To say that human resources departments have been managing some pretty abnormal and challenging situations over the last few years would be a significant understatement at the least.
Between the Great Resignation, navigating retirement waves, orchestrating remote work, adapting to in-flux employee expectations, and implementing quickly evolving technologies, HR departments across the US and around the world have been forced to move at an ever quickening pace in order to keep up with the competition. To meet these new and elevated demands head-on has required human resources teams to possess an increasingly diverse set of skills, including strong interpersonal communicative abilities, an analytical mindset, and conviction to do the job well even in the face of significant change and adversity.
Beyond the plethora of skills and experience that internal HR professionals bring to their organizations, however, the complexity of modern human resources management often makes it advisable to seek outside assistance in order to better address some of the most common sources of stress among human resources managers in dealing with employee retention and benefits packages.
To those ends, insurers and their representatives are typically well-positioned to assist their client policyholders with those very stressors that surround retention and benefits efforts. That said, in order to continually stay on top of emerging trends in benefits and eligibility criteria as the market moves faster and faster, insurers must become more proactive than they have been at times in the past when the market was more stable and not prone to changing as quickly.
For example, insurers that are in-tune with the shifting needs of the market are aware that the insurance sectors covering Group and Voluntary coverage must alter their approach from one that’s product-oriented to one that is more customer-centric.
Both insurers and their clients must also recognize the changing demographics of policyholders and benefits recipients in order to modify their offerings accordingly and meet the varying needs of the latest generations, who tend to appreciate services that are tightly tailored in line with their personal needs and are driven by value.
It’s no surprise that younger workers have higher expectations when it comes to personalized products and services, which they have become accustomed to as technology has made a greater-degree of personalization possible in many offerings over the course of their lives. Similarly, technology has in many cases enabled a greater degree of variety in many product and service categories, which combined with the relatively limited financial resources of youth has led to many among the younger generations to prioritize value when comparing options.
As a result, keeping up with evolving technologies - especially when those technologies jump to a new summit among the rising developmental plateaus - has become a critical function for insurers and their clients alike in managing the changing expectations of a changing workforce.
Currently, some of the technologies that are becoming most crucial to insurers and enabling their users to efficiently innovate and improve the experiences and outcomes of their customers include cloud-based data management, cloud-based platform hosting, APIs, microservices, containerization, and of course artificial intelligence systems. Up-to-date and intuitive user-interface functionality is also increasingly important when catering to the more tech-savvy or at least tech-oriented younger population.
And while insurers would be wise to adopt these technologies in order to improve their business capabilities, and while policyholders would be wise to ensure their insurers are optimizing the customer experience and maximizing efficiency with these kinds of systems, incorporating the technology into operational systems isn’t sufficient without also taking steps to shape company culture, establish employee buy-in, and educate/support customers in order to make the transition as seamless as possible.
Although the challenges that human resources professionals continue to encounter in their rapidly moving industry have been substantial, the technology that is being developed in order to better manage these challenges has been keeping pace, and both insurers and those they serve can meet those challenges by putting the available tools to use while keeping the focus on transforming their models toward a more customer-oriented approach.
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