Speaker 1 00:05
Thank you for joining today’s webinar, “From risk to resilience: What every industry can learn from insurances talent transformation.” We’re excited to have the Josh Bersin Company join us to share their latest research on the insurance industry from their Global Workforce Intelligence (GWI) Project powered by Eightfold AI. I’ll pass it over to our speakers, Stella Ioannidu and Kathi Andres.
Stella Ioannidou 00:44
Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining. I’m Stella Ioannidu, Senior Director of Research and lead of the Global Workforce Intelligence Project, and with me, Kathi.
Kathi Enderes 00:55
I’m Kathy Andres, Senior Vice President of Research and global industry analyst, and we’re thrilled to welcome you today, and we have a really packed agenda. So Stella, should we jump right in and let’s do it? Yes, absolutely. Sounds great. Sounds great. Okay, so what will we cover today? I’m going to give you some introductions and business context, some kind of why are we even talking about the insurance industry, and how are we going? How did we go about all the insights that Stella is going to share, that Stella is going to have the majority of the time to share what we learned about the insurance industry and how you can apply this, whether you’re in the insurance industry or in any other industry. And then I’ll finish it up with just what this means for you, and what I think are some next steps for you? So with that, let me, let me jump right in, because we have lots to cover, and it’s very exciting, because this is the launch of this sixth study that we have on an industry on this time, it’s the insurance industry, where we looked into skills and roles and organizational pathways and organizational kind of strategies based on data that we got from eightfold. So Stella is going to launch that for you, and it’s going to be very exciting. But why are we talking about this? Why are we talking about what’s happening in the world? So we see really four big trends happening in the market, in the labor market, and also in the bigger economy today, whether you are in the US or anywhere else around the world. And actually, I’m here in California, but Stella is in Greece. So we have kind of global, global coverage, even from our presenters here. So, what’s happening is that the first theme is that the labor market is kind of very unbalanced and very hard to handle. And I’m sure whether you’re in the insurance industry or in any other industry, you are actually, you are actually encountering that. So we have a lot of shortages in any kind of blue collar workers, or frontline workers, desk workers, or whatever you call them, healthcare, of course, manufacturing, transportation. If you’ve been recently flying or recently going to a restaurant or something like that, you probably have encountered delays or kind of service shortages because there’s just not enough people in this area. Meanwhile, in some of the white collar jobs, we’ve seen layoffs. We have seen a kind of uncertainty with the advent of AI so it is very hard to balance the kind of the labor market from an HR people perspective. The second theme has to do with the businesses. Every business is actually changing and converging. Stella is going to talk about how this is impacting the insurance industry specifically, but every company now has to be a tech company. Of course. If you’re in retail, you’re also going into financial services and health care. If you’re in health care, you’re going into technology and pharma. If you’re in pharma, you’re going into health care. And all of these kinds of industries are rapidly changing, and every organization has to be much more dynamic and much more skill based, because you used to know what jobs and what talent you need to need for your industry, and you just don’t know this anymore. So that’s challenging for us. Who’s in the HR area. Who are you going to hire? How are you going to promote people? How are you going to move people around? The theme has to do with AI. And can’t believe we haven’t mentioned AI and we’re six minutes in. But AI, of course, is on everybody’s mind. Everybody is thinking about how we can adapt and adopt AI? How can we adapt our business models? Put AI into every job, every every organizational model. How do we adapt, adopt AI in HR, but then also, as you are in HR, and I think most of you will be in HR, how do we support the organization to transform every job for AI, and that’s actually a big part of what Stella is going to talk about as well. What we found in the insurance industry, and the last one, has to do with the workforce themselves. Every employee, once more, every employee is felt under stress. Engagement levels around the world are an all time low. Every every employee is looking to their organization in terms of preparing them for this AI transformation, getting them a better career, helping them get the skills that they need. So employees are looking for more, what we call activation and more engagement, and we need to do this, of course, on an organizational level. Meanwhile, CEOs, and this comes from the global CEO study by PwC that really invests very heavily into Gen AI, they all want to not just cut costs, but increase revenue. So you see a 92% of these, see of these global CEOs have invested and are increasing their investment in Gen AI, but only 7% have generated new revenue with with AI. So and that all it has to do with people, the culture, our ability to move people around, and our ability in HR to help people, what we call become super workers. And the super worker This is a concept we introduced earlier this year, and we have a full study on this. And this is kind of one of our big themes that we’re looking into and that we’re researching, is a super workers, a very powerful concept. It’s it means that AI is actually not just about technology. AI is really about people and culture, and we in HR can help every employee, frontline employees, mid level managers, senior leaders, white collar workers, blue collar workers, any employee really become what we call a super worker, to exponentially increase their performance, their innovation and their output using AI, and for that, we need to make our organizations much more dynamic, much more change ready, and help people reinvent themselves, learn all the time, and also invest in technology. And that’s one of the things also that Stella is going to talk to about the insurance industry as well. We see this as a totally different economic area. We call this the intelligence age, where it used to be that kind of you could focus more on financials and machines and tools and kind of financial investments now, with AI agents coming on the team, it’s really about the power of how every organization can foster this culture of talent density, hyper performance, skill based work and the right culture to support this kind of powerful AI transformation that really makes productivity increase exponentially. And this is a chart where we looked at how productivity has changed over the last 150 years or so, where it took almost 200 years, where it took 100 years for the first 200% increase in the mid 1800s then it took 60 years for