Balanced Growth hosted a virtual executive roundtable discussion with senior executives to discuss the challenges, unexpected benefits, and future of the impact of COVID-19 upon the Insurance and Financial Services industries. Companies who were methodically implementing disaster recovery plans were abruptly pushed into place with the onset of COVID-19, pressed to create innovative and sustainable processes out of necessity. Some of the key take-aways from this engaging virtual roundtable discussion are summarized below.
Employees quickly adapted to working in their remote virtual home office due to the power of digital resources. Jerry Lyphout, Chief Administrative Officer at Modern Woodmen of America (MWA) shared, “We were confident that all areas of the organization were able to function in a remote environment (due to prior planning). It’s worked out very well. In fact, when you look at productivity, our service levels today are as good as if not better than when we were actually in the home office”. Debbie Morgan, VP of Operations at GBU Financial Life had a different, yet still positive experience. They did not have a remote program running or access laptops, but quickly set up key employees with VPNs, multi-factor authentication, MiFi and had employees take home their work computers.
Debbie shared their innovation out of necessity, “Considering where we started from and what we accomplished in 10 days to quickly get up to 60% fully operational with quality customer service and new areas of business” was an amazing feat of ingenuity, adding, “Our employees are very comfortable, happy and productive working in their home office.”
Looking to the future, one of the concerns discussed is the loss of a ‘physical barrier’ between work and home. This can be difficult for some employees as they try to separate personal life from work. Executives also discussed concerns regarding employees not taking needed and accrued vacation time and overall mental health wellness due to the current statues of the pandemic.
Gleaning from these key executives who have a pulse on the operational side, Tom explained, “It’s all about digitally reaching out and changing your business to do that. If you’re not reducing the operational footprint then you’re behind the game”. Companies running analytics see the myths that they believed regarding the remote work environment will be faced with deciding whether to close office locations to save operational expenses or returning employees back to a public office. Tom Haertjens, IT director at MWA explained “We’re managing their expectations (regarding continuing to work remotely), because our culture is very strong. We like being centralized in one place and the advantages to this, but that genie is out of the bottle and it’s going to be very difficult to pull it back in”.
When Jason Bordui, president of Balanced Growth posed the question, ‘Could this pandemic serve as the catalyst to accelerate the insurance industry’s move toward a digital operating model?’ Chris Murumets, managing director of RGAX confirmed. One of the benefits to being pushed into this new digital trend which “everybody has been talking about digital transformation, like getting a purely digital track, which includes a digital selling of a policy,” Chris explained that innovation-focused groups suddenly have free time to try something new and are ready to experiment and be aggressive with timelines. Dave Keith confirmed, “Our agents are having to understand their livelihood is also changing so they have to adapt with the times”. Consumers are readily embracing the digital process but according to Mike Ahles, Senior VP at CFL, “It’s the field workers who are uncomfortable with technology not the consumers”.
The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed companies to create the opportunity for changed behavior and executives are excited to take advantage of this with little pushback from employees and consumers because they don’t have any other option but to accept it. Jerry Lyphout shared, “From an opportunity perspective, it’s been one of the best things to happen to us from the technology side.” Jerry continued, “The playing field has been leveled and everyone has the same dominator, now it’s the speed of how soon you can get technology in play. Twenty-five years ago smaller players couldn’t afford to purchase the technology to compete with big companies, now smaller companies can compete with the big dogs.”
Dave Keith, Chief Operating Officer at AEG, accurately summarized the conversation saying, “What we’ve been able to do quickly and well says a lot regarding how far we’ve come digitally as a society.”