Although the insurance business has prioritized talent over the last ten years, the COVID-19 epidemic and the Great Attrition have brought about a new feeling of urgency. According to a recent McKinsey worldwide poll, 40% of workers are considering shifting professions shortly. As a result, leaders in the insurance industry must alter their talent models to adapt to this new reality and create new skills quickly and at scale. A panel of chief human resource officers (CHROs) from top Asian insurers recently met as part of our Asia Insurance Executive Roundtable (AIXOR) series. We highlight eight imperatives for insurers to rethink their Strategic plan across three crucial areas: ownership, impact levers, and value enablers. We do this by drawing from the perceptions of senior HR leaders and McKinsey’s research and viewpoints.
Elevate HR Ownership
The CEO and CFO have historically been in charge of performance and value management. However, insurance companies may ensure that talent is critical to all strategic choices by enlarging this group and forming a “G-3″—a CEO, CFO, and CHRO. Together, these three leaders should create a culture that draws and keeps top personnel, implement novel working practices, and allow the funds necessary to develop and expand the company’s workforce. Fortunately, since more than 50% of CHROs in Southeast Asia have expertise outside of HR, they are well-positioned to develop the new skills and mentality required by the G-3 model for the Asian insurance business.
Board members are valuable partners in advancing the talent agenda because they act as mentors, coaches, and guardians of a long-term strategy for finding fresh talent. More than half of board members who participated in a worldwide study on board priorities said they would like to devote more time to cultivating the company’s people and culture. The G-3 should actively mobilize and shape the board’s agenda to include articulating an inspiring purpose, defining talent and culture aspirations, succession planning for a broader range of critical roles and capabilities beyond the CEO, and oversight and guidance to develop future-proof capabilities.
Drive more impact
Link value to talent. State-of-the-art The HR department is aware of the jobs most important for generating value and works to fill them with qualified candidates. However, it’s not always the case that crucial roles follow organizational structure, function, or employment level. For example, our experience has shown that essential tasks for insurance frequently involve capital management, asset liability management, pricing, distribution, customer analytics, and claims and customer service. Even though some of these positions may be many levels below the C-suite, they nonetheless have a disproportionately large impact on the company. Therefore, talent acquisition, development, mobility, and performance appraisal should be HR leaders’ top priorities for these positions.
Broaden your skill set. Asian insurers must rapidly hire and train new talent in digital capabilities, analytic tools, customer experience, user design, and agile as forces like AI and other factors threaten the business. Because of the rise in remote work, insurers will need to access new and larger talent pools over a broader geographic spectrum. Additionally, HR directors will need to foster an inclusive culture, accept new working arrangements, and inject creativity and innovation into conventional approaches to skill development.
Pay attention to employee experience. The insurance employee life cycle requires insurers to address it holistically and from a people-centered perspective. With a specific focus on the moments that matter and utilizing these to identify common threads across employee segments, HR professionals can leverage customer-experience thinking to create high-quality experiences tailored for various employee segments in the workforce. The insurance industry employs individuals in multiple jobs, and top digital talent has different demands and difficulties than front-line salespeople. According to our study on the Great Attrition, employees demand more than simply transactions at work. When participating in engagements like celebrations, challenging dialogues, and performance meetings, HR executives should be careful to provide a human touch.
Refresh the HR department. The HR department has to change to a new paradigm to drive these talent imperatives effectively. This entails improving its employees’ strategic and business acumen (through capability building and recruitment), becoming an “early adopter” of other imperatives, like talent analytics and agile working methods, and incorporating itself into core business initiatives and journeys to become an engine of transformation from within, as opposed to a support function on the outside.
Open the sources of values.
Make people’s analytics stronger. The depth and breadth of personal data are still not fully utilized. People analytics can pinpoint opportunities for increased talent impact and design individualized talent journeys that empower staff members to maximize their potential, provide satisfying professional development pathways, and add more value to the business. Insurance businesses have broadly used developing people-analytics capabilities to attract digital talent better, analyze manager performance, boost employee retention, and identify high-potential individuals, even though use cases cover the entire talent life cycle.
Be flexible. Insurance companies are one of the most conventional businesses, frequently sticking to tiered hierarchies and utilizing functional silos. However, more straightforward, quicker, and more adaptable operating models will be needed in the future of insurance to respond swiftly to changes in the external environment. This results from fewer organizational levels, a move toward cross-functional teams and processes, and empowered business units and teams. Teams implementing agile working approaches have significantly increased productivity and employee satisfaction across sectors and regions.
Asian insurers are aware that they must take decisive action to address market challenges and utilize their full capabilities. While some concentrate on gradual improvement, the majority are still at the start of their trip. Therefore, we advise altering the critical talent across all eight implications in a comprehensive manner. Only then will insurers be able to create a talent-first business that will succeed in the new normal.
