How to Create Loyalty in Your Organization

Creating a positive company culture and having empathy for employees are two of the most effective ways to create loyalty within an organization, according to Emek. She also believes a company’s onboarding process is important. “A lot of companies don’t have a clear onboarding process,” Emek stated. “I suggest that when anyone joins the company, they get introduced to all the different departments, so they understand the whole company.”

Another crucial factor for creating loyalty at one’s company is to make sure employees feel like they have a purpose there. “The insurance industry, in my opinion, has a purpose for everything because we’re protecting risks,” Emek shared. “Even the smallest thing you do is what’s protecting somebody’s life, somebody’s home, somebody’s business. So, communicating the purpose is so crucial to every job if you want to keep people.”

Effects of COVID & Remote Work Expectations

While COVID definitely changed the expectations of workers when it comes to remote work, Emek thinks it is changing back. “Now [companies] are understanding that people were highly productive [working from home] during COVID because they were home all day and night,” Emek explained. “Once COVID passed and people now could go out, productivity dropped. Companies recognize that young people are not getting mentored enough by working from home 100% of the time.” According to Emek, companies are now offering more flexible work arrangements where employees are in the office three to four days a week.

Another effect of COVID is that salaries have increased within the insurance industry and beyond. “This is a good thing,” in Emek’s opinion. “The insurance industry is competing with young people going into industries that pay much better salaries than we do, so raising that salary bar is definitely going to help attract young people in this industry.” Overall, she believes the outcome of COVID has been positive on work expectations.

Managing Today’s Workforce

Emek believes insurance companies need to think differently about how to manage their workers. “I think we have some very old management constructs that we still work by,” she admitted. “One of them is the performance review, which I call a report card. Report cards are for elementary, junior high school, and high school. They are at the end of the year for the most for most companies and by the end of the year, nobody remembers everything they’ve done.” Emek recommends implementing a newer version of this in the form of monthly one-on-one meetings, where employees and managers discuss goals for that month.

Another element that needs to be changed is how companies manage personal time off (PTO). “I think when you have the right people, it’s about the outcomes [and] results,” said Emek. “People sometimes don’t recognize that it’s about the quality of the work that’s being done, not how much time you might have put in.” All in all, as long as employees get their job done, they should be able to take any PTO they need.

WAHVE: Helping Insurers Cope

WAHVE offers two talent solutions to insurers. “Our main solution, which we built the company on, is helping our retiring insurance industry professionals continue to work in their retirement,” Emek explained. “Because the truth is, people aren’t really retiring from work, they’re just retired from the office. They’re no longer on a career path; they want to have flexibility.” WAHVE has been capturing the retiring insurance industry population, qualifying them, and contracting them back out to insurance companies, retail brokers, and wholesale brokers all across the country. WAHVE has placed over 4,000 assignments over the last 13 years, from CSRs to underwriters to actuaries and even attorneys. By keeping the aging population working, WAHVE is helping the insurance industry maintain its institutional knowledge and fill that talent gap.

Another solution WAHVE released this last year is called Talent Acquisition Outsourcing. “We created bias-free, qualifying software exclusive within the insurance industry,” Emek explained. The software’s algorithm will match applicants with job ads that have similar hard and soft skill requirements by giving the applicant a score. “Then we give the client the five best-scored diverse candidate pools to hire from. So, you don’t have to look at 100 resumes and worry about your bias, because you’ll get the five most qualified scored against you.”

WAHVE also supports not-for-profits in the insurance industry that recruit talent, like the CPCU society. “We support them because we know it’s so important to bring in the young talent,” said Emek. “That’s why I built WAHVE in the first place…to help solve that problem.”

To view the full interview with Sharon Emek, please click the video above.

To view part one of this series where Emek discusses how to apply AI to solve the talent crunch and avoid its pitfalls, click here.

The post WAHVE CEO Explains How to Solve the Talent Gap and Retain Quality Talent in a Competitive Market first appeared on AAIS.

State of the Talent Gap in the Insurance Industry & Efforts to Fill It

Emek admitted the state of the talent gap in the insurance industry is complex. “It started probably in the late 1990s when carriers began to close down their insurance schools,” she said. “Also, the money was with the technology space and Wall Street, which were exploding at the time, so we didn’t attract a lot of young people.” As a result, the population in the insurance industry began to age.

According to Emek, industry professionals are beginning to realize that finding talent from four-year colleges is no longer ideal. “We have to start looking at non-traditional ways of [filling the talent gap]; maybe start looking at two-year colleges or even high school graduates,” she advised. “We should be creating more kinds of mentorship programs and internships so that people can learn and understand how powerful our industry is.” Even though the industry is beginning to look at these different methodologies for attracting young talent, the issue then becomes how to keep them. “Young people move [jobs] very quickly and the industry is used to having people with longevity.,” said Emek. “We have to rethink that because longevity might not be there going forward.”

