Talent wars: Meeting the challenges of today's workforce

“We shouldn’t be surprised by the battle for talent,” said Mike Hessling, CEO of North America for Gallagher Bassett, in the opening general session of the 76^th Annual Workers’ Compensation Educational Conference in Orlando, Florida. “We’ve talked about the aging workforce in workers’ comp for years. Insurance has consistently had a lower unemployment rate than the overall economy and the job for claims professionals hasn’t gotten any easier over time.”

The comments came as part of a panel discussion addressing the battle for talent led by the hosts of the Out Front Ideas podcast, Kimberly George of Sedgwick and Mark Walls of Safety National.

“What is a surprise,” continued Hessling, “is the pandemic, which brought new pressures and uncertainty to the industry. Working from home led to a more mobile workforce and we can’t underestimate the impact of the pandemic on the workforce. It was inevitable, but there were other forces at play too.”

Debie Bisdorf, senior risk manager of third-party programs at Amazon shared that her company is having trouble finding people who have the industry knowledge and are a good fit for the different industries with which Amazon is involved. “We’re looking for talent who understand the industries and data since we are a data-driven organization. We need to know what it means and how to act on that data.”

Michelle Adams, vice president of risk management operations and casualty claims for Walmart said, “As an industry, we’ve been caught behind. We should have been ahead in assessing what is the life expectancy of an adjuster in a claims organization. We have this legacy employment base and have created these single-point failures. When we assess our organization, we have failure points we have created ourselves. What could we have managed and solved for sooner and how do we use them as an opportunity to attract people into the industry? We’re all battling for the same people and we need to assess ourselves in an honest manner.”

“We talked about knowledge transfer years ago and upskilling and reskilling of workers and claims professionals from this stage years ago,” said George. “We need to build a workforce for the next 5-10 years and not just solve for the problems of today.”

The increase in remote work comes with some very real challenges and opportunities for businesses and employees.

“We see more opportunities than challenges,” said Bisdorf. “We’ve been doing it for two years. If you hire good workers, they’re good workers anywhere. I hire risk managers who have 6-10 years of experience, so I don’t have a lot of issues with remote work. We all benefited from being pulled into meetings and debriefs when we worked in person, and it’s harder in a remote environment. We need to be aware of that and make sure to pull our new hires into these meetings.”

“People made choices about who they worked for because they could work remotely,” finds Adams. Her preference is that everyone would be in the office because there is a lot of value in being able to ask questions of colleagues. “Working remotely we’re missing out on some of that dynamic learning from co-workers.”

One of the challenges in hiring remote workers involves the onboarding experience and what that looks like, especially in terms of sharing a company’s culture. “We have to think about how we make connections for culture,” emphasized Adams. “How do we create those culture moments? We want to make sure our associates know they are doing important meaningful work that makes a difference every day.”

The battle for talent

One of the primary challenges for every employer, but especially for insurers involves attracting and retaining people in the industry.

Adams believes that while attracting people is difficult, it’s even more important for them to understand that working in insurance can become a “career destination” that allows them to move laterally or vertically within a company. “How do we introduce them to people who have moved to other areas within the company from where they started? As hard as it is to lose talent internally to other departments, at least they’re still within the company. The title claims adjuster doesn’t cover the depth and breadth of the job they do. It’s a tough, critical thinking skills job.” She sees value in applying the same skills used in determining a college career path to the claims path.

“Our values and what our organizations stand for matter,” emphasized Hessling. “We compete against all other industries for talent. How are we advocating and recruiting new people to the industry? We have to put on our recruiting hats. If we all recruited one or two people into the industry in the next two years, think about the impact that would make. We talk about the value of claims professionals but we need to back that up. When we’re looking over their shoulders and making it harder for them to work, that makes it harder to pull people into the industry.”

“We need to do a better job of letting people know and understand the opportunities within insurance,” agreed Bisdorf.

Adams also questioned where companies can go to find their talent. “Think about the talent pool of learned experiences,” she advised. “Life experiences bring a wealth of background that would be hard for us to add through training. Their reasoning and listening are at higher levels. We need to go for talent recruitment in different ways.” Walmart has been very successful in recruiting veterans and individuals with law enforcement experience into the industry.

“The talent is there,” continued Adams. “Put your actions behind your DEI commitment. Include people who have disabilities. If ever an industry was perfect for people who have disabilities, it’s working with people who have disabilities. How do you make accommodations so that they can succeed? We have to create the action plan to bring them into the industry.”

Hessling agrees. “We are looking at where we can attract talent from. We don’t have trouble attracting diverse talent, but it’s what opportunities we’re providing for them that will keep them within our pipeline. We want diverse perspectives.”

Telling our story

If how the public views the insurance industry is based solely on the commercials they see, then it’s no surprise that people aren’t considering insurance as a career path. Insurers help people put their lives and businesses back together after floods, fires, accidents, tornadoes and other incidents. The role of insurance is far more substantial than an emu, a gecko, a duck or any of the other characters portrayed in advertisements.

“We do a tremendously bad job telling our stories,” stated Hessling. “Think about the words that we use to describe the jobs that we do. We have to focus on connecting people’s personal purpose to the general purpose of what they do.”

“Making people understand the breadth of what we do and how their skills can fit into insurance is important,” agreed Bisdorf. “At Amazon, we’re trying to change how insurance works. We need to do a better job of telling people that these opportunities exist.”

Adams concurs. “The language that we use and how we describe what we do matters. We help people when things go wrong. We’re helpers and that’s what we’re about. That’s how we connect.”

Each of the panelists shared that their companies have escalated their focus on talent over the last two years. They are offering internships to high school and college students, recruiting on college campuses and encouraging individuals who have left the industry to reconsider it as a career option.

“We’re all trying to bring more people in,” added Adams. “It’s not one thing, it’s a thousand little things. Recruiting in the last year has been more challenging than in the past. Change is constant and necessary.”

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