Thirty percent of companies will eliminate remote work this year, and 83% of CEOs globally expect a return to full-time office work in 2027, according to two recent reports. Many insurers will be among those heading back to the status quo pre-COVID.
But a lot of employees are pushing in the opposite direction. They not only want flexibility on where they work. They want flexibility on when they work.
We hear all the time about the hundreds of thousands of insurance industry employees reaching retirement age and about all the difficulties in attracting the talent needed to replace them, so I suggest we don't dismiss the desire for time flexibility out of hand. Yes, it runs counter to the management reflex that wants to bring everyone back to the office so they can be seen and managed as a cohesive group. But insurance desperately needs an influx of talent, and, as the saying goes, you attract more bees with honey than vinegar — or, more bluntly, beggars can't be choosers.
Clearly, many parts of the insurance process can't happen whenever an employee chooses to work. Agents and brokers need to be available, for instance, whenever a client needs them. But many underwriters and claims representatives could do their work based on a caseload, rather than on office hours, especially now that generative AI can track down so much of the data for them.
Whether to offer more flexibility, not less, is worth a thought.
My interest in the topic of flexibility was piqued by a smart column by Matthew Fray at Quartz (which supplied the statistics I quoted in the first sentence). It says:
"Work-life balance has overtaken salary and compensation as the leading priority cited by 65% of office workers globally, up from 59% four years ago, said Peter Miscovich, co-author of the book The Workplace You Need Now, and the executive managing director and global future of work leader at JLL, the commercial real estate giant.
"Employees increasingly value control over when they work such as start and stop times, protected focus blocks, and predictable personal-time boundaries, more than additional workplace location choice, Miscovich said."
I realize I have a bias about flexibility, having worked remotely and pretty much on my own schedule since I left the Wall Street Journal in the mid-'90s. The productivity of a writer is also awfully easy to track. You either produce, or you don't. Even at the WSJ, where I worked office hours, if I went a couple of weeks without a byline, I might get a call that began, "Pa-uu-ll, this is your faaaaather. I'm just calling to make sure my son is still employed." (Thanks so much, Dad.)
But I do think flexibility attracts and retains top talent and is possible in many parts of insurance processes. I'm thinking, in particular, of claims and underwriting. An experience manager knows what a claims rep or underwriter should be able to handle, not just based on the number of cases but on their complexity, so it should be possible to let them work largely on their own time in their own place. I'm sure other processes can allow for at least some additional measure of flexibility, too.
People should still come to the office for socialization purposes. Training of newbies probably needs to be largely done side by side. And anything that requires frequent interaction between employees obviously needs to be done in the same place at the same time — Zoom eliminates some of the need for being in the same place but by no means all.
I realize that, in many types of jobs, there's a fear that employees will slack off if they're not under close supervision, and that surely happens. But we also see how compulsive people can be about keeping up with their email and other work even during off-hours, so I'd bet some people — especially the talented and ambitious — would work even harder if motivated by more flexibility.
I harken back to an interview I did with Scott McNealy, at the time the CEO of Sun Microsystems, in 2001. In the days before everyone had a laptop they carted to and from work, McNealy had spent quite a bit of money buying home computers for his 40,000 employees. He caught some grief for the expense but seemed to me to have a pretty good justification.
"I do not want somebody at 10 o'clock at night who can't sleep, who wants to work because there's nothing good on TV, to not have the full capability to do everything he needs to do to get the job done," McNealy said.
Worth a try?
Cheers,
Paul