How COVID can drive diversity in insurance

The insur­ance sec­tor has long lagged behind on diver­si­ty and inclu­sion (D&I) and his­tor­i­cal­ly has been seen by many as inac­ces­si­ble.  But as coro­n­avirus has sig­nalled an end to the phys­i­cal office space, at least for the time being, it’s clear there’s only so long the “old boys’ club” can sur­vive.

Could remote work­ing now pro­vide a new oppor­tu­ni­ty to dri­ve D&I in the insur­ance sec­tor? And what can busi­ness lead­ers do to make it hap­pen?

Changing the tide for gender diversity

When alle­ga­tions of harass­ment and bul­ly­ing at Lloyd’s of Lon­don sur­faced last year, the organ­i­sa­tion became the cen­tre of a media storm. A sur­vey con­duct­ed by the Bank­ing Stan­dards Board on behalf of Lloyd’s found the “expe­ri­ence of women is much less pos­i­tive than it is for men”.

Out of the 480 peo­ple who had respond­ed to its sur­vey, 8 per cent said they had either encoun­tered sex­u­al harass­ment them­selves or wit­nessed it. Lloyd’s of Lon­don chief exec­u­tive John Neal said he was both “dis­ap­point­ed and upset” by the find­ings and vowed to enforce diver­si­ty quo­tas to have 30 per cent of top roles tak­en by women.

The sit­u­a­tion high­light­ed long-stand­ing prob­lems with­in the sec­tor as a whole. But Susan Vin­ni­combe, pro­fes­sor of women and lead­er­ship at Cran­field Uni­ver­si­ty, says while Lloyd’s of Lon­don has shone a spot­light on harass­ment in the insur­ance sec­tor, dis­crim­i­na­tion tends to be a far big­ger issue.

“The over­ar­ch­ing prob­lem is large­ly one of bias. Change is slow­ly tak­ing place, but when you’ve only ever been used to see­ing the same types of char­ac­ters, unfor­tu­nate­ly this can lead to oth­ers behav­ing dif­fer­ent­ly towards them and mak­ing assump­tions,” she says.

Focusing on results, not just hours worked

Vin­ni­combe adds that these prob­lems have been exac­er­bat­ed by the industry’s par­tic­u­lar attach­ment to tra­di­tion­al work­ing pat­terns. Rather than pay­ing atten­tion to spe­cif­ic results, employ­ees were expect­ed to be in the office, with pro­gres­sion and pay ris­es award­ed to those who were arriv­ing ear­ly and work­ing late.

“There’s nev­er been an issue with attract­ing women in the insur­ance indus­try, but it could be dis­as­trous for the tal­ent pipeline,” she says. “There’s a dan­ger of los­ing peo­ple fur­ther on in their careers if they want to start fam­i­lies because of an out­dat­ed idea that being present equates to being a high per­former.

“Of course, the pan­dem­ic has caused peo­ple from across sec­tors to ques­tion this. Almost all organ­i­sa­tions have been forced to start focus­ing on results rather than work­ing pat­terns, which most of them start­ed doing a long time ago.”

Char­lotte Wood­worth, gen­der direc­tor at Busi­ness in The Com­mu­ni­ty, empha­sis­es there is no chance of return­ing to the old ways that were preva­lent in the insur­ance indus­try. “Wide­spread home work­ing has let the remote-work­ing genie out of the bot­tle. Many of the sec­tors like insur­ance that have pre­vi­ous­ly strug­gled with home work­ing, even on a rel­a­tive­ly lim­it­ed basis, have been forced to adjust and the signs are we won’t go back to a full-time, in-office cul­ture for a long time, if ever,” she says.

Creating a more inclusive culture post-COVID

There are signs that the pan­dem­ic is already result­ing in a push for improved D&I in insur­ance. Research from Cul­ture Shift found that almost three quar­ters (73 per cent) of employ­ees sur­veyed from across the finance and insur­ance indus­tries said work­place cul­ture had improved since mov­ing to remote work­ing.

More than half (54 per cent) of respon­dents said remote work­ing had a pos­i­tive effect on their work-life bal­ance. Vin­ni­combe com­ments: “I’d say that if you’re tak­ing steps to cre­ate a real­ly inclu­sive work­place through intro­duc­ing remote work­ing or a less hier­ar­chi­cal way of work­ing, every­one will ben­e­fit.”

Driving D&I initiatives from the top

Emma Fran­cis, D&I lead at Zurich Insur­ance UK, says the organ­i­sa­tion has been aware of the eth­i­cal and com­mer­cial ben­e­fits of flex­i­ble work­ing poli­cies for some time. The excep­tion­al chal­lenge brought on by COVID-19, how­ev­er, has increased a sense of trust among Zurich employ­ees.

“It has taught us that off-site work­ing is pos­si­ble in even the sce­nar­ios we thought wouldn’t be pos­si­ble – cus­tomer meet­ings, large staff gath­er­ings and so on – and our employ­ees tell us they feel clos­er to their man­ag­er and more empow­ered and trust­ed to do their work,” says Fran­cis.

In terms of improv­ing the hir­ing process, the pan­dem­ic has accel­er­at­ed improve­ments that might have oth­er­wise tak­en years to imple­ment. Con­cern over the cost and time asso­ci­at­ed with chang­ing recruit­ment has proved unfound­ed. “Since lock­down we have done a lot of new things using tech­nol­o­gy, from recruit­ing all our grad­u­ates and appren­tices through vir­tu­al assess­ments and inter­views, to deliv­er­ing all employ­ee ‘town hall’ ses­sions, involv­ing some 1,500 par­tic­i­pants, using Microsoft Teams,” she says.

“We think it’s made us adopt process­es that might have tak­en five years to embed in the old world, in a mat­ter of months. We are excit­ed about what the increased accep­tance of flex­i­ble and remote work­ing means for diver­si­ty and inclu­sion, and think we will nev­er go back to the old way of doing things.”