the next 200% increase. And now we’re predicting it’s going to take only 15 years. So productivity increases faster and faster, and that’s around the world you see here that we didn’t just look at the US, but we looked at many other countries too. And it’s the same trend that productivity is exponentially increasing. And the way that to do this is really to reinvent your industry all together, not just include digital, not just adopt digital, not just transform for digital, not just think about this digital disruption, but really what we call industry reinvention, rethinking your jobs, roles, your business models, your skills, adjacencies, in order To make, kind of create this culture of super workers in HR. We see that everything in HR is now connected with each other. It used to be that you could say, “Well, I’m a recruiter and I’m focusing just on recruiting. I’m a learning person. I’m just focusing on learning.” But now you need to understand all the related pieces. You need to understand everything that we’re doing in HR, the skills, job architectures, pay benefits, diversity and inclusion, workforce planning, workers intelligence and the labor shortages, you also need to understand the economy. So our job in HR is actually getting much more exciting and much more powerful and much more important, and that’s what we mean by a new talent architecture. So we used to be able to think about filling jobs and having people in very static jobs where you had enough workers, and that was easy to do. And also things didn’t change so quickly. But now, with AI tools, of course, changing every day. I think every day there’s a new capability coming around. We need to think about much more about the work that people do and about the skills that people have, and understand these skills on a really granular level, and then match them to the work that they’re doing at the job almost becomes secondary and not so so important, because we’ve all been there when we created jobs, right? The next day, the job kind of became obsolete. If you’re thinking about the job description that you’re in, you’re probably not doing that job at all, because things changed so much. You had new markets, you had new technologies, you had new customers and new competitors as well. Really important model and Stella is going to talk about what this means for the insurance industry, is for our framework around skill based talent management and talent density, where we’re saying it used to be when you didn’t have enough skills, or you didn’t have the right skills, you just had to focus on recruiting, and that’s the first R and of course, you still need to focus on recruiting, finding the right people, placing them into the right roles, focusing on employment brand and a great candidate experience, but we also have to focus on retaining the people that we already have. So we need to think about employee experience and creating the right culture and listening to people all the time. We also, at the same time, have to think about reskilling people, so thinking about building new skills and creating career pathways into new roles, and thinking about adjacencies skills, adjacencies and talent mobility and talent marketplaces to move people around to those skills and work opportunities where we need them most. And at the same time, we also need to redesign jobs, work and employment models, using AI, using productivity platforms, in order to kind of create those new skills. And what all of this means for the technology tech stack is we see kind of a new technology stack where we still have our, of course, our kind of transactional systems at the bottom here. So you have your recruiting systems, your HCM, your LMS, your kind of performance management system, compensation system, and on and on people analytics. But then you have really, importantly, kind of this AI powered talent intelligence layer. And Stella is going to talk a lot about what we found from talent intelligence, where it’s not just ingesting, kind of the transactional data that you get from the transactional systems internally, but then also externally. What are your competitors doing? What skills are they looking at? How are they moving people around? What jobs are they filling? And then we have kind of transactionally. We have this semantic data layer where AI agents are going to interface with your candidates, your employees, your alumni, your managers, white collar workers, hourly workers, senior leaders, you name it, basically, so you don’t actually have to interact with these systems anymore at all at some point. And it’s really much more, kind of without a homepage, basically without this transactional layer, and much easier to just basically chat with your systems. And we focus on our global workforce intelligence project at this middle layer, at the talent intelligence layer. So I’ll tell you just a little bit of what we mean by the Global Workforce Intelligence Project and how we went about it. And then Stella is going to go into the insurance industry. So we set out, and there was four years ago, actually, unbelievably, we four years ago. We started this, doing this together with eightfold, where we said we’re going to focus industry by industry, on the skills, on the ins, on the talent insights, on the roles of each industry. And we started with healthcare. And I’ll tell you more which industries we covered, but basically we brought in from the Josh person company, where Stella and I both work. We bring in HR insights, talent acquisition, recruiting, insights, employee experience, compensation, diversity and inclusion, people, analytics, of course, learning and development, insights, organization and work design. How are organizations actually doing all of these processes? Eightfold, and we partnered with eightfold, and are still partnering with eightfold on this. They have 1.5 billion people profiles, basically where we map kind of the skills and skills adjacencies and understand what roles trends we have and how industries are converging. So we literally looked at billions of data points and analyzed them. And then we always work with consultants that know kind of the industry. And then we also do a lot of interviews and discussions with leaders in the industry as well, to do this kind of gut check and get the stories in as well. So we looked at job roles, job clusters. We also looked at what, how what skills are rising, what skills are declining and needed, what skills are close to each other, what career pathways do people have from maybe declining roles into future roles that are going to be more important? And we also look at what solutions these industries bring and sell is going to share what they learned in the insurance industry. Here’s all of the ones that we have done over the last four years. So we started with healthcare, then we went to consumer banking, we went to consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals and biotech technology, and then help automotive manufacturing. And now at the last one is this beautiful, green picture about insurance? So that’s where we landed here, and Stella took us away and shared with us everything that we learned about the insurance industry.
