Change management, for those embroiled in its intricacies, is time consuming. It goes beyond mapping the functional aspects of change. It needs to be done cautiously and there are no shortcuts.
Change management experts from Manulife, RBC Insurance and SGI Canada shared these and other insights into the management of change which occurs at their respective companies at a recent webinar, hosted by Reuters Events, entitled Catalyzing Progress: Insurance Change Management 101.
Historically, the industry has been very product focused. Today, however, there appears to be an imperative for change unlike that which has gone before – clients and employees alike demand progress and up-to-date processes and functionality, while the technology industry also continues to poke at incumbent companies, threatening disintermediation. (Although the panel’s moderator, James Benham, underlined that disruption in the industry is challenging – “you can really lose your butt doing it,” he said, adding that such players have still made incumbent companies very uncomfortable.)
Change advice
Jennifer Leflar, vice president of enterprise change management with SGI Canada, points out that change takes time. “It takes quite a bit of time, at least in my experience, to bake in the skills and the processes and the mindsets within the culture to get to the point where stakeholders are ready to adopt,” she says.
Transparency is beneficial for getting long run buy-in, she adds. Early on in the change effort she suggests educating all stakeholders about what is being done and what the benefits might be. “Take that extra time and have the conversations, time and again, to try and build that alignment.”
Even in places where change processes exist, change management is often an afterthought to the main program’s design, says Parin Kothari, assistant vice president of digital transformation with Manulife. “You have to think about it,” he says, “rather than just roadmap the functional aspects of a transformation. It’s a different way of looking at things. You cannot rush through it.”
Constant communication, adjustments, flexibility “and not being ideological about how functionality should be,” are all included in the panelists’ advice for those gathered to hear the presentation.
“There are a lot of steps in terms of how we disrupt a 140-year-old company and culture,” Kothari adds. “You have to do it cautiously, step by step.” He advocates for an ongoing process of creating buy-in among stakeholders with each step until 80 per cent are, if not promoters of the change, at least not detractors. “Only then can you move onto the next step, and again disrupt, make people uncomfortable and go over that cycle again.” The process, he says, is tedious at times. “There is no shortcut to it.”
Early on, Leflar also encouraged listeners to make sure that stakeholders are comfortable with training throughout the life of the program. Creating expectations early on, she adds, is important.
Involve your lawyers
“Doing this in isolation without risk functions can be very challenging,” warns George Sahyoun, senior director and head of digital risk operations, planning and agile transformation with RBC Insurance. “One of the benefits, we’ve found, is bringing risk along for the ride so that you’re collaborating as you’re doing this and not in the 11th hour where things get held up or surprised because of a particular law or regulation.” Later, he adds: “we often underestimate the challenges that we see with risk when they’re not included.”
The traditional view – that risk managers are a pessimistic bunch about change – doesn’t hold up in practice, he adds. “That’s not what we’re seeing at all in this transformation. We are seeing a willingness to balance the business need and protect the company at the same time from a risk perspective.”
Balancing innovation and stability
Companies, meanwhile, are tasked with the job of delivering a streamlined user experience, without compromising that experience along the way. “You want a streamlined user experience but not at the expense of stability,” Benham notes. Sahyoun adds that ensuring continuation of client stability is a matter of leaning into the things the company already does well.
“We see some great opportunities to experiment in that space. You can do that in parallel while still maintaining that level of service with the customer,” he says.
Early on in the program planning too, Leflar says at the discovery stage, it is important, corporately, to understand what the expectations are for the coming years, “depending on the size of your transformation initiative and the length of time that it’s going to persist.”
Fierce prioritization
Once the project’s timeline has been identified, it is then helpful to create an inventory of change initiatives already underway across the company, Leflar adds.
“Just building that inventory is tough,” she says, but adds that it’s important to understand everything which could be taking focus away from the larger scale transformation initiatives.
“The inventory of what’s going on is important and hard to find, but it takes some dedicated support to uncover the things happening and the divisions that might be adding to what I call the change saturation across the organization,” she adds. “It’s amazing how chaotic it can be without that inventory and how many directions your end users or your employees are pulled in as a result of other things that are going on. Understand that. Maybe cull that list down. Have those important conversations. It creates space when you get to the implementation stage.”
Meanwhile, there are usually initiatives that are mandatory and need to move forward. A regulatory change, for instance, “those bypass the line,” Sahyoun says. “But a lot of rigorous prioritization has been the secret to what gets us balancing that need for innovation and operational stability.”
Why change?
Among those gathered, there is a sense that change is inevitable, for a few reasons. In one case, they suggest that failing to update processes and applications will cause a company to fall behind. Similarly, there is concern that if companies don’t positively disrupt themselves, that disruption will inevitably come from external sources.
Primarily, however, they say customer expectations are changing. Leflar says when it comes to being a digital first company, this means meeting customers where the customers want to meet their needs.
“That’s something that all of us in the insurance industry are thinking of on a day-to-day basis. Our products, our processes, our technology platforms, they need to change in order for us to be able to meet the customers in the digital space. I think that’s the main driver,” she says.
Benham in a follow up statement concurs: “Those customer demands and expectations aren’t changing and they’re not going away,” he says.
Says Sohyoun: “If we don’t disrupt ourselves, someone else will.”
