Employee Well-being and Development
Professional Resources And Development
Professional development and opportunities for advancement are critical to the growth of our employees. We enable training opportunities through Subaru Training and Resources United (STAR-U), our internal platform of educational programming, compliance training, lunch and learns, DEIB opportunities, and executive leadership training. In 2022, over 2,000 hours were spent on professional development through STAR-U. A sampling of specific opportunities is described below.
Mentoring Program
Employees told us in the annual employee engagement survey that they wanted more mentoring opportunities. After a pilot with 60 employees in 2021, we launched the Ignite mentoring program companywide in 2022. Eighty-nine employees participated in the new mentoring program over nine months, where they built relationships, established goals, connected for personal and professional growth, and engaged with other mentoring program participants.
Leadership Competency Awards
We celebrate the qualities of strong management skills through our Leadership Competency Awards. Every quarter, employees nominate finalists based on our Subaru Leadership Competencies. These awards recognize the leaders who are living out these competencies, no matter their level. Finalists receive recognition from their senior leadership team, a celebratory trophy, and a $250 charity reward to donate to a nonprofit of their choice through the Subaru Giving Portal. In 2022, this award was given to 10 employees, with plans to double those recognized in 2023.
LinkedIn Learning Challenges
We use LinkedIn Learning as a professional development platform for our teammates. To further engage employees and help promote continued professional development, we issue monthly challenges, resulting in three-fourths of our colleagues using this resource. The most popular areas of focus were communication foundations, skills for inclusive conversations, Microsoft Excel, and digital body language.
Across Subaru in 2022, we participated in almost 3,000 hours of courses from industry experts across a range of topics.
Benefits And Well-Being
There’s No Place Like Home: Where the Love Promise Begins
When we welcome a new colleague into the Subaru family, we make them a Love Promise — we listen with care first, and then we support the unique needs of both them and their family members at every step of their Subaru journey. Through The Voice of Our Stars — our confidential all-employee engagement survey — we keep the lines of communication with our team members open to ensure they experience love and respect in every interaction. While we are always striving to be better for each other, our customers, and our communities, we are proud of the family we have created and how we support each other. Here are some highlights demonstrating how we live the Love Promise at home every day.
The Voice of Our Stars
If you ask our colleagues why they work at Subaru, the answer is nearly universal: the people. Our Subaru family believes deeply in our mission of being more than a car company and living the Love Promise in every interaction. Each year, we ask our Subaru family to confidentially share their feelings with us on a number of topics that are central to our culture, and we are proud of our Starfull results! Perhaps most importantly, in 2022, our Subaru colleagues ranked us:
8.7/10
8.7/10
8.8/10
These scores, which outrank the benchmark data, tell us we are on the right track to fulfilling our Love Promise at home and fostering the family environment we are striving for.
A Forever Home: Our Total Rewards Package
Our total rewards package is designed not only to attract the best and most diverse talent; it is also designed to entice those individuals to make Subaru their forever home. We do this by designing programs and plans that support the whole person — the employee and their family. We are proud of our total package, which includes a competitive base salary, an annual bonus that leads the market, and a suite of benefit programs that knock it out of the park.
Pay Transparency and Equity
We believe the best way to approach pay is with honesty, transparency, and fairness. We have nothing to hide because we know our total compensation (including base pay and bonus) is leading in the market, and we know the methodology behind it has been designed with fairness and equity in mind. We also believe in empowering our employees with knowledge, so they can hold us to the promises we have made.
To share how some of this comes to life, each position at Subaru is categorized into a grade level, and we publish the salary ranges by grade level (associate, professional, manager) for all employees to see. We also communicate the methodology we use to determine the salary ranges, which relies on market data derived from several salary surveys, both general industry and automotive. To eliminate the influence of any potential unconscious bias when it comes to determining an individual’s pay within the salary range, we use defined guidelines for determining pay and pay increases that are based on objective criteria. Our HR team partners with leaders across the organization in a formal calibration process to ensure all compensation decisions are consistent and fair across the company.
While we are confident in the process we have designed, we know we have to be diligent to ensure we are maintaining internal equity across the company with each new hire and each internal move. For that reason, in 2021, we hired a third-party compensation expert to conduct a company-wide equal pay analysis of all positions and all employees in the company to assess whether any pay disparities existed based on race, ethnicity, or sex. We were pleased with the report that no pay disparities based on race, ethnicity, or sex were discovered. And we learned from the process too. By way of example, we learned that employees who started out briefly as temp workers came in at a lower salary that was set with the temp agency, and therefore our guidelines should be revised to offer that population a greater increase upon hire as a full-time permanent employee. This is an example of how we always strive to get better, and we did. We will continue to assess our pay practices on an annual basis to ensure pay equity for all.