Speaker 2 15:52
Yes, happy to it’s been a journey, and I really enjoy every time you focus on an industry, and we try to understand what is the biggest business challenge of the industry, and how can we solve it with skills in every industry, I want to say, is a little bit different, and at the same time, the underlying themes and the findings are so well connected that even if you’re listening in, and let’s say you’re not from the insurance, you will see that many of these strategies and approaches are completely transferable to you. I spent a good part of my career, 15 years in the financial services, and it’s always a pleasure to go back to either banking or insurance. And insurance definitely is one of those industries that is in a very hot seat. Right now, there’s so much traction into the forces that are redefining what insurance is, because it goes beyond the simple underwriting, the claims, the sales, the insurance agents, and we’re seeing more and more traction interconnection, and let’s say, similar capabilities as we would see in FinTech organizations. We’ve seen a lot more connection with health care. We see a little more capabilities around consulting. We see a lot more worry and care about increasing cyber security. And let’s face it, we are in an environment at least for the way that insurance sees it and keeping honest everyone who’s from insurance that the frequency and the severity of natural disasters, of cyber threats, of pandemics it has, it has, it’s rising, right? It’s high. Insurance is not known for the, let’s say, the technological infrastructure of the most modern one. We talked to a lot of insurance companies who are struggling with legacy, legacy technology, and they’re struggling how to integrate new technologies like artificial intelligence, like machine learning, like blockchain, like Internet of Things, and although the global projection, let’s say, for for natural catastrophes, is growing At the same time, the regulatory pressures are also growing. Insurance providers are expected to serve something like the barometer of the market. Right now, they have so many solvency requirements, so many consumer protection laws, their privacy, ESG standards, and the list goes on. And amid that, there’s a widening, let’s say, gap in trust from the consumers the way that they they’re perceived, perceiving, let’s say what insurance has to offer, and although the insurance, let’s say market is like the experts, the gurus of understanding, how do we what risks are we taking? Where are the biggest pitfalls? Where should we invest? Or how, or how should we align our portfolio with the market? This is no longer enough, because the market is changing so swiftly, so it’s even more important now, not just to manage and understand risk, but manage to understand risk on the go and as the environment is shifting quickly, it’s not just enough to go out there as an insurance provider with our insurance agents to try to sell our products directly to our consumers. It’s also critically important for us and insurance to embed into other industries and make ourselves presented in our offerings and our products to every consumer, regardless of the selling point, regardless of the time of day or where they are in their financial, let’s say services journey and at the same time, we need to be proactive. We can’t just expect to model and manage what has come, insurance is also expected to be free. Let’s say, see things before they happen. And that is the big, let’s say, story that we found talking to more than 50 of you out there, and while combining this with data from the jobs person coming in the eight fold platform, it’s no longer enough just to be an expert of risk management. The next phase in insurance is to understand how to be a master in adaptability change along the market and the consumer needs and all the other ecosystem requirements that we need to abide by. And let’s face it, we thought we had time in insurance, you know, we thought that we have a digital transformation project or a five year modernization plan, and we we we did some analysis of our technology stack, and we say, okay, we can, we can transform a few things here, a few things there, and we can gradually get there. And here comes artificial intelligence. We actually spend a lot of time analyzing the impact of artificial intelligence and insurance, because we actually found that across a series of industries, insurance and legal services are one of the the two industries that are most exposed to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence, and in particular, generative AI, the way that work is being done, whether in insurance, whether it is about, how do we process claims, how do we underwrite our risk? How do we serve our customers? How do we document and classify the client information? How do we detect fraudulent transactions or fraudulent clients, and how do we assess the types of risks we’re taking in all those related processes, and I know there are a lot, if you come to think of it, it’s like the epitome of the entire business model. These, these contain processes heavily affected by the adoption of AI, and most insurance companies are really not ready to embrace this at the scale and the speed that the market is changing right now, although we found that those companies that understand this, and we call them pacesetters, and I’m going to guide you through some strategies, what they’re doing, what sets them apart, but what they really, really