Tizzio says focus on mental health is ‘integral’ part of Axis' strategy

By James Thaler

June 2 - (The Insurer) - Axis Capital CEO Vince Tizzio has called his company’s focus on addressing mental health in the workplace an “integral” part of its strategy and a key part of its turnaround, while he also detailed the rationale behind its position on hybrid working and the return to office.

Tizzio made those comments in a fireside chat at last week’s E&S Insurer Conference 2025, where he said Axis’ interest in raising mental health awareness has been tied into the tough work that has gone into repositioning the company.

“It's personally important to me. And I think if you situate yourself in my seat, two years ago we began a transformation of a company that had worked really hard,” Tizzio said.

“We became aware of the ground that we had lost relative to our market share, our market valuation, and we had a lot of tough love conversations. And it wasn't lost on me that the impact of these discussions could feel really brutal, (and) really harsh,” he added.

Tizzio also pointed to a number of polls and studies that have illustrated mental health challenges becoming “a global epidemic”, highlighting studies that have shown that depression, anxiety, substance use disorder, and alienation have increased post-pandemic.

“And if you think about the Harris poll that we conducted, and you read the statistics, you just can't hide from it,” he commented, calling the topic of mental health a “personal value” for Axis, whether staff are working in-office or remotely.

“It's an environment that we want to exact the best of people, but we want them to have provision of care to be okay with not being okay at that moment in time,” Tizzio explained.

He also said Axis is collaborating with the organization Project Healthy Minds to help it understand the issues facing the global workforce.

“We're a global company with a lot of different countries and a lot of different normative behaviors and lots of different challenges, and the ability to speak globally to people around care, I think, is incredibly important,” he commented.

“And I would reason with you, it's one of the reasons I think that we've made the degree of progress that we've made from our starting point, depending upon how you measure it, we're really pleased with it, and this is an integral part of our strategy,” Tizzio added.

RETURN TO OFFICE

With a growing trend among companies to push for more in-office attendance, Axis recently reiterated its position on hybrid working in a staff memo published last month.

“I personally believe in office work for most of our team is a more productive outcome, but I respect hybrid working, and I often joke at the expense of our technology team, I'm not looking for the coders to be in, or our vendor folks to be in,” Tizzio noted.

“But certainly I think our underwriters benefit from working with one another, collaborating, calling on our customers, our brokers,” he added.

“It's incredibly important, and I think it shows a level of flexibility, and I think it ties to our values in constructive mental health,” Tizzio explained.

Axis is among many companies that monitor staff’s in-office attendance via badge swipes, which Tizzio argued is largely geared towards optimizing a real estate strategy and cost efficiencies.

“Real estate is a top five expense for a mid-cap company that has an ambition of achieving 11% G&A ratio by 2026. We're making great progress, and I'm an advocate that says, let's open more offices that create proximity,” he explained.

“And so what isn't captured... is that we've opened up a number of other offices. And so it's really a real estate consideration to know what the occupancy is, whether we can consolidate space,” he said of the company monitoring staff badge swipes when entering a building.

“We recently opened a new office in Los Angeles, really in response to our team from a location that wasn't the safest and really was serving as an impediment, we instructed our real estate team to find a new location,” he continued.

“We had the data to know how many people wanted to come to work, versus just guessing or relying on work charters to govern that outcome,” Tizzio said. “So that's a metric that we used in the consideration of our real estate."

Watch the full interview with Axis Capital CEO Vince Tizzio to hear more on:

• How Axis used feedback from an NPS survey to make strong improvements to service

• Axis’ “generally favorable” view of market conditions, with property softening more “than it ought to be”

• “Fairly uncertain” M&A market conditions for carriers

• Axis’ multi-year AI strategy for expense and productivity gains and better risk selection

• Why return-to-office is important and mental health is a major focal point for the firm

• Why dialog with shareholders is “entirely different than two years ago”

• And more…