- 03 May 2023
- Managing the Future of Work
Workforce coverage: How Zurich Insurance protects its skills base
Bill Kerr: Insurance firms are scrambling to modernize as they wrestle with environmental, political, and economic instability, alongside rapid technological change. In adopting new tools and processes, they also face the challenge of retaining valuable institutional knowledge, while abandoning outmoded methods. Is the industry covered when it comes to its workforce needs?
Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Sally Henderson, Head of Talent and Learning at Zurich Insurance. The 150-year-old global firm is in the midst of an ambitious upskilling and reskilling effort, with an emphasis on hiring from within. We’ll talk about how insurance jobs are changing, how companies can maintain core competencies in underwriting and assessing, while injecting new skills and talent. We’ll also talk about Zurich’s leadership strategy, its approach to environmental, social, and governance issues, and the role of artificial intelligence. Welcome to the podcast, Sally.
Sally Henderson: Hi, Bill. Thank you very much for having me.
Kerr: Sally, let’s begin with a little bit of your background and your path to becoming the Group Head of Talent and Learning at Zurich Insurance.
Henderson: I’m an HR leader with 25 years’ experience now working in HR, and as you said, my role is Group Head of Talent and Learning based at Zurich Switzerland, our global headquarters. I started my career in the U.K., firstly in manufacturing before jumping into insurance. I worked various HR business partnering roles within the UK Zurich Insurance business. I then moved to take on a regional leadership role as Head of HR for our corporate business in EMEA. And then six years ago, I moved to the headquarters, where I really took on my first global remit, firstly heading up talent management, and then I’ve also been Global HRBP [Global HR Business Partner] for some of our assurance functions here at the group before moving into this role.
Kerr: Let’s maybe start with painting for us the overall talent picture at Zurich Insurance, and what are some of the big priorities that your team is grappling with?
Henderson: We have a set of strategic imperatives, and the first one is very much about what we call fueling Zurich’s talent engine. And that’s really based on our very strong commitment to an ambition around people’s sustainability, which is all about creating an environment where our employees can really grow, thrive, and have a really life-long learning journey with us. It’s also about how we can continue to improve our ability to identify, assess, and grow high-potential talent, particularly for those critical areas of insurance, those capabilities that really differentiate us as an industry, and how we do that from much earlier in their career. And then our second big strategic imperative is around optimizing the employee experience. And that’s where—you mentioned in the introduction about our leadership ambitions. Definitely one of the key pillars of our focus is, how do we ensure that our leaders of our people are equipped to deal with the evolving needs and changing environment that they’re working in to really bring out the best in our employees. And then about shifting to a skills-based employee growth journey and really about how we then continue to, through our people’s sustainability ambitions, continue to grow and develop our employees.
Kerr: Well, like many industries, insurance is trying to attract and cultivate digital and analytical skills in greater abundance. Talk to us about some of the specifics you’re doing toward recruiting and training in that area.
Henderson: This is definitely a need for us. This is an industry that perhaps hasn’t been as quick to digitalize. And that’s definitely something we are now on a mission to ensure that our employees are able to support us with our ambitions to grow and to build those digital analytical capabilities. And we are doing that through two channels. So one is very much about how do we develop those skills in our own employees today. And then the second is where we’ve done some strategic hiring, some targeted recruitment of those skills that we just can’t grow quickly enough in our own internal base. So let me be a bit more practical about what we’ve done. One of the things we have launched is a digital mastery program. And it’s a foundational program that’s available to all of our employees. And this really is acknowledging that every employee across the Zurich organization is interfacing with customers, is using more and more data, regardless of what their role is today, and the demand for faster, speedier and more accessible and simple information and products. It really requires our employees to understand and to have the skills to be able to leverage our digital capabilities. It’s a short course that’s open to everyone, and it really explains the digital revolution. It will teach employees about six technologies impacting the way we’re working, and it introduces new ways of working that will prepare our employees for a digital transformation journey. And that’s available to everybody. And then on the recruitment side, we have done some quite significant recruitment activity to bring in those data skills, those data scientists, data analysts, and we’ve really looked at pools of talent across the organization, where we can then really attract those people and bring them in. One example is we’ve got a hub in Barcelona, which is really quite a powerhouse for us of digital capability and technology skill sets.