understand, is that it’s not only an uncertain world, but it’s in a world where we as insurance providers are expected to adapt intelligently, see things before they happen, predict trends, monitor the market, be in sync with the changing conditions of the market and not be Let’s say cut let’s say, cut back by the ongoing uncertainty. And we actually found that this business necessity actually translates very clearly to a talent and skills advantage that these pay set organizations have compared to, let’s say, their non pay setter counterparts currently the way that the insurance market looks, we are seeing that most insurance companies, they cannot proactively manage risks. So even if they understand the risk that they are taking, or they’re able to, let’s say, model or measure the types of risks that they’re taking, they do it post event. Something happens, we manage our losses or gains, and then we decide how to redesign our strategy. This will no longer cut it, and we saw that insurance companies have different roles and different skills in their talent that allow them to supercharge their ability to sense what’s going on, proactively, model it and run the entire thing a priori. Let’s call it before it happens, not after effect. We have seen that the Pacer insurance organizations understand that it’s not, it’s no longer enough to have an HR organization siloed, where everyone has a different, let’s say, bucket of talent related responsibilities they apply. They understand the collaborative, the systemic, the embedded way of operating an HR function, and they also understand that you can’t make these types of decisions based on, let’s say leadership’s gut feeling. You need great data. You need robust data. You need data real time, flowing from across the organization, and especially when it comes to what talent do we need? It takes a lot of, let’s say pacer organizations to invest a lot of effort into setting them up, setting themselves up for success, having the talent intelligence infrastructure and the data in the approach to make this work. And let me give you a little bit of a sneak peek into the actual data. More of that on the on the report, of course, but as in every industry study, the way that we start interpreting and understanding the the data that we get, combining the eight full talent intelligence platform and our own data and everything that Kathy explained a few minutes ago, we try to understand, okay, best on the on the arching business challenge, how ready are the organizations in let’s say the insurance industry, do they have the roles that they need, and within those roles, Do they have the skills that they need to proactively manage and anticipate risk? And to our surprise, when they study the roles in the insurance industry, we actually saw compared to other industries, we’ve done five more, right? So we’ve seen a lot already compared to other industries, up the role, let’s say spectrum, the majority of roles are either stable or slightly rising. So it’s not like they don’t have the right roles to begin with, that a lot of complete difference in the job family change in the job family is is needed, with the exception of the IT and digital solution space, where we are seeing more of the need to have, let’s say, more modern looking, more next, next gen looking roles to actually support what we mean by intelligent market adaptation. More on that in a minute. I promise. I’ll explain exactly what these roles are. The second layer of analysis that we do is about the skills. So okay, within these roles, with these within these jobs, camera police do have the skills to actually support insurance providers into embracing this intelligent market adaptation. We actually saw that the majority of skills are stable and slightly declining, which is the case in many of the industries that we’ve studied. But in insurance in particular, it’s quite alarming, because of the stability in all the roles. So every role that we’re seeing, every skill that we’re seeing currently in the insurance industry, does not have that dynamic that they’re not going to be around for much longer. The majority of these skills are soon to start declining. So this does not work well with the overarching need of insurance providers to anticipate what’s going on, be ahead of the curve, proactively manage risk, be gurus of data analytics and understanding, and have a very well modernized and consumer oriented tech stack. In most cases, we try to analyze not only what we have in terms of the roles and the skills, but we also try to see, okay, this is the lay of the land. What are insurance companies doing about this? Right? In many industries, when they see that they have a need to advance in some role or some skill area, the first strategy area that they choose is recruitment. So they say, okay, out of the 4 Rs which is, which is the strategy that has the immediate impact, and it’s faster to implement, right? And we understand, we get it. It’s the first response. Let’s say to the insurance industry’s need for more talent and intelligent market adaptation. And this is all a combination of a profile that knows about risk, about analytics and about technology. And in these specific areas, we saw that, yes, insurance providers are offering increased wages at the average market wage point. They’re kind of trying to, as we call it, kind of hire their way out of the problem, if they can, right as much as they can, and that’s okay. But what is also on our