Workload automation & orchestration can help retain, attract IT talent
Reducing the amount of repetitive, mundane IT tasks can keep top-flight talent engaged and working toward breakthrough innovations.
Even before the pandemic, insurance businesses struggled with a rising labor shortage; now, it’s a different animal to find and keep qualified staff. Millions of Americans in all sectors of the economy started leaving their occupations in late 2021 in search of better prospects, whether for increased salary, improved work-life balance or early retirement. The Great Resignation or Great Reshuffle, as it is known, continues in full force.
As long as this trend persists, the insurance sector’s labor issues, particularly in IT, will only get worse. According to TalentLMS, the labor market is becoming more constrained, and 72% of IT workers surveyed said they were considering leaving their positions in 2022. Additionally, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce projects that within the next 15 years, about 400,000 workers in the insurance industry will retire.
These roles are getting harder to fill. Nearly 25% of the IT job openings in insurance were vacant in 2021, according to The Everest Group. Recent figures indicate that younger generations are less drawn to the insurance industry, adding more gas to the blaze. Only 4% of millennials are interested in working in insurance technology, as they believe the sector is hesitant to adopt cutting-edge technologies.
How a labor shortage affects P&C insurers
According to the 2021 Harvey Nash Digital Leadership Report, 67% of global digital leaders could not keep up with change because of a talent gap, adversely impacting their business’ ability to expand. By 2030, it is anticipated that the demand for competent IT professionals in the insurance industry will increase by 55%.
Many insurance businesses are experimenting with tried-and-true strategies like competitive compensation, better benefits and flexibility in when and where employees can perform their job tasks to retain current talent and attract fresh faces to fill vacancies. However, this won’t be sufficient because many IT specialists are turned off by the conventional framework that many insurance businesses still employ. For instance, allocating IT workers to repetitive, low-value jobs all day is not feasible. A manual workload frequently has a high rate of inefficiencies, a high rate of human mistakes, a low job satisfaction rate and little room for innovation.
Insurance businesses can use workload automation and orchestration (WLA&O) to lessen the pressure placed on their IT departments and address workforce issues and shortages.
Using WLA&O to address the talent shortage
Modern WLA&O solutions may offer operational management over even the most complex IT environments, in contrast to classic work schedulers, which are constrained in their capacity. Modern WLA&O solutions can manage processes across siloed operations, creating a bridge between legacy and modernized systems, even as insurance companies integrate newer and more sophisticated digital technologies into their infrastructure. As the organization expands, this enables insurance companies to scale up quickly.
WLA&O helps P&C insurers carry out mission-critical, routine and scalable operations, enabling them to advance the business. A McKinsey analysis estimates that by 2030, 44% of the current insurance workload may be entirely automated. Accordingly, jobs primarily devoted to manual, repetitive activities will eventually become obsolete. At the same time, IT professionals with more advanced skill sets will be in higher demand than ever.
While there are countless applications for WLA&O, P&C insurance decision-makers frequently use it to free up IT resources in the following areas:
- Continuity of operations and disaster recovery
- Customer due diligence (CDD)
- Transferring files
- Analysis of risk, compliance, and audit
- Planning for insurance and data reporting
- Account reconciliation for customers
- Data validation
- Operational accounting and insurance
The goal of WLA&O is to eliminate the busy, dull, monotonous labor that steals employees’ time from the business and customers — not to try to replace the workforce with machines. A team’s morale can soar with the implementation of WLA&O, resulting in a lower attrition rate and engaging personnel who wish to put their talents towards insurance innovation. IT personnel can take on more responsibility, help their organization expand and advance a digital transformation strategy that will benefit the business. IT employees will have a high level of job satisfaction and be less likely to look for employment elsewhere if they feel empowered in their professional growth.
There will inevitably be more churn within the insurance industry. By documenting business-critical functions and institutional knowledge within the WLA&O system, WLA&O can help close the talent gap in the insurance industry by ensuring that, if employees decide to leave, their replacements won’t have to learn a complex procedure from scratch but will only need to know how to activate it. Companies can speed up the onboarding of recruits by moving this library of business operations and institutional knowledge inside the system itself.
Deploy WLA&O to employ skilled IT
Unprecedented labor unrest continues to impact the insurance sector negatively, and it doesn’t look like it will resolve anytime soon. By integrating WLA&O across IT environments, P&C insurers have the chance to not only retain current skilled employees but also to hire fresh talent and accelerate digital transformation to keep up with evolved customer demands.
Insurers do not have to be completely dependent on a labor trend that restricts their ability to innovate. Workload automation and orchestration will minimize menial tasks, redeploy IT workers to focus on more valuable initiatives, enhance employee morale and retention rates, and retain institutional knowledge to streamline onboarding. In addition to serving as a launchpad for digital innovation in the P&C insurance industry, workload automation and orchestration can help you “flip the script,” turning the current rigid labor market into a strategic advantage for your business.
Todd Weiss is the vice president of product management at SMA Technologies. He is responsible for setting and owning product strategy as well as managing the product roadmap for SMA’s solutions.
Opinions expressed here are the author’s own.
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