Kerr: When you’re bringing in the outside digital talent, is there typically an effort to try to integrate them with the insurance skill sets and the very classical important things for your industry base? Or is some of the digital talent being able to mostly focus on those particular skills?
Henderson: It’s mostly focusing on those particular skills. I think, for our industry, we have those areas that are our core capability that really define us as insurance, and they’re really important to us, and we need to protect, nurture, and evolve them as the insurance industry shifts. So an obvious area there is underwriting. What we then need is to complement that, our digital capabilities that are able to serve our customers, provide platforms, distribution channels, enable product development that allows us to keep up with the pace of our customer needs. That doesn’t necessarily require them to be insurance experts. It requires them to understand the needs and then bring their skills to our environment. I think it’s really important that we allow the two skills to coexist and to complement each other. I think it’s also fair to say, when we’re attracting talent into our industry that are really high-quality data and digital capabilities, they don’t necessarily look to insurance as the first place to be employed. And so one of the things that we’ve really worked on is, what’s the proposition for the skill set that we are trying to attract? And it is the opportunity to really support us on a transformation journey. That doesn’t mean them becoming insurance experts; it really means them being able to enable us.
Kerr: I think it’s fascinating to think about the traditional insurance and the digital skills coming together. When we have a group of 10, do we tend to have somebody that’s got the insurance expertise and the digital coming together at that level, or is it more you can have even independent teams of those experts?
Henderson: They need to coexist and complement each other, number one. Number two, I think our organization is one that’s built on being quite highly collaborative, and more and more, it’s less about fixed organizational structures, but more about bringing people together at the point at which we need to bring those skills together. Generally, we would have underwriters in an underwriting team, and we would have our technology core teams in a technology team. But as they operate, they come together on teams all the time. I think probably just the add-on is going back to our previous question about how do we train. There’s also something that’s really important about the reskilling ambitions and the people’s sustainability ambitions that we have as an organization about wanting to continue to evolve with the skill set of our whole organization. Technology skill is being brought into our whole organization, but clearly the expertise sits with those core experts.
Kerr: Sally, can we also maybe talk a bit about Zurich’s HR automation strategy and its talent platform? And in particular, you made a choice to internally source a lot of these technologies. So walk us through that decision.
Henderson: We have a really strong commitment to sustainability at Zurich, and we’ve defined that really as three pillars of our sustainability commitment. So one is to our customers, one is to our planet, and then one is to our people. Our people sustainability ambition is really about future proofing our people to enable them to thrive. Our skills that we have today aren’t necessarily the ones we’re going to need in five years’ time, even a year’s time. So how do we ensure that we can continue to refresh those skills [so] that our employees stay absolutely fit for purpose for their roles today, but also that we can offer those careers going forward? We have three real focus areas. One is about continuing to grow the skills of our people and, therefore, offer careers to our people. One is about ensuring that we’ve got a diverse workforce and an inclusive environment in which they can thrive. And then the third commitment there is around our well-being—that means that our people really can thrive and grow. When we hire, we want to do more and more sourcing of talent from inside, but it also means that we need to ensure those skills are fresh. We are launching, and we’ve been building out a platform we call “My Journey.” And My Journey will enable all of our employees to assess their own skills, match their own skills to job opportunities, identify skill gaps—both against their jobs today but also against future ambition jobs—and then also connect that to both learning opportunities but also to growth opportunities from an experience point of view. Because we still firmly believe most learning is done through experiences. And the other thing about this platform that we’ve also connected into is something we call “My 70 Percent,” offering people short-term assignments, projects, part-time experiences, and how we democratize that so that people can put their own hand up for these opportunities. It really is how do we technology-enable simplify the whole thing so that employees can navigate their way through knowing what they need to know, how do they solve gaps and how do they really own their own career.
Kerr: Sally, I want to turn the attention to a place where that can sometimes create friction, which is a senior leader who doesn’t necessarily want their employee to leave and go and work for another part of the organization. So what was the thought process and ways of promoting this strategy among senior management?