mind? And we double click to see where things are, say, Okay, on top of recruitment, what are the other areas? And we use other labor market insights for that. Okay, so what are the skills areas and the capability areas that are, let’s say, emphasized in the industry? And if you are following the blue line, you’ll see that it’s still all about marketing capabilities, and then it’s all about underwriting capabilities, project management capabilities. And if you go to the list on the right, you’ll see that somewhere at the end we’ll see process improvement, workflow management. There is no technology whatsoever. So we in insurance are actually quite desperate, trying to hire our way, but currently we’re behind. We don’t have critical mass to see those hires actually have an impact. And then we we leverage the Josh bursting company data points, and we’ve done deep dives and definitive guides on recruitment, on retention, on re skilling, and on work redesign, and we’re able to cut by industry to say, okay, so why is the insurance industry, let’s say, operating like that. Why are they trying to recruit so much? Why aren’t they trying, let’s say, to redesign how work is done, because this is actually really impacted by artificial intelligence in this industry. And what we found is actually a way to explain the phenomenon. On the left, you’ll see the darker column. It’s actually the insurance industry, and the gray column is the average of all other industries, and you will see that insurance is actually leveraging recruitment, because they’re actually built above market in their maturity. Very, very well. How to recruit great talent. They are almost at par with re Skilling and retention. Or, as one CHRO said to us while we were doing the interview, we do not have a, let’s say, retention problem in the insurance industry. Our insurance are single digits, and this is definitely not the case for us. But if you go to the right side, you’ll see that the redesign area is actually where the biggest opportunity for growth is in the insurance industry, especially with the impact of generative AI on all the processes across all areas of insurance companies, you will see that the biggest opportunity for us is actually to start from redesigning the work, rather than actually trying to hire our way in, out of it and bring in as much talent as we can. Because if we do bring them in, they will see how the work is being done, and then they won’t be staying much longer, or as much as we would want them to, to have any meaningful impact on the organization. These types of analysis, and we’re showing this to you, let’s say we go to the practical level, because you actually need to see what it looks like. You need to understand what type of analysis you need to start doing, because you can’t expect these insights that maybe the executive team needs to hear about to just come out of Excel spreadsheets or someone’s gut feeling like I’m feeling that the market needs more of ABC, right? We also run the numbers for you, and we do this in every industry study, because we really want you to have a very good understanding and also very strong data points to go and pitch the need for change in your organization. So we go and say, Okay, we know the lay of the land. What are the skills in the role? But then we also compare, how do pacesetter organizations compare to the overall industry and pacesetter organizations? Few, a few words on how we understand and define them. They’re not just financially sane insurance companies. They have not just great financial outcomes, but they’re also leading in the industry. They’re acknowledged by their innovation, and they’re also very mature in their talent practices. So we take, let’s take a holistic approach to how we understand a pacesetter organization. So financial outcomes are part of it, but only, let’s say a quarter of the whole picture. So pacesetter insurance companies, in terms of the roles, have significantly more people in financial service roles. They really, really understand how to model risk, how to count risk, how to understand the financial aspects of the market. But they don’t just stop there. They have more people in transformation roles, which are the roles that get this insight of where the market is going, they’re able to translate that and, okay, so how do we shift the boat? How do we, you know, steer in which direction? How do we reorganize? How do we prioritize so that we are able to intelligently adapt? And they also have more people as a whole. How many people? Right? More people in technology roles. But what I find most interesting is when you double click on the skills prevalence, pacesetter organizations have twice as many people with rising technology skills. And what do we mean by rising technology skills? Technology related skills that are around understanding what are our what is our technology stack, understanding how to build great user interfaces for our clients, understanding how to manage our data pro in an organized way that it can help our forecasting capabilities, making sure that our IT services are always up and running, making sure that we don’t rely on on premise solutions, that we have virtualized the environment. These are some of the rising tech skills that are very important for the tech stack and the infrastructure and insurance, which is, as we said earlier, kind of lagging in terms of how modernized it is, but in, let’s say, in alignment with what we found in the role prevalence, we’re