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Talent attraction remains an area of concern for the insurance sector, and though the industry has no shortage of seasoned experts with an extensive background across all areas of insurance, an influx of new talent still remains thin on the ground.
One thing that most consider when entering a new role is how their organisation will support their life outside of work. As the hardships of raising a family and maintaining a career have increasingly come to the forefront, initiatives such as flexible working and part-time hours are a strong pull for the workforce – and, according to statistics, are a solid predictor of loyalty and productivity.
“I certainly think that flexible work arrangements are an important development and are an important part of organizational change,” Willis Towers Watson head of legal, Australasia, Jon Downes told Insurance Business.
“At Willis Towers Watson, we’re experts globally on human capital and benefits. We’ve done an enormous amount of research and thinking, and we’ve conducted employment surveys globally and locally across all industries. From those studies, the results suggest that engaged employees outperform non-engaged coworkers.”
“But while employee engagement is important, it only takes an organization so far,” Downes explained.
“When employers support their employees to do their work effectively and efficiently, we call that ‘enablement’, and when employers create a positive work environment that supports employees’ physical, social and emotional well-being, we call it ‘energy’. If you add engagement, enablement, and energy together, that results in a significant uplift in performance, and this is backed up by the results of the studies we’ve carried out. We term all those three elements together ‘sustainable engagement’.”
Downes says that flexible working arrangements are one of the most important factors to contribute towards sustainable engagement, and they are a key factor in attracting talent to organizations. Willis Towers Watson previously conducted a three-year study of 41 global companies on elements of sustainable engagement, and, according to Downes, it found that companies with all three of the mentioned elements ‘substantially outperformed’ their competitors.
“When you translate that into statistics, highly sustainable engagement companies outperformed their sectors in terms of growth in gross profit by 5%,” he stated.
“So, companies who scored well on engagement but didn’t score well on enablement or energy outperformed their sectors by only 2% of growth in gross profits. Interestingly, companies with low scores on all three sustainable engagement factors had gross profits that averaged 13% below the sector average. Flexible work arrangements are an important part of that, but the statistics suggest that companies can realize greater value by not just engaging employees, but by enabling and energizing their efforts.”
The challenges of getting by without initiatives such as flexible working are keenly felt by mothers and fathers within the sector – and, according to Willis Towers Watson account executive Hetal Parmar, the arrangement helped her rebuild her career just as she was giving up hope.
“I could not find a suitable job where I could have either the part time hours or possible work-from-home options,” Parmar explained.
“I got to the point of giving up job hunting, and that’s when I got interviewed by Willis Towers Watson. At that point I’d just given up on it and decided, ‘OK, this is the last one I’m going for, just because it’s come my way. After this, I’m not going to look for jobs anymore.’ And I left with a part-time job with very flexible hours, so that’s how I got to look after my kids and build a career at the same time. It really gave me hope that I could build my career, and that was one of the bigger turning points for me over the last three years.”
Parmar says that working from home comes with its own challenges, but it nonetheless offers a different kind of experience and helps develop a new skillset. The flexibility ends up being invaluable to an individual juggling work and family, and the challenges become easier over time.
“Personally, working from home has its own challenges and I prefer to come to the office and work,” Parmar said.
“When I’m at home I’ll see 10 things that I want to do, and it can take the focus away. I like to physically take myself out of the home environment, and that’s a personal preference – but it was a 20-hour role, and the flexibility allowed me to choose my hours. I could either work four hours, five days a week or five hours for four days a week, or two full days or one half day, etc. It was the best thing about that job back then.
“Right now, I have moved on to working 30 hours. The change has really allowed me to grow, take on more responsibility, and I’ve really learned a lot.”
