Keith Stonell, Vice President, EMEA, Guidewire Software
“Work from home if you can,” may be today’s maxim, especially with the pandemic’s second wave hitting our communities. This guideline cannot be argued against if we are to control coronavirus and confirms how home working is becoming a permanent way of working for millions, even after some offices were re-opened briefly this summer.
People have wanted more flexibility in their lives for some time and the largely positive experiences many businesses have reported in the move to home-working means that flexibility is likely to be the norm once this pandemic recedes.
For a sector like insurance which can be conservative and slow to adapt, sometimes, the sudden pivoting and then permanency of working from home could have been expected to have been difficult to do and sustain.
In fact, insurers have adapted to the new normal with alacrity. Centuries old institutions, like the London Market and Lloyd’s of London, have discovered that the world has not fallen apart following the adoption of radical new processes and they have been very successful in doing so.
As it turns out, there are plenty of tools available for insurers to do their jobs from home. And for many insurance companies, such as Direct Insurance Group and Zurich UK, the working from home model has real potential to become a more permanent fixture.
The maturity of cloud adoption and hybrid environments in the insurance industry has also come at just the right time. Considering brokers and claims handlers specifically, it is reassuring that many have not experienced problems with accessing customer information or being able to model risks properly, thanks to the fact that they are not chained to the legacy systems and green screens that were once commonplace.
But that is not to say that we are entering a new nirvana. Working from home is a great boon for those lucky enough to have access to high quality internet connections and enough space at home to have a dedicated office or workstation. For others, like the younger workers who are so critical to the future of insurance, the experience can be a disadvantage.
This reality was brought home to me when I recently spoke to my own insurance broker. There were several domestic interruptions to our call: she apologised and was certainly uncomfortable with the disruptions. It made me think that, if her company adopted a long-term work from home policy, it would make her job a far less easy experience for her and perhaps her clients.
The people who directly interact with customers in this industry typically live in pricey, inner-city environments. They find themselves living with friends, partners, or their families, in small homes where dedicated space to work is a luxury. There is noise, people in the background of video calls, internet service interruptions, and Zoom fatigue.
Undoubtedly, working from home models have some major upsides for insurers. They can shrink their building and operations costs, which with harsh recessionary economic headwinds forecast is attractive to CEOs and CFOs everywhere. Some forecasts suggest that as much as one fifth of all office space could be abandoned across all businesses, and insurance organisations will certainly be included in this figure.
Yet, corporate decisions to move to flexible and remote working practices must be people-centric in terms of both customers and employees. Whether my broker or claims handler is in the office or at home should be invisible to me as a customer because, frankly, I do not want to be discussing the specifics of a sensitive claim or disclosing personal information if I can see or hear someone in the background of the video call.
Insurers must think about what their staff need to do their jobs effectively, regardless of where they are, and the move to working from home is throwing up some difficult questions. For example, if people now need the space and resources for an office space at home, who, in the long term, should benefit from the money saved on rent, energy bills and office technology? Plenty would argue it should not be shareholders or company bosses. Yet it also could be argued that employees should see at least some of the benefit either in salaries or allowances for working from home equipment.
While the second wave of the pandemic means home-working continues, it seems likely that flexible hybrid working practices will emerge that combine home and office. Either way it will be vital that employers support their staff with the right tools and resources they need, so they can operate sustainably and continue to deliver the vital services they provide to businesses and individuals alike.