seeing that pacers and insurance also have more people with transformation skills, Understanding how to change your organization, doing more forecasting, understanding what market research means, understanding how data modeling works, understanding how to translate that into and embed that into enterprise risk management. And overall, they have more people with the so-called adaptability and systemic HR skills. They understand that, for example, cross functional team leadership is one of the most important skills to develop, alongside performance management and employee management and Talent Management and benefits. And you know this better than I do how intricate and rich let’s say the talent structure is in the insurance industry, we get this question a lot, and I will answer it before you even ask it. They ask, okay, tell us who the Pacers like? And quite frankly, as in all our industries, there is no one insurance provider to win them all, but we were able to identify some amazing use cases and stories from insurance providers and how they’re tackling each aspect of the systemic HR quadrant. So for example, we have great stories in our report from Allianz, who has a virtual reality based employee onboarding platform that also supports upskilling for new joiners. We write about the MetLife talent marketplace. We see the story in the big transformation of Zurich, who has more than 100 actually different use cases of generative AI throughout the organization and to automate work and enhance the talent acquisition and Employee Engagement, we’ve seen integration of financial wellness into the workplace benefits by New York Life. So there’s a lot of stories. If you want to be focusing on one of the quadrants, or many of the quadrants, what other key players are doing about this, but if you want to hear, let’s say, the highlights of the whole experience that they’re trying to let’s say, let’s say, offer, it’s pacesetter. Insurance providers care more about growth, rather than promoting people across large ladders. And they they are, tend to build one of the, let’s say, some of the strongest cultures that we’ve seen across others that you know, compared to other industries we’ve we’ve studied, and they organize around the work that needs to be done, rather than what’s on your let’s say job roaster, and they care a lot about employee experience, and that makes them almost, let’s say irresistible as organizations, right? As I said, we, the Josh Bersin Company, have deep dive studies on each of the four quadrants. So if you are wondering, let’s say about where I can find additional strategies, or what works, or what are the key areas to focus, you can definitely reach out to us for our work. But what I want to emphasize is when we are and this holds true both industries that we study, okay, but especially in insurance. This changes into intelligent adaptability. This is not a CHRO project. This is not something that only you know, the HR talent, the HR people need to let you lose sleep over. This is a C suite transformation, where we need the CEO to lead the adoption of the digital technologies and influence the policies and drive the customer centric innovation. Of course, we need the CHRO to understand and push on systemic HR and what that means in the era of AI. We also need the CIO to lead the modernization of the IT infrastructure and integrate AI into it. We also need the financial strategy for these digital investment from the CFO and the operational efficiency and sustainable practices, let’s say, encompassing all this from the viewpoint of the COO so it’s about a collaborative effort to change the entire ecosystem, let’s say, in a way that’s becoming as sustainable and as proactive as possible, because the way that we’re seeing it, the although the the overall insurance industry is exponentially growing, the players are going to be around are actually going to be fewer. So it’s a big opportunity, especially with AI, to embrace this and understand that, let’s change the shift before it gets changed for us, if you’re one of the people like me who want to, you know, lose sleep over how do we build great talent intelligence centers of accelerated way we can get the data, what We can do about it. The way to operationalize this for your own organization is to start by building a cross functional center of excellence around this. So this is where everybody connected to the problem you’re solving should sit under and mind that phrase the problem you’re solving, because this is not about boiling the ocean, finding every you know, analyzing everything across the organization, on all the data points, we need to be adamant about identifying the challenge that we’re focusing on, what is it that we’re solving for? And then do this similar analysis as we do analyze what roles are related, what skills are related, what organizational trends are related, what are the key solutions from the four hour framework that could get that could play well, and then I iteratively work across the company to, let’s say, plan, design, develop, implement, measure, and then go back and re implement, and, let’s say work it through, step by step. This is not so much of a project that it’s more of a shift in the mindset and the way that we’re making decisions around talent based on data. And I would love now to pass this over back to you know, pass the baton back to Kathy, because I’d love for her to explain to you what this means for you and how to move this ahead.