Trends Affecting the Search for Talent

As Emek mentioned, one of the main issues affecting the industry is that young talent tends to job-hop. “This is really affecting the industry because we’re not understanding what that means,” she said. “We need to come up with a methodology to keep that job hopping within the industry, so we at least keep the talent.” Another trend is that the industry is moving to look at the underserved population for talent, like within the military. “We need to look at how to create the skills and the talent that we need,” Emek urged. “There are some companies that are setting up their own insurance schools to teach kids because the future is going to not necessarily be about a college degree, but more about the skills.”

Searching for Candidates with AI

AI’s role in finding the right candidates is a bit complicated and problematic for Emek. But AI does help when it comes to job boards like Indeed. “It looks at words in a resume and words in your job ad and it does a screening based on them,” she explained. But, according to Emek, the problem is that AI does not fully qualify the applicant, so hiring managers may end up getting applicants who are overqualified for the position. “It’s still too new [of a technology],” she claimed. “But it will evolve and there will be more sophisticated methodologies used to make sure that you’re getting better-qualified resumes.” Another issue is that AI tools exclude a lot of candidates if you leave out certain details in the job ad. “If you don’t put a salary range, you’re going to exclude people because more experienced candidates might look at the job and assume that since there’s no salary listed, it’s going to be a low salary,” Emek warned.

Advice for Hiring Managers

“Advice I would give hiring managers is to make sure job descriptions are accurate, which means that they have to communicate more with HR,” Emek suggested. “Sometimes, HR writes job ads and they don’t fully understand the hiring managers’ needs, so there is a disconnect. They really need to work together to make sure the right message is getting out there.” Emek also reminds hiring managers to not exclude candidates just because they do not possess a certain hard skill. “When you’re looking at those resumes, you have to look at what their soft skills are, because people don’t always tell the truth [about hard skills],” Emek shared. “You have to make sure you consider the soft skills of that person because many times they’re more important.” She believes too many candidates tend to get excluded because of that.

To view the full interview with Sharon Emek, please click the video above.

In part two of this series, Emek discusses how to retain quality talent in a competitive environment. Click here to watch the interview.

The post Applying AI to Solve the Talent Crunch and How to Avoid Its Pitfalls with WAHVE CEO first appeared on AAIS.

Matching the Needs of An Organization to the Wants of the Next Generation of Insurance Professionals

According to Morgan, culture is one of the key decision metrics that people use when they’re either looking for work or starting at a new company. “I think what employees are really looking for has shifted,” he surmised. “Work-life balance is really high up on the list now. COVID really motivated that to become something important. People sat back and started reevaluating what was important to them during the pandemic.” Another common need for the next generation of insurance professionals is career advancement. “It can be a real challenge for employers to ensure their employees can advance in their careers if they work remotely or even hybrid,” said Morgan. “So, I think it’s incumbent on managers to make sure that when they’re getting a new employee, they vocalize what their career path will look like.” Meaningful work is also key. “I don’t think employees want to just show up [to work],” Morgan explained. “They want to be giving back and contributing.”

Elements of a People-First Company Culture

Newman believes a people-first company culture starts with establishing strong values, shared values, and a compelling vision and mission. “A lot of companies that I’ve worked with do this as an annual exercise or they have motivational posters on the walls,” he said. “But it’s really got to be something that’s lived and talked about and brought into your [organization’s] daily, weekly, or monthly meetings.” In addition, Newman recommends investing in technology to enable teams within a company. “You’ve got to enable that team to have an effective experience, especially if you’re in a hybrid environment,” he urged. “But even if you’re not [hybrid], you need the technology that gives you the ability to have a quality experience in your meetings.” Establishing a regular cadence of in-person meetings is also critical for remote or hybrid organizations. “WSRB started doing this in 2020 alongside even more frequent Zoom and Microsoft Teams meetings,” Newman shared. “We established a strong culture by scheduling quarterly in-person meetings and monthly virtual meetings. Our business units meet monthly in person and our executives and leadership team meet weekly virtually. These frequent meetings revealed a ton of opportunities for us to improve the virtual and hybrid environment for us.”

There are great opportunities to build company culture by improving the processes and procedures that were in place pre-COVID. For example, Morgan described how WAHVE now makes performance reviews more personal, asking questions like what the employee did over the weekend, what their hobbies are, etc. He also suggests management teams create videos for new hires talking about the company and its culture. “Doing so will help new employees understand what to expect, what they’re going to be faced with in their role, and what the company is like before they even start the job,” Morgan explained.