Henderson: So in 2022, we achieved an internal hiring ratio of 71 percent, and that was an increase from 21 of 68 percent. So we are nicely on track for moving more and more toward our ambition in terms of our internal hiring ratios. What’s helping us to gain buy-in is a real commitment in our DNA to sustainability and recognizing that the world is shifting, and our employees will need to keep themselves on point. I think the other thing we’ve really definitely seen is, through the last couple of years, there are definitely some markets where we’ve had a talent challenge. We’ve seen incredible competition for our skilled people in certain markets. We are an industry that’s got skill sets at our core that have been built off years of experience, and we won’t have the luxury of years of experience for those coming into our industry today. There’s a real acknowledgment that, through those different pieces of information, we need to be much more open-minded as to how do we retain our talent, protect our skill set, and enable our people to be able to unlock the future. Add to that, we’ve then set ourselves some ambitions, and one of those ambitions is the internal hiring metric. It’s an ambition and it’s one that we’re tracking on a regular basis. It certainly helps to focus the mindsets of our leaders around, “Actually do I really need to go outside for this? Can I be more open to offering this opportunity to other people?” And then I think, perhaps, one other piece I would add to that, where this scenario you asked me in the question, what really drives a manager to release their best person to another job somewhere else? I think, in addition to all those pieces that drive a manager to, I think, what’s really beneficial about this platform, we’re enabling the employee to take ownership. We’re enabling the employee to make informed choices, and actually less reliance, therefore, on my manager knows what the next role is for me and they’re able to unlock that for me. Because, actually, we are a huge organization with so much opportunity. Relying on a single manager to be able to do that for their team is almost inhibiting, actually. So that’s where we are really creating that empowerment for all.
Kerr: So, Sally, the career arc that you have described for employees and this life-long employability has got obviously a big draw for the talent. As you think about the company as a whole, does this translate into lower cost for the employee base? Other savings like that?
Henderson: It’s not driven by cost saving. But what I would say is that there is an additional benefit to us, which is much more about the transition and smoothness and business continuity. When you hire in external talent, you have the onboarding, you have the time lag, it takes a lot longer for someone to get up to speed, because they have to get to understand not only the role they’re understanding, but they’re also having to understand our organization and the dynamics and the culture. And, therefore, in truth, the time it takes for somebody to be really performing is a lot slower and often a lot more disruptive because it takes longer. Whereas when we are hiring from within, that transferability, the speed of which we can transfer people and get them up and running and onboarded into the role is so much quicker. And you’ve also got the safety net that they remain in the organization for the person who’s backfilled them to be able to come to.
Kerr: As you think about the skills taxonomy that you’re describing, I’d love a little bit of reflection on how much that is very specific to Zurich Insurance in your setting, versus one that has greater general application across industry spaces.
Henderson: It’s definitely a big topic of discussion in HR circles at the moment. We’ve gone down the road of developing our own skills framework or taxonomy. Why did we do that? We did that because we really wanted something that our leaders felt was relevant to our organization, relevant to our employees, that people would pay attention, they would recognize the skills, and that they would really be on point for us that would then drive meaningfulness, it would drive purpose. How we’ve gone about doing that, really practically, is we talk about job families in our organization. So really simply, it’s about how we almost divide up the landscape by way of profession. So a finance job family is an obvious one. And assembly we’ve got underwriting job families, et cetera, et cetera. And what we’ve done is we’ve worked with leaders of those different job families, and we’ve talked through what are the skills that are critical to be successful in this function. And then we’ve started from that top level; we’ve then broken it down. We’ve broken it down into four competency levels where you start with a beginner level right the way through to expert. We’ve got a standard definition for all four levels, where, as you can imagine, an expert level skill set is somebody who’s really an independent, almost a thought leader in that space, enabled to coach and guide others versus somebody who is at entry level, they’re starting to get some understanding under supervision. And then what we’ve done is try to map them to the different jobs. We’ve tried to keep it as simple and as practical as possible, but it’s got to be defined enough that when an employee goes into this platform—and this is the goal—when an employee goes into this platform, there are a set of skills that come up on the screen that they assess themselves against, which are relevant enough. They might not be 100 percent perfectly describing the job, but they’re relevant enough that the employee engages with it, sees benefit in going through this, and connects to the content that comes out. I think the positive has been, we’ve got some real buy-in and we’ve got some really meaningful content. So we’ve also supplemented this with learning academies.
Kerr: That’s a very powerful lever there. Another place you’ve been innovative is around your apprenticeship programs. Can you talk a little bit about them?