Kathi Enderes 43:02
Well, thank you, Stella. This was so fantastic. Every time I listen to you, I learn so much. And thank you for diving in and really decomposing this. I think it’s fantastic. And how do you apply this for yourself? So first, what if you could do this, what Stella just talked about for your organization? Because Stella talked about the entire industry. And I know many of you have not all many of you are in the insurance industry. But even if you’re not in the insurance industry, what if you could do the same thing? Think about first the business problem that you want to have, that you want to solve for. And that’s really important, starting with the problem, not starting with the data, right? Because if you just look at data, you don’t see anything. If you just look at data, it’s just a mess. But starting with the problem. But then you need the data. You need to challenge intelligence. And we built all of this on data from Eightfold, right? So Eightfold has has all of this, this dataset, and we’ve seen companies that actually do the same thing for themselves, right? So they you look at this is my problem that I’m trying to solve for and then how can I get to understand the skills, our own skills, but then also skills that others have in my industry and even in other industries? How do I understand the roles? How do I iterate? How do I continue doing this and getting to the solution? So this is all within your reach. You could do this kind of really proactive planning for how you’re going to execute on recruiting, retaining, rescaling and redesigning, if you have the right data. So that’s the first point. The second point is really starting with your problem, with your talent challenge, and what we talked about right now was, as we saw in some other industries, a skills gap. Right? The insurance industry has this digital skills gap, as have actually consumer banking, CPG and automotive, some other industries that are missing next generation digital skills, AI skills, kind of these future skills, very hard to get them, and the skills are changing all the time, right? We talk, we call this high skills velocity. And next week, when we talk about the pace setters overall, we’ll actually, in another webinar, we’ll talk much more about skills velocity and how quickly skills are changing. And there you have to change the kind of the talent mix. You really have to think about, how do we Up skill, re skill, how do we get new talent in? How do we retain the people that already have the right skills differentially? So it’s a different strategy than for example, in the second problem where you don’t have enough people, and that happened in healthcare and in pharmaceutical when we studied those industries, they just didn’t have enough people. It was not so much a skills gap as well. Capacity gap. Skills are changing pretty rapidly too, but not as rapidly. There you need to decrease the demand for talent. So you need to focus primarily on this redesign area where you’re saying, basically, we need to just need less people. How can we use AI, for example, to increase productivity of the people that we have while we decrease the demand for talent? The last one could be a misalignment problem, where you have the right skills, you have the right people, you have enough people, but maybe people are working on the wrong things. And we sometimes hear this in tech companies that we’re working with, they actually have the right people, they have enough people, they have the right skills, but they’re focusing on the wrong areas. So that might be around more aligning and prioritizing the work into the right direction, so really starting with the problem that you have, and then using the data, analyze all of this data, and it’s hard, right? It’s hard, but it’s important, because otherwise you’re just focusing on gut feel. And I know your CEOs, your CHRO, your CFO, they’re all looking for the data and for the database insights. The last point I wanted to make is about how we do this as an HR organization. And Stella and I both mentioned systemic HR, but we can really talk a lot about this. What we mean by systemic HR is really a new operating system for the HR function, where we’re moving away from being this kind of service delivery oriented organization, where we’re focusing much more on kind of creating great products and even consulting skills, consulting, focusing on the right problems, and then having kind of a very agile, very dynamic organization to kind of move people around, mobilize the skills where they need to be mobilized. And for that, we need HR people that are not just focused on one silo. We call this full stack HR professionals, where you’re saying, even if I’m a recruiting person, for example, I need to understand learning, I need to understand compensation, I need to understand employee experience. I need to understand work and organization design, in order to kind of execute on these for us, because then they could be very silent, but they need to actually execute together in kind of these cross functional teams. So we have a whole study on that as well, and where we explain what systemic HR means. And with that, actually your role is, if you’re in HR, and I think most of you are in HR, your role is becoming more and more important, but it’s also changing a lot. So not only do we need to be HR experts, but we also need strategic advisors. We are economists. We’re kind of helping organizations transform. We’re changing. We’re business consultants. We need to be connectors across the business. We need to learn all the time. We need to coach the business. And we need to also be psychologists and economists right outside of our company to understand what’s going on in the economy, what’s happening with other companies as well. It is a very exciting time to be in HR, and the role is changing a lot, but I think we can, we can all make this happen. So with that, let’s open it up for questions. And I actually saw some people, and I’m going to go back to this Stella, because, of course, it’s for you specifically in the insurance industry. So one, one person basically sent us saying, insurance companies are by design, built on a culture of risk aversion and stability, yet the most successful pacesetters have managed to undergo significant transformation, embracing AI, shifting talent models, building adaptability without abandoning this foundational mindset. What specific tactics or strategies have helped these organizations transform while staying true to the inherently risk averse nature. How did they balance innovation with institutional caution? I think it’s a very insightful question, and it probably came from somebody who works in the insurance industry, Stella. What did we learn there? How do they balance that kind of innovation with the culture of kind of caution and being very risk averse.
Speaker 2 50:24
Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting time to be in insurance right now, especially because there is this dissonance, right? Insurance is the master of managing risk; they are inherently risk averse. I want to go back to what we spoke about in terms of the skills and the roles, because if there’s something that we saw in the past, great is understanding that the pathway to get them where they want to go does not necessarily come from technology or artificial intelligence. These are all enablers and players and catalysts, but they start with, do we have the right people in place for that? Do we have the role that we need? Do we have the skills that we need, and do we have the right talent strategies around it to make sure that we’re not just building something in some area of the organization and some other area of the organization is suffering? I remember a discussion with one of the CHROs we interviewed, and they were telling me, for example, that there is this particular type of risk analysis, and there is only one person in the organization who knows how to do it. Should that person be sick? Should that person want to, let’s say, leave the organization or retire? We’re in big, big trouble, because no one can analyze this type of risk better than what they can. So pace. Organizations understand this. They understand that it’s not just about agency and giving people, you know, having them become specialists. It’s about building a sustainable ecosystem that has the talent that we need, not just for today, but also looking into three years from now, five years from now, understanding that the industry as a whole is morphing into something new. It’s morphing into a data intelligence industry, and it’s not so much about the the direct to consumer type of sales, and selling insurance to consumers, it’s making sure that we echo what consumers fear or worry about the most, and we provide that to them proactively through the right Channel, the right timing for them, not necessarily for us. So it’s not an easy answer to say, oh, you know the Pace Setter. Insurance providers do 12345, because they actually have a different mentality about how they understand the industry and the challenges at large. And we see a lot of let’s say movement around experimenting. Let’s say this new thing comes out. Let’s play with it. Let’s understand what it is. Let’s see what it’s not, and let’s see how strictly we can pivot into that. I know it’s a more complicated answer than you know you would have expected, but it was a complicated question. It does, though, start with acknowledging that what got us here is great, but it’s not going to get us into the future of how the insurance industry is morphing. Let’s say three to five years from now.
Kathi Enderes 54:01
I think one thing that I take away, I know this was a long answer, because it was a complicated, kind of complicated thing that they do, but I think one thing that I take away from this, and as we take us a look at all the pace status, is they are innovating, not in a specific group, but they’re innovating in every allow every person to innovate. Right? They’re innovating at the core. I know we’re going to talk about this in our Pacesetter webinar next week as well, that they’re not just seeing innovation as this kind of sideline that only the R&D group does, but they are innovating at the core in every organization, in every position, in the front line, positions allow people to experiment with new technologies, but then also with new business processes, with new approaches. So that kind of innovation everywhere, not just in the R&D group, I think makes them much more kind of transformation, ready and constantly transforming as well, and constantly from forming in small pieces, not doing this big transformation, right, not building up and like, Oh, now we’re going to do this wholesale transformation. That’s always so scary. But when you’re saying Molly, you’re breaking this into smaller pieces, and you’re constantly making little shifts, rather than staying the same and then making this big shift, it’s much easier to absorb, and it’s much easier on employees and also on the customers as well. So I think this is a great question, and I think a fantastic answer. Stella, thank you. Here’s another one that we got as insurers rapidly adopt AI and shift to intelligence driven talent models. How are pacesetter organizations ensuring that employee wellbeing isn’t compromised by the pace of change or increasing demands for adaptability.
Speaker 2 55:48
Okay, so we saw a few of the use cases. I know we didn’t have time to go through all of them, but for sure. If there is one thing that was very clear to, let’s say, Me, as an analyst, when I go into studying each industry and for insurance in particular, it was very, very clear is that this industry cares so much about the experience of their people, the retention of their people, building a very strong culture, embedding wellness into the workplace as much as possible. They literally, you know, one of the people we spoke to literally told us, oh, we don’t have churn. We actually need to start making the When are you leaving conversations, rather than how long you know the stay conversations, because they are actually great places that people want to stay there, because they enjoy so many benefits and so much care, in terms of the of the culture, I remember one particular interview, someone said, Well, you don’t grow up envisioning a career in insurance, but once you’re in there, boy, that’s a surprise on a positive end, like you’re being very well taken care of in that aspect, I know I mentioned this earlier. How you know New York Life, for example, is empowering its employees. Is integrating financial wellness into the workplace benefits. But what I think like when we have the AI transformation or the AI impact conversation, what we kind of need to kind of zoom out and see the big picture, is that if you redesign work the way that it should be redesigned. The employees will not be suffering by the adoption of AI. They will be relieved of the adoption of AI because they will see all the mundane tasks, everything that they hate doing that takes them time, the needy greedy that are sometimes highly prioritized but are they feel like low value in terms of how much they enjoy them, they get the you get those out of the way and you allow people to actually put their human, creative talents into their daily work, then it’s actually not a problem of adopting AI and seeing diminished returns in wellbeing, but actually the opposite, bringing in AI to take out the Monday and having more happy, healthy and creative people in the workforce.
Kathi Enderes 58:32
Fantastic. And I think with that on that happy note and on that positive note, how the insurance industry is actually taking care of their people and creating irresistible environments that continue to do this in and all of that certainty uncertainty, I should say, thank you very much, Stella, thank you. This was fantastic, and thank you everybody for joining us, for the great questions and colleagues. Back over to you, right.
Speaker 1 58:59
Thank you so much for joining us today, everyone. And thank you Kathi and Stella for a great presentation. As always. If you missed part of the webinar today or want to share it with one of your colleagues, the on demand recording will be available through the link you used to log in today, and we will also have the recording available on Eightfold’s website. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.
