Insurer Solutions: People

The digital revolution is driving the expansion of artificial intelligence and automation and disrupting the insurance value chain, from core underwriting practices to portfolio management, changing skill requirements and employment relationships. The battle for talent is intensifying with competition coming from well-established players as well as agile startups.

Why Willis Towers Watson

Getting ahead of the imminent talent crunch requires an understanding of the values and preferences of a diverse, multigenerational workforce.

To support an inclusive workplace and integrate the right total rewards, benefits and wellbeing programs in a personalized talent experience, clients need to capitalize on the force of change. Willis Towers Watson offers expert advice, data and sophisticated technological solutions to help insurers stay ahead of changing human capital requirements.

Modernizing Total Rewards

Amid the evolving expectations of a diverse, digitally-savvy workforce, new legislative developments driving change in areas such as pay equity and the need to deliver an improved ROI, insurers are under pressure to modernize their Total Rewards programs. Willis Towers Watson can work with you to identify the programs that will deliver the most value to your workforce and the best return to your organization.

Because it takes more than pay to attract and retain top insurance talent, Total Rewards must be viewed from a holistic, strategic perspective that incorporates all components – pay, benefits, wellbeing and career programs -- into your offerings.

We can help you use segmentation and survey analytics to better understand the reward preferences of key talent groups – including contingent workers – and to develop programs tailored to meet their needs. Moreover, recognizing that your employees increasingly expect to be treated like consumers in the workplace, we will help you leverage the latest technology and tools to provide more choice, flexibility and personalization to deliver a “consumer-grade” Total Rewards experience.

Given your significant investment in Total Rewards programs, it’s also important to use the right metrics to assess the results of your efforts. Our experts can work with you to determine an accurate measure of financial return as well as impact on employee attraction, retention and engagement. Organizations with more sophisticated analytic capabilities may choose to use our Total Rewards Optimization to measure the proportion of spend on key talent segments and assess which rewards have the biggest impact on employee attitudes and behaviors, reducing the risk of investing in the wrong Total Rewards programs.

A robust Total Rewards portfolio of pay, benefits, wellbeing and career programs can help set you apart from the competition, positioning your organization to stay ahead of the insurance industry’s imminent talent crunch.

Modernizing Benefits

An insurance company is only as good as the people who write its coverages, influence its customer experience, select its investments and manage its risks. Willis Towers Watson offers products, services and solutions that help high-performing organizations cultivate and grow talent, carefully balancing costs and rewards.

Employees are seeking customization and personalization of their benefits portfolios, especially as the workforce becomes more diverse. Global benefit costs and risks continue to put pressure on company budgets, and benefits technology has created opportunities to improve the employee experience and the administration of benefit plans.

Given this context, “modernizing” benefits are not purely about revisiting the portfolio of offerings; it’s also about finding more efficient ways to deliver, finance and manage benefits programs.

To modernize benefits delivery to meet today’s standards, we can help you:

• Offer a purpose-driven portfolio of benefits: Align benefits with organizational purpose and culture, as well as mission and values, to better reflect the company image and reputation.
• Optimize the financing of benefits programs: Allocate money effectively to programs employees most value and leverage global scale to get the best deal on the benefits offered.
• Use technology to engage employees and help them make informed choices: Adopting a retail-like user-friendly interface that provides employees with choice and flexibility to personalize their own experience is also key to modernizing benefits strategy and delivery.
• Gain efficiencies through operating model and administration technologies: Leverage benefits technology to improve data interface and security, and streamline administrative processes to keep pace with modernization trends.
• Use data-driven insights for informed decision making: Adopt data-driven analytics and insights to inform your benefits strategy decisions, control costs and risk, and help foster employee wellbeing.

Most importantly, don’t ever expect to tick “modernization” off your to-do list. Modernizing benefits is an ongoing concept that needs to change as your company and workforce evolves, and as the market innovates.

Future of Work

The digital revolution with its unprecedented pace of change and innovation is transforming how work gets done across the insurance value chain. It is now possible for insurers to deconstruct jobs into component tasks that can be allocated to employee and non-employee talent anywhere in the world or shared between humans and machines based on the most effective and productive ways to get the work done. Willis Towers Watson can help you capture the opportunities in this new world of work.

Our future of work offering helps organizations manage how, where and by whom work gets done, including by automation. It addresses the requirements for new ways of working, identifying emerging skills and drivers of engagement for all your insurance talent: employees, free agents and contingent workers.

We provide approaches and tools that assist you in tackling critical challenges related to the future of work:

• Reinventing Jobs: Assess the work in your organization with the goal of deconstructing select jobs, analyzing new work alternatives and reconstructing new, more human jobs.
• Work Strategy: Define how the new work will be done across your organization (e.g., reconstruction of jobs, AI and robotics).
• Work Architecture: Develop the core architecture and leveling approach for jobs, work and curation of skills.
• Reskilling Pathways: As skills become the currency of the labor market, ensure continuous reskilling of talent as work is reinvented.
• Talent Value Proposition: Align total rewards with the various means through which work is done to engage all types of talent, employees and non-employees.
• Contingent Workforce Management: Define the types of talent required in your organization, the governance and control processes and work life cycle.
• Flexible Work: Design work arrangements to engage and sustain talent as well as address inclusion and diversity objectives.

Insurers who can navigate the many emerging options for getting work done stand to gain a significant competitive advantage in an evolving workplace.

Integrated Wellbeing

Willis Towers Watson helps clients unlock the business value of employee wellbeing, boosting the effectiveness of Total Rewards and the talent value proposition, engaging employees and improving their performance and productivity. We work with clients to develop an integrated wellbeing strategy across four dimensions – physical, emotional, financial and social – to help shape their employees’ experience. As a result, companies realize a healthy workforce culture that’s aligned with overall organizational goals and the company’s talent value proposition.

Our approach starts by setting clear objectives for your wellbeing initiatives that leverage your company’s assets, brand and value. Then, we measure wellbeing, tying results back to your purpose and vision.

Willis Towers Watson can work with you to:

• Connect the four dimensions of wellbeing
• Entrench wellbeing in your business culture and acumen
• Put employee wants and needs at the center of the employee experience
• Put the employee experience at the heart of the talent value proposition
• Nudge, do not judge
• Leverage technology to support the needs of employees as consumers
• Move on from financial incentives
• Use the workplace environment to promote healthy behavior

The differentiated strategies we help organizations create enables them to better engage employees and motivate behavior change that ultimately reduces longer-term health care costs, increases savings and enables employees to bring their best selves to work.

Target Operating Model

In a rapidly changing world where insurers are facing disruption, owing to growing demand for digital innovation, insurance companies are being forced to reexamine their organization and operating model. This is resulting in greater ambition for companies to drive customer centricity and foster digital innovation and data.

Our global insurance industry credentials and expertise married with our unique and proven capabilities in organizational design deliver best in class solutions — we help our clients adopt a modern operating model to successfully achieve their business goals.

Our solutions develop an effective bridge between strategy (what needs to get done) and execution (how and where it gets done), resulting in greater efficiencies and an aligned organization. The framework we provide to clients includes:

• Setting the project foundation
• Establishing future state vision and evaluation of options, including:
• Market insight
• High-level organizational structure design options
• Option appraisal and selection of preferred design
• Organizational structure
• Functional charters
• Producing a blueprint report around design options assessed against design principles and appraisal criteria
• Developing a high-level implementation roadmap that highlights the key items necessary to embed the new structure into the business.