We believe long-term success depends on our ability to attract, develop, and retain a high-performing workforce. Our goal is to create an environment where colleagues can thrive personally and professionally and can maximize their potential, and our human capital management strategy is anchored in a skills-based foundation that drives workforce agility and future readiness. Our Board of Directors and its Compensation and Human Resources Committee are responsible for overseeing our human capital management strategy, with senior management providing regular updates to facilitate that oversight. As of December 31, 2025, Citizens had 17,398 full-time equivalent employees, primarily across New England and the Mid-Atlantic.
Attracting and Developing Talent
Attracting talent with the skills and experience necessary to achieve our strategic objectives remains imperative. We leverage various channels to identify talent with strengths and values aligned with our priorities and culture. We continue to believe that fostering a workforce with diverse backgrounds and experiences is fundamental to driving innovation. Our Hiring Blueprint, introduced in 2025, establishes a process through which the skills, behaviors, and achievements of candidates are evaluated using a consistent framework that provides recruiters and managers with guidance on effectively evaluating candidates. We continue to evolve our hiring processes and explore ways that technology and automation can further improve candidate experience.
Our development and learning initiatives are aimed at building capabilities to ensure colleagues excel in their current roles and are valuable contributors in the future. We remain on a multi-year journey to build bold leaders and nurture a culture of learning and innovation, consistently enhancing the resources available to our colleagues in pursuit of these objectives. We recognize that the success of our long-term strategy relies on the strength of our leaders and we remain dedicated to advancing their capabilities. We launched a new leadership development program for frontline managers across the enterprise and are implementing a new leadership framework to further build a culture of inclusive, high-impact leadership.
Continuous learning and a growth mindset are essential for colleagues to thrive as part of our organization and to feel a sense of accomplishment and purpose. With the launch of Talent Matters in 2024, colleagues now have access to a talent marketplace that creates personalized experiences to support skill-building and career advancement. In 2025, we launched a new learning operating model that creates a more streamlined learner experience and expands learning solutions across the enterprise. By leveraging artificial intelligence and advanced learning platforms we are accelerating personalized learning and building capacity for skill development. This approach supports our recently expanded educational assistance and robust academy programs, creating learning pathways for critical and emerging skills.
Engaging and Rewarding Colleagues
Listening to our colleagues’ voices and experiences is important to us and is instrumental in helping us support colleagues and to evolve company culture to best support our business strategy. Colleague feedback is used to refine our focus, address any gaps, and strengthen efforts to improve organizational effectiveness and colleague experience. Our approach to colleague listening is multifaceted, featuring numerous channels and frequent touchpoints, including our annual organizational health survey (“OHS”), an interim pulse survey, and five life-cycle surveys that measure colleague sentiment at key stages. Our latest overall OHS results place us in the top quartile of financial services.
We foster a culture where all stakeholders feel respected, valued, and heard. Our dedication to building an inclusive workplace centers on welcoming a wide range of skills, backgrounds, viewpoints, and perspectives. Various resources are used by management to understand what drives a sense of inclusion, including responses to our OHS and input from our seven business resource groups, which assist in identifying and supporting initiatives that are most relevant to customers, colleagues, and the community. While our diversity efforts encompass a broad range of perspectives, we recognize that certain stakeholders maintain an interest in colleague demographic data, which is available in our Sustainability & Impact Report and on our website.
We provide comprehensive compensation and benefit programs. We strive to compensate our colleagues fairly based on market data, experience, and performance, and we compare our compensation to other companies in our peer group as well as others in the financial services industry. We are dedicated to ensuring fair and equitable compensation for all employees. To support this commitment, we engage an independent third-party expert annually to conduct a pay equity assessment, which considers factors such as role, performance, and experience that appropriately account for pay differences. Our benefit plans and programs are designed to equip colleagues and their families with resources to navigate various life events and to support various dimensions of well-being including physical, mental, and financial. Our benefits offering is reviewed annually and has expanded in various areas in recent years, including most notably an expansion of resources related to mental well-being. Our Credo calls for us to perform our best every day to help our customers, colleagues, and communities reach their potential. We encourage colleague volunteerism in our communities, which we support by providing colleagues with paid time off for volunteer events and a community service sabbatical program.
Sustainability
Our integrated, enterprise-wide Sustainability & Impact strategy helps us build a better future for all those we serve. Led by robust corporate governance, this strategy helps guide the decisions we make. It means serving our customers and clients, engaging shareholders, monitoring our environmental impact, and empowering our colleagues and communities to thrive. Our four focus areas include robust corporate governance, the workforce of the future, fostering strong communities, and positive climate impact, which speak to what we believe are the strengths of our company and how we are driving growth and having a positive impact on our business, society, and the planet.
For more details regarding our sustainability efforts, go to our website.