How to Keep Remote Workers Happy, Motivated, and Productive

The key to having a happy, motivated, and productive team is to simply hire motivated positive people. “You can’t motivate the unmotivated,” Newman stated. “Give new employees a clear vision, mission, and goals to rally around. Remove any obstacles and make sure they have the tools, training, and resources they need to be successful, and then reward them when they are.” Companies that neglect to build up their people are companies that are not as effective as they can be. “At WSRB, we’re working on building the whole person to be a better person at work and outside of work,” Newman revealed. Through an anonymous all-employee survey that measured organizational effectiveness, WSRB found that it is, indeed, possible for companies to value people and get results at the same time.

For Morgan, constant communication is critical in keeping remote employees content. “In this new work environment, there’s a new layer of complexity and responsibility for management teams to make sure that there’s clear and consistent communication with focus and intent for the people that are in the office,” he said. Simultaneously, it’s important for employees who work remotely to be part of these in-office communications. “There are different ways managers can do that, whether it’s having weekly meetings, monthly meetings, or scheduling consistent check-ins.”

If you would like to view the presentation again in its entirety, please click the video above.

Questions? Please don’t hesitate to reach out to any of the featured speakers through the contact information below.

Karl Newman

President/CEO (WSRB/BuildingMetrix, Inc.)

Karl.Newman@wsrb.com

Rick Morgan

Chief Marketing Officer (WAHVE)

Rick.Morgan@wahve.com

The post Webinar: Explore Acquiring Talent & Leading a Team in a Virtual World first appeared on AAIS.

Needs of Today’s Employers & Those Seeking Employment 

While COVID has emphasized the issues surrounding hybrid work, Morgan believes it didn’t necessarily reinvent the needs of today’s employers and employees. “I think we’ve added a new layer of complexity to the whole effort of finding and qualifying talent and the expectations that employees have,” he said. “One of the main things that employees are shifting to now more than what they did before is looking for specific skills to help fill that job gap.” Morgan explained that instead of just looking strictly at someone’s resume, employers are now looking for specific skills to help their company. 

Perhaps the biggest shift with those seeking employment is the whole idea of work/life balance, which Morgan indicated is a result of the pandemic. “People reevaluated what they were doing, how they were spending time, and what their life looked like, and they found out that they really liked spending more time with their family,” he stated. 

Types of Working Environments Desired by Job Seekers 

Morgan reiterated that when it comes to the types of working environment employees seek, having the flexibility and freedom to work hybrid is top of mind. Being able to come into the office part-time and work remotely part-time is important for people that might be caregivers or those that have issues with commuting, especially in certain areas that experience heavy traffic. 

Morgan also suggested today’s workers are looking for environments that offer professional development. “One of the things I think managers have to be very careful about especially in the hybrid work environment or if they have employees that are fully remote is [creating] career paths,” he advised. 

Successful Onboarding Best Practices 

Onboarding whether it’s remote or in person isn’t all that different according to Morgan. That being said, there are definitely onboarding best practices. One of them is communication. “Communicate before the new employee comes in and is hired,” he recommended. “Talk to them about what the company culture is and what the expectations are and be very clear about what success looks like.” 

Mentoring is another best practice when it comes to onboarding. Morgan explained that when placing WAHVE contractors in different fields around the country, they don’t necessarily have a career path. “They just want to give back and are thrilled to be engaged and contribute. They became great mentors for new employees in an agency or a carrier.”   

Tips for Recruiting Talent Today 

There is a challenge with recruiting talent because there’s a huge talent gap. In order for companies to be successful in this “talent war,” Morgan suggested they have to be creative and look outside of traditional avenues for finding talent. Using social media and job boards are good options. “We’ve got companies like WAHVE that are out there for finding people that are wanting to pre-retire and can still be good team members [while filling] a talent need that a company may have.” 

What is WAHVE? 

WAHVE is a contract staffing talent solution serving the entire insurance industry that brings companies and pre-retiring professionals together. Companies get the right talent and vintage experts get to extend their careers working from home. WAHVES, or the people that are placed with a carrier or insurance agency, have at least 25 years of work experience and 10-15 years of insurance experience. Carriers will reach out to WAHVE looking for talent to hire and WAHVE uses its database of WAHVES to find people that are a good match for the company. “We’re sort of a Match.com for the insurance industry,” joked Morgan. 

To view the interview with Rick Morgan, please click the video above.

The post Acquiring & Onboarding Talent in a Virtual World with WAHVE CMO Rick Morgan first appeared on AAIS.