Henderson: Absolutely. We do want to grow our own talent, but on the other hand, we also recognize that we have some commitment to or belief in being able to create the next generation of insurance professionals. We’ve embraced a number of different apprenticeship programs, and they’re quite localized. So they’re quite localized to the normal market practices and also the education systems. We’ve also joined the Global Apprenticeship Network [GAN], and that’s been really helpful in driving discussions globally around how skill development and apprenticeships can work for the future. If I look across 2022, across the organization, if I focus on those main markets, we are hiring in approximately 400 apprentices every year, just to give you some sense of scale. A couple of markets where we’re particularly active on apprenticeships is in the U.K., in Switzerland, and in the U.S. We’re certainly not limited to those. And really the aim of these is to allow our newly joining the insurance industry to have a really good grounded breadth in what we do. It’s really seen as an entry level into an insurance career. And interestingly, whilst a big proportion of our apprenticeships are for people who are really fresh into their careers—so they’re coming straight from school—we’ve also embarked on apprenticeships for people who are at any stage but wanting a new career.
Kerr: This multigenerational approach sounds really relevant in an era where increasingly we have older workforces, aging populations and bringing people back into the workplace that have stepped out for childcare reasons or others along the path.
Henderson: And I think for us, it’s really showing us proof points, because we’ve got people who come in with just such a diverse experience, mindset, background, and are so hungry to learn. I think it’s been a great way of us being able to diversify our talent and at the same time to be able to bring in new people into the industry and get some fresh perspectives.
Kerr: With these different modes of learning and also the emphasis on skills and coming up with your own taxonomy and approach to that, is that changing the role or relevance of traditional degrees for Zurich?
Henderson: It’s great to have people who come through that traditional academic route blended with people who are coming in straight from school or people who are coming in having already done one or two careers and with different industry experiences and possibly completely different backgrounds. And it’s that collective skill set, knowledge, experience, mindset that, really, we see so much power in.
Kerr: Your personal career profile spans several countries. Likewise, Zurich has operations on a global basis, and the firm has a very strong commitment to environmental, social, governance [ESG] goals and diversity, equity, inclusion [DE&I] efforts. How does that play out across different divisions or geographies? Clearly, you’re pointing in the same direction in each market, but are there different hurdles that you face or different implementation styles?
Henderson: We are an organization which has got very much market-led propositions for our employees and our customers, and that is very much to reflect the societies in which we operate, the practices, the different needs of our customers. If I take, for example, our goal around diversity, how our workforce looks in all those different markets and the challenges we face and where we may want to increase our ambitions differ quite significantly. In some markets, we’ve got perhaps a more aging workforce, and our challenge is how do we blend that with some next-generation hires. In other areas, it might be that we’re still very much focused on how do we continue to accelerate the development of our gender diversity. I think the overall ambition is one of, ultimately, us committing to that diversity, that inclusion, the equity, and the belonging. How that shows up in terms of our initiatives definitely does differ by market.
Kerr: In any digital transformation of the business, a lot of it comes down to leaders and leadership and helping the people that are managing the workforce to adopt the new approaches and models. I’d love for you to reflect with this a little bit on your programs and your incentives and the wraparound supports that you give to the leaders at Zurich for them on this journey.
Henderson: If I go back to our fundamental talent strategy is to grow our own people and our people’s sustainability commitment, that translates into, firstly, our leaders really need to support that, enable that, work really closely with their team members to support them in their journey. But there’s also something really much more fundamental about what we look for in our leaders around much more focused on a much more human-centric leadership, actually. So building trust with their teams, being much more purpose-led in what we do, and being able to empower employees much more. There’s no one way of managing a team. Hybrid working, which is something that, within Zurich, we’ve embraced—means we’ve got very different ways of working across teams and leaders need to manage through that and engage hearts and minds of employees, through. Sharing perhaps a more practical example of something that’s really worked well for us. We’ve definitely moved away from the traditional classroom-based leadership programs. We’ve run two programs. One is a program which is called “Global Conversations,” and they were our manager series of “Global Conversations: inspiring trust, inspiring belonging, inspiring well-being.” We brought in speakers who were from a very different context to us to really share their stories, their journey, and some of the learnings they’ve had in their life—just to inspire that conversation. It was a conversation about what are my challenges, what are yours, listening to that speaker, what does that mean? And similarly, we did something with our top leadership team, what we call our “Group Leadership Team,” which is our top 120 leaders. And again, once a quarter last year and the year before, we brought the leaders together in a virtual forum, and it was a conversation. One of them was about innovation and technology. So where we brought our executive committee members into it to almost do a prompt thought-starter and then facilitating a conversation among 120, using that content to be able to engage hearts and minds on our direction and spark conversation and challenge each other.
