Transforming the Insurance Workforce to Achieve High Performance

As the insurance industry enters a soft market, insurers must transform their workforces to meet the challenges and achieve high performance. Accenture experience shows that human capital transformation programs can help insurers achieve the sustained performance improvement needed to prosper, despite cyclical downturns.

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Insurers that transform their human capital assets can achieve high performance—something that is especially important as the industry enters a period of consolidation.

The global insurance industry is entering a soft market after several years of pricing increases. To respond adequately to these growing pressures, insurers' workforces must transform.

Accenture's experience with insurance companies around the world has shown that human capital transformation programs have led to improved and sustainable business performance.

Insurers need to have the right skills and behaviors to drive high performance through learning and knowledge management.

These skills and behaviors include the need to:

• Plan and execute learning investments based on business impact.
• Ensure senior executives play a role in creating and executing a world-class learning program, including governance, measurement, management and leveraging the promise of outsourcing the learning function.
• Leverage the right blend of technologies to deliver high-impact learning at the lowest possible cost.
• Ensure learning programs meet the needs of business partners and customers as well as employees.
• Use performance management techniques to keep employees motivated and aligned with business needs, thus improving retention as well as positive impact.

Successful insurers have human capital strategies designed to deliver the right people with the right capabilities who can execute the business strategy and contribute to the drive for high performance.

To transform the performance of business-critical workforces, insurers must ask the following questions:

• Sourcing and staffing: Do I have the sourcing and staffing capabilities to find the best people from the right pool of potential recruits, and then deploy them optimally?
  
  
• Learning and knowledge management: Do my people have the right skills and knowledge to execute our strategy?
  
  
• Performance management: Are my workers properly and continually aligned with strategy?

Thereafter, they must take some important steps:

• Improve the employee selection process: Use new selection techniques and technologies to match new job profiles against potential worker pools.
  
  
• Anticipate and lessen the risks of a workforce sourcing crisis: With approximately 80 million employees approaching retirement, all companies must be considering proactive steps to anticipate and mitigate those risks.

If insurers are to meet their most important competitive challenges today, they must increase the energy and focus with which they address the workforce capabilities that are essential for success.

Achieving high performance in insurance today requires an exceptionally engaged, skilled and productive workforce: the right people, with the right skills, doing the right things to contribute to long-term success of the business.

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