Medical
All employers offer medical coverage, but what makes Subaru different? First, it is the richness of the coverage and the low cost for employees. Under our Core PPO Plan, Subaru covers:
85% of the Premium Cost
for employees with family coverage
22% Points Higher
for employees with family coverage
Second, it is the way we modify our plans to respond directly to the unique needs of our employee population. For example, based on aggregate plan usage, we could see that our plan members – along with the rest of the country – were struggling with poor sleep and nutrition. As a result, we launched access to the Calm app to help with sleep, and we engaged a nutritionist to meet with our employees either virtually or in person at the cadence of one covered session per month to help with nutrition. These are just two examples of the many ways that we try to meet our employees and their family members where they are and provide them with the best resources to maximize their health and wellness.
Dental and Vision
Our dental plan annual maximum benefit is more than double the average offering in the United States, and the plan covers services that many other plans do not, including robust coverage for braces, which we know can break the bank for many families.
Under our vision plan, our lens co-pay is more than 50% less AND our frame allowance is more than $100 better than the average for many of our industry counterparts. Also, when we noticed that diabetes rates and complications were increasing across the country, we ensured we had a diabetes rider on our vision plan to safeguard our employees and their family members.
ERG-Focused Plans
We know that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to health and wellness, and we also know that different populations face very different health challenges. That is why our health and wellness team has partnered closely with Subaru’s Employee Resource Groups to ensure that employees of all backgrounds — and their families — have equal access to the unique resources they need to maximize their health and well-being. To illustrate how this has come to life, our health and wellness team partnered with Subaru’s Out & Ally ERG to establish a benefits resource setting forth inclusive services and care for LGBTQ+ employees. This resource highlights benefits such as adoption assistance, domestic partner benefits, coverage for services related to gender reassignment / gender affirming surgery, fertility services, and more.
Wellness Programs
We offer our employees and their families, household members, and even friends access to a robust wellness program designed to help them in getting the most out of life every day. Our employees and their household members can access mental health support in the form of free counseling and cognitive behavioral health programs through our EAP, Talkspace, and Horizon AbleTo.
In addition, our employees and up to five of their family members or friends have access to a free premium Calm app subscription. Calm’s diverse content library offers resources such as guided meditations and specialized music playlists to help with stress and focus, mindful movement video and audio, relaxing Sleep Stories, tailored content for children, wisdom-filled masterclasses led by experts, and much more.
To promote physical health, employees are also provided with gym membership discounts as well as free access to a health, wellbeing and navigation platform offered through Virgin Pulse. The Virgin Pulse platform assists employees in establishing healthy habits, meeting step goals, and reaching all their personalized health and wellness goals. The app provides resources to help employees struggling from anxiety, asthma, Covid-19, depression, diabetes, insomnia, pregnancy, and more.
Tuition Reimbursement and More
We care about learning, both in our communities and here at home. That is why we have developed both robust in-house learning programs for our employees as well as resources to pursue outside learning opportunities. These resources include a free LinkedIn Learning subscription along with a competitive tuition reimbursement benefit ($15,000 per year for full-time employees).
Financial and Legal Resources
Through trusted partners, we also offer our employees several financial wellness benefits and resources. These include access to a financial wellness app, access to free one-on-one consultations with financial and legal experts, mortgage assistance programs, discounted insurance programs (including pet insurance!), and much more.
Love What’s Next Program
Our Love Promise extends for life and while we would love for our Subaru family to stay forever, we also want them to enjoy what’s next. We offer employees a highly competitive 401k matching program, an employer-optional contribution program, and a guaranteed defined contribution pension program to ensure that our employees and their families have the financial resources they need to enjoy their next steps.
Additionally, we established our Love What’s Next program, through which we strive to care for our colleagues who are retiring with the same care, dignity, and respect they received when they were working with us. This program encourages colleagues to think positively about retirement and feel supported in their decisions by offering guided thinking and conversations between retirees and loved ones to gauge expectations and assumptions about post-retirement life, one-on-one conversations with financial consultants to discuss financial planning and decision-making, and a thorough preparedness analysis conducted by a dedicated retirement transition firm.
