STRATEGY
Tough choices: taking D&I from theory to practice
Re/insurers should think big to see real change in their organisations. A focus on specific areas to achieve real change needs to be combined with a willingness to question fundamental assumptions.
Diversity and inclusion (D&I) has long been an issue in insurance, but it has come to the fore in the last couple of years. Galvanised by the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, re/insurers are increasingly turning from aspirational statements or targets to concrete strategies. For many, however, it is still early days. There remains, many in the industry admit, a long way to go.
To explore how re/insurers, brokers and others will get there, Intelligent Insurer brought together a panel of experts to discuss their strategies and what else they’ve seen in the industry: Bill Wharton, head of Argo Insurance Bermuda and a member of the insurer’s D&I committee; Helen Cooke, who joined Aspen in May 2020 as its lead for culture change engagement and D&I at Aspen Insurance; Chelsey Sprong, appointed inclusion partner at Beazley in the same year; Barbara Schönhofer, founder and chair of ISC Group, a community interest company that provides personal, professional and business development for women in insurance; and Vic Mazