“One of the main challenges we face right now is just simple battle fatigue,” said Anthony Di Fiore (pictured above). Di Fiore is specialty risks manager for Adroit Insurance and Risk, a Geelong-headquartered firm. He warned that years of bad market conditions and the work pressures they bring are taking their toll on staff across the insurance industry.
“I think underwriters, brokers and even clients - we’ve all dealt with year on year of bad market conditions,” he said. Di Fiore, like many industry stakeholders, doesn’t see an end to the hard market anytime soon.
“I think that constant battle with hard market conditions takes a toll on all of us and the mental well-being of staff is a concern,” he said.
A year ago, mental health issues arising from isolation caused by two years of COVID-19 resulted in many insurance companies implementing mental health initiatives. Di Fiore’s observations suggest that more attention in this area is needed.
“I think we all need to acknowledge that and manage it correctly with staff and try to prevent that industry burnout,” he said. “I think that’s an issue moving forward and leading into that is labour shortages.”
It’s common knowledge that insurance companies – and many other industries across Australia – are dealing with a shortage of talent.
“We see across both broking and underwriting that every business is struggling to fully resource departments and that shortage is driving up costs of employment,” said Di Fiore.
However, the other issue, he said, is the added pressure on existing staff who are being asked to carry this extra workload.
“In some cases, we’re even seeing inexperienced individuals being placed in situations where they’re just not quite ready, or there’s a skill gap that’s maybe a little bit too large,” he said. “That’s a great opportunity for those who can learn how to swim quickly in deep water but it’s a disaster for those that fail and also [a disaster] for the client.”
Di Fiore said this creates a “a vicious circle” because with less staff in a business, there are less people qualified and experienced enough to train more junior staff.
“Education and training is really important,” he said. “Thankfully, we have a really good HR department to support us in learning and development and though our link to Austbrokers we get access to a lot of educational materials.”
Di Fiore also said insurers are improving their contributions to the education and training of brokers.
“Insurers have also been quite good with it,” he said. “Previously, you had to jump in the car to go to learning and development but these days webinars are becoming popular and it’s easy to find some training online.”
However, he said training is an “ongoing issue” faced by all businesses.
Another challenge playing into battle fatigue and staff issues: the broker’s job, he said, has become more complicated.
“Insurance has become highly complex over the over the last 10 years and it’s difficult for brokers to face the sheer number of different classes and so many different insurers per class,” said Di Fiore. “This making it almost impossible for a single broker to have an in-depth knowledge across all those binds.”
However, at the same time, he said, clients are expecting a “comprehensive tailored insurance services for their business.”
Di Fiore said his firm’s approach to this dilemma is to have specialists in various classes.
“So we have a risk advisor who’s the client relationship manager and then to support them, we have specialists in a number of higher or more complex classes,” he said.
The classes include WorkCover, property and liability, trade credit, transport, heavy vehicles, management liability and cyber. Di Fiore is the cyber specialist.
He said the brokerage’s range of clients cover a diverse array of businesses, from SMEs to large national firms.
“We also manage facilities and partnerships for key brands and associations,” he said. “Our key focus is our medium sized commercial business clients.”
Di Fiore said this focus came from identifying a gap in the market.
“We saw that, over the years, a lot of these medium sized businesses were treated as actual businesses and maybe received an invoice once a year,” he said. “We thought that was an opportunity for us to present specialist advice and deal with complex problems – something these companies were craving.”
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