By 2025, the consumer landscape will be predominantly digital; insurers refusing to adapt to new workplace trends won’t make the transformation and will eventually perish.

Adopting new technologies and digitizing the business is important. But an equal pillar to the company’s success is helping employees become tech-first and educating them on how technology makes processing insurance (and their work) easier.

Instead of waiting days for a response, policy-holders now get instant access to important information like claim reimbursements, health scores, and reports at the touch of a button. However, instant feedback isn’t only a must for customers, it’s a must for employees too.

Most incumbents today are focusing on digitizing the customer experience. But that’s a tiny piece of the puzzle. Almost as important, if not more important, is digitizing the employee experience.

By focusing on building for the employee as much as the customer, and by building an innovation-valuing company culture, where anyone is welcome to participate and contribute, incumbents can cement their future position in the industry.

Creating the Right Workplace

Productivity and innovation are stifled by corporate structures and complex systems. Although stringent legacy models persist in most industry giants to this day, refusal to change gears directly impacts their ability to invest in (and become a part of) the growing digital economy.

Currently, the tides favour digital-born companies, who can capture markets without being held back by legacy systems. Removing rigid structure makes room for flexible business.

Using technology to streamline operations enables them to:

• hire fewer employees, and report higher market capitalization per employee
• develop agile programs and designs in days, instead of months or years
• fill important roles by quickly finding the right people
• boost time for innovation and research on new projects
• rapidly respond to market changes.

In order to create the right workplace for employees, insurance companies need to understand that employees expect a digital experience as much as any customer. Far too many insurance companies are still pushing paper. Outdated and rigid legacy systems are still in use. This not only affects the customer journey, from enrolment to claims processing, but also frustrates employees and forces the best people to find new jobs.

Attracting the Best Talent

Millennials will soon be dominating the workforce. Across the globe younger workers demand more meaningful roles in their company. Insurers need to start viewing employees as partners instead of workers.

Begin first by understanding the millennial mindset. The millennial workforce:

• value flexibility in work schedules
• want lots of feedback (to stay on track and up-to-date)
• believe integrating technology is unavoidable
• expect to be listened to and have opinions respected.

Having a reputation for growing and nurturing talent is a big attraction to the most ambitious candidates across Gen Z and Gen Y. These generations are hungry for growth and big learning experiences and relish opportunities to travel, experience new cultures, and build their skills.

One approach to this is to ask fast-track candidates to spend time across different functions in different locations before promoting them to management positions. This approach not only better prepares your best talent by experiencing the digital transformations each aspect of your business is going through, it also helps attract them.

Millennials are drawn to the entrepreneurial experience. Companies known for giving these opportunities will be the ones able to attract the best talent from around the world.

However, sending employees across to experience different functions or countries isn’t enough. Companies have to ensure that the environment and feedback loop is in place to make this a valuable experience for both the company and the employee. Maintaining a partnership approach in the employee’s career track is vital. Companies can ensure managers maintain a positive relationship with the best talents by:

• acknowledging their merits
• providing feedback on completed tasks
• encouraging them to speak up and be involved
• communicating face-to-face even in a digital world. Newer generations prefer personal meetings when discussing important matters
• rallying the entire team to be decisive and strategic.

In similar fashion, we can burgeon innovation in the following ways:

• Introducing new technologies

• AI and machine learning algorithms reduce company expenses, expedite daily operations, and lead to bigger opportunities in the marketplace.

• Examining relationships between products/services

• Pinpointing human behaviours that lead to good and bad outcomes during interactions with applications, websites, and salespeople.

• Challenging teams to help individuals achieve their goals

• Complement applications with offers to minimize unhealthy behaviours among employees and policy-holders.

The sooner the incumbents adopts a tech-first mindset, the sooner they’ll be attracting, hiring, and retaining the best talent available.

Change is Inevitable

Currently, there are several well-known companies making bold advances with new technologies (machine learning in particular). For instance, Google has been researching algorithms and their relationship to “problem-solving” since they’ve started, but they’ve only recently really put the pedal to the floor in regards to AI.

Google’s star of the show is none other than DeepMind, the research program responsible for AlphaGo, a highly-competitive AI system that, in late 2015, beat the world champion of Go (a game that requires complex multi-level cognition) – a task many had sworn impossible.

AlphaGo’s success still sends ripples of concern to those who fear that AI may become uncontrollable. To combat this, John Giannandrea, Google’s head of search and its AI chief, believes machine learning research should become Google’s top priority over any other venture.¹

Smarter algorithms for information processing are being worked on every day, but companies who fail to innovate won’t be capable of accommodating newer machines and applications – leaving only a small window of opportunity to catch up before losing their place forever.

Change is inevitable … don’t get left behind.

For the Greater Good

As companies begin to adopt a tech-first mindset, the most important thing to remember is to keep testing, keep refining, and keep building. Most players are still learning how to approach these new technologies. But the shift doesn’t have to happen overnight. Companies need to:

• perform extensive research and develop proof-of-concepts
• consult with employees for their opinions and insights
• launch, test, and repeat.

There are countless emerging technologies such as blockchain, wearables, and AI that insurance companies should be looking at. The technology is already there for these large incumbents to reduce their operating costs by 60–70%.²

What’s important to remember is that this overhaul requires an end-to-end transformation. Both the front end (customer experience) and the back end (employee experience) are vital to a company’s success. Digital platforms for claims, online enrolment, and accessing medical networks that service the customers must also translate into digital processing for the employees. Too often we’re seeing a digital platform on the customer side and a manual, labour-intensive platform on the employee side.

The changes the industry is about to experience are unprecedented and are required on a massive scale. But it doesn’t have to start on a massive scale. We know the technology is there for insurance companies to build end-to-end digital insurance platforms that make use of blockchain, AI, machine learning, chatbots, etc. with the capability to automate several aspects of the insurance experience. So why not start there? By building an end-to-end platform and testing it.

Large incumbents are focused on trying to collaborate with and integrate new platforms, however as they often operate on overly complex and workforce reliant legacy systems, this poses a big “risk”.

Ideally insurers should be spending an equal amount of time building new platforms top to bottom – starting afresh – and building an insurance platform that’s separate from the constraints of corporate structures. Somewhere where innovation and flexibility are not stifled by silos and never ending hierarchies.

Start there, and slowly grow. I’m not talking about running a PR exercise where every month the company gets to announce it’s working on “X” technology. This is about building a real business, from the ground up. Give the best and most eager employees the chance to participate in the process. Let them learn from a tech-first team. Let them come up with their own ideas and give them the opportunity to build on them.

Maybe then we’ll start to see empowered employees who are creative and take initiative, freed from the constraints of corporate legacy culture.

Research. Build. Test. Launch. Repeat.

It’s a simple process.