To Us, HR Means Healthy Relationships

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By: Kurt Diederich

The good news is we’re in the New Year. The bad news is we still have some of the challenges we had in the old year. More specifically, we have to determine whether return to office (RTO), work from home (WFH) or a hybrid model work best for our companies and for our people.

While we weren’t deliberately trying to create a new abbreviation, we were deliberately trying to create a model that varies slightly from those models and that entails the best of both and then some: We decided to call our model work from office (WFO). To us, that means we have to take care of the people who take care of our customers and our business.

Two-Way Streets

To earn the right to work here, our people have to be committed and conscientious. To earn the right have them here, we have to make sure:

  1. Total compensation is meaningful and competitive: The combination of salary and benefits has to attract the talent we want.
  2. Recognition and rewards are consistent: Performance-based reviews, rewards, and promotions have to be suitable to retain the talent we want.
  3. Policies and procedures are clear, current, and accessible: We can’t expect people do know what to do, what to expect, what’s acceptable, and what’s not if we don’t tell them.
  4. Career opportunities are clear and available: In addition to letting people know what’s expected of them, we have to let them know what’s possible for them. And we have to be engage in those conversations with them.
  5. They know their feedback is welcome. Employee feedback: We can’t know what our people want and need — and we can’t know what contributions they’re capable of making — if we don’t converse with them. “We’re only as good as our people” is so much more than a cliché. It has to be.
  6. We provide the necessary flexibility: Open-ended flex time isn’t manageable or constructive. But we give our people the time they need for family commitments, necessary appointments, vacations, and PTO. Those aren’t gifts. They’re signs of respect and appreciation for what our people do every day.

That’s Healthy

We’re successful. We’re growing. And we’re committed to making Finys a place in which people feel comfortable, fulfilled, recognized, and rewarded. Since those things are true, we believe WFO is fair and favorable for all of us. And we believe it creates healthy relationships.

The Digital Promise: Part One

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A recent post from Insurance Thought Leadership — “A Wake-Up Call for Insurers” — says this, in part:

Insurers have been talking about going digital for a good decade now, and seemingly everyone says the pandemic greatly accelerated the trend over the past three years by forcing us all to interact remotely. Yet ACORD says it found in a recent survey of the 200 largest insurers worldwide that “fewer than 25% have truly digitized the value chain, while more than 10% are not appreciably leveraging digital technologies within their current business processes. Further, more than half of the insurers in the study are still exploring how digitization can be applied against their business model.”

This is like saying you can build a skyscraper from the lightning rod down. No, you can’t. Likewise, you can’t take insurers to task for having failed to adopt a technological capability — digitalization — for which no foundation had been constructed. Here’s why we think that:

Let’s Go To the Replay

The working environments seeming to be promised by digital transformation would have been more fairly and constructively undertaken if:

  1. The modern core system with which attendant digital capabilities have to interact had been in place first.
  2. Carriers hadn’t attempted to put the digital cart before functional horse (see #1).
  3. Startups and insurtechs had paid more attention to the intricacies and peculiarities of insurance than they paid to the proverbial customer journey.

Instead, the industry allowed itself to fall for calls for AI preparedness that were grossly premature. So, it hired data scientists on staff to optimize AI and data strategies. It got way ahead of itself with driverless vehicles without paying due heed to how to insure them, whether to insure the the driver, the passenger, or the automaker, along with the related, litigation concerns. And it fell head over heels in infatuation with blockchain and cryptocurrency.

What’s the Price?

There are several lessons to be learned here. Chief among them is this: Choose your experts wisely. It may not be fair to say all the ostensible experts were wrong, per se. But they were misleadingly, enthusiastically premature. Had they known a bit more about the business of insurance, insurance companies could have made significantly more progress in fulfilling the digital promise. And had insurance companies chosen their experts more wisely, they likely would have saved significant amounts of time and money.

With any luck, we’ll be smarter next time.

Trust as an Element of the Sales Process

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By: Scott Hinz

I’m a sales guy. I’ve sold for other companies. What makes Finys different is that we don’t treat our sales prospects the way other companies might treat their sales prospects. We treat them as peers who have a need and whose trust and respect we have to earn.

We earn that trust and respect, in part, by offering what we call Project Risk-Elimination Planning (PREP). There are eight steps to PREP, each equally important:

1.    We schedule a comprehensive visit to our prospects’ locations. There’s nothing like handshakes and eye contact to plant the seeds of trust.

2.    We get to know their people, their organizations, and their operating styles. Just as important, they get to know us.

3.    We review their systems, the functionality of those systems, their lines of business, and the states in which they write that business.

4.    We demonstrate Design Studio, our configuration toolkit, including its capabilities and its workflows.

5.    We list and validate all the systems and sources with which the Finys Suite will need to integrate.

6.    We share our implementation methodology, step by step.

7.    We discuss the roles, the responsibilities, and resources that will be required to make the implementation successful.

8.    We thoroughly review the project management and data migration plans.

A is For Accountability

One other way we earn trust and respect is by being accountable. If we commit to doing something, we do it. If that something is complicated and time-consuming, we’ll say so. We won’t sugarcoat or mislead. We’ll tell you what you need to hear, even if it’s not what you want to hear. We’ll finish everything we start. And we’ll work as hard as we can to meet and to exceed your reasonable expectations.

Why doesn’t every company work the way we do? We don’t know. But we do know what works for us and for our customers. And we’ve been succeeding with what works for us and for our customers since 2001.

That’s a pretty nice track record if we do say so ourselves.