.

One thing that the company lost, to its detriment in Paul’s view, was the hiring of people with disabilities. In 1981, he says, there was a blind telephone operator. “She never saw anybody, but she knew everybody – by their voice. She was amazing.” Her name was Maureen Newall. “Back then,” he continues, “the ethos of the company was we give people with less capacity the chance to contribute. Then in the late ’80s, ’90s and 2000s, employees were only taken in if they could deliver, high-performance people. Thankfully, Zurich is coming back around to think more about people who have issues to deal with, particularly physical disabilities, and I think that’s wonderful. It’s heartening to see Zurich go back to the values I like, which is to give people a chance to be whatever they can be and deliver enough to be employed without working 20 hours a day.”

Dress codes, where they had been formal, like in the Dublin office, slowly loosened. “When I started, you’d never go in without a shirt and tie,” Paul says. “Now it’s completely different. Our previous managing director, Patrick Manley, was there for 10 years and was progressive, but the current M.D., Neil Freshwater, is even more progressive. He rarely wears a formal shirt and tie, and during Covid he let his hair grow out. Over the decades, it has transitioned from business-formal to smart casual to whatever you’re comfortable in for your day. But the work gets done, and people respect the change as being positive.”

If the pandemic forced companies into a collective, world-wide home office, Zurich was ahead of the curve. Mike Berrenson started doing some home office as far back as 2002, while in Dublin they had two days remote pre-Covid. Carol McArdle was given the chance to work from home nine years ago when she announced to her boss in Chicago that she was leaving the company to move to Alabama.

“I’ve had the most wonderful managers you can imagine. That makes all the difference.”

“My boss said, ‘We’ll see what we can do for you.’ It was kind of iffy back then because most people weren’t doing it,” she says. “It was awkward at the beginning, but I got past that pretty quickly, and I always felt as if I was part of the group. I’ve had the most wonderful managers you can imagine. That makes all the difference. So when people ask me, ‘How come you don’t retire?’ Well, I love my job, I love the people I work with – why should I?”

For those who are nearing retirement, like those with 40-plus years of service interviewed here, the work-from-home option, many of them agreed, will ease the transition of not being in the office. Safe to say, the flexible schedule has been a positive change.

Plato once wrote “All is flux, nothing stays still.” Paul, our own philosophical colleague in Dublin, puts it this way: “I thought there couldn’t have been more change but there has been, which is great. Zurich has always changed.”

Epilogue
Now

Emanuela Carena started at Zurich’s Milan office in 1980. She was 19 and fresh from technical accounting school. It was in the heart of the city in an elegant building that also housed pricey condominiums.

Her parents were overjoyed, and she gave them her paycheck since only her father supported the family of five. Her colleagues welcomed her warmly and treated her seriously and professionally. They put her to work behind a manual Olivetti typewriter and offered her a voluntary black apron so as to not spoil her clothes. (This was Milan, after all.) Some of her first memories that year were commiserating with her co-workers after the attack on Bologna’s main train station and later when Southern Italy was devastated by an earthquake in Irpinia – she could even feel the tremor up north. Two weeks later, on a Tuesday morning, news arrived that John Lennon – “my idol,” she says – was shot and killed in New York City. There was 9/11, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, and the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009, which she says, “had a great impact on our work as an insurance company.”

But there were pleasant events lived together with her colleagues: Italy’s World Cup victories in 1982 and 2006, to name just two, plus the awards she obtained with her own team, moments of “collaboration, teamwork, satisfaction and friendship that will always remain.”

“I have no photos to share. Only memories.”

As she prepares to retire, she says, “it’s not easy to summarize 42 years of working life, but they were intense years, full of great experiences and people, where my company has always been present and close during every moment and challenge. The two years of the pandemic that have just passed only confirm how proud I am to have worked for Zurich, for all the support it has given me both personally and psychologically. Now that I have reached my milestone, I can only say, with a big heart, thank you Zurich.”

A couple of weeks later, when we ask Emanuela if she has any photos to share, she writes in Italian, simply: “Non ho foto da condividere. Solo ricordi.” “I have no photos to share. Only memories.”