Kerr: Sounds like a great program. You mentioned hybrid work model, and earlier we’ve also connected to employee wellness. As you think about the pandemic and the emergence from the pandemic, what were some of the impacts it had on Zurich and policies that have stuck around?
Henderson: I think we learned a lot through the pandemic. We are not unusual in that we transferred overnight to virtual working. And going back to technology, the upskilling required to do that, and the new platforms continue to come, actually, because we continue to operate in varying degrees of virtual operation. And in a global organization like ours, the byproduct of it, which we didn’t anticipate was it actually connected us much more as a global organization, because that requirement to be able to go somewhere to connect was suddenly not possible. I think there was a real connection and opening of channels and an opening of much more, that broader team spirit, which we perhaps hadn’t anticipated. But beyond that, I think there were a few areas we really focused on. We did focus very much on our well-being of our colleagues during the pandemic. The mental well-being, the physical, the social, and the financial well-being. As we’ve come through it, which is perhaps much more current to where we are today, as we are in coming up to almost April 2023, we’ve established a new way of working. And I’d say, in our organization, that’s pretty well embedded. We have some principles that we’ve got that are global, and they very much focus on the importance of collaboration, and connecting is very much there. Our customers’ needs and our business needs have to come first, and that needs to shape the working pattern that we moved into. But, actually, hybrid working is something that we have the appetite to be able to do, and that’s translated slightly differently by market, but with those principles in mind. The value of colleagues being able to connect with customers is still there, and some of that is really advantageous by being done in-person, but recognizing the value of virtual working, too. So that blend is working well for us.
Kerr: We’re recording this in March 2023 and the world is abuzz about artificial intelligence and its latest manifestations that we’re seeing. How is Zurich using it for hiring and applicant tracking? And also, as you think about this as a skillset that you want to recruit and train for, what’s your approach to AI?
Henderson: We are using AI in quite a few ways, to do a lot of the mapping on our platform that enables our employees to be able to map the skills to jobs. It’s a broad space and it’s definitely an area that shows up a lot in recruitment. We see lots of new technologies in the recruitment world. And there are benefits, but there are also some risks associated with that. We consider our position fairly carefully when we think about deploying AI into our recruitment process to ensure that we are still selecting the right candidates for us, that we are still ensuring that there is no bias seeping through because of the technology. So that lens on diversity is really critical for us. So, for example, this year we are beginning to implement an automated AI-driven online interview scheduling. And it supports us being able to do the scheduling process, puts the candidate in the driver’s seat, which also means that they’ve got far more transparency on when things are happening, they can self-select when it works for them. And that enhances the candidate experience. So that’s one way, as an example, where we are deploying AI.
Kerr: Sally, as we get to the end of our podcast, any other key trends that you and Zurich are focused in for the next few years as you think about talent and the world of work?
Henderson: I think talent generally as a whole topic remains really core. It’s one that we continue to focus on—retaining and growing our talent. Our employee promise is let’s grow together. It really is at the core of what we’re all about. I think that skill-building journey, it’s a journey we absolutely see as being in our future. The days of us putting something in place and tick that box that is solved is just, they’re gone. I think that’s the underpinning—continuous focus on development and that shifting landscape of development. I think employee well-being will continue to be something we need to watch for. With that challenging environment that we are working externally, there is still a lot of volatility in our society today. And then combined with the speed at which things are changing, I think that’s something we need to continue to watch out for, our employee well-being. And then I think just our talent marketplace. Our people is really Zurich sells—our promise, our knowledge, and making sure that we protect those skills, protect our people and continue to engage them and enable them to grow a career with Zurich is really at the forefront of our minds.
Kerr: Sally Henderson is the Group Head of Talent and Learning at Zurich Insurance. Sally, thanks so much for joining us today.
Henderson: Thank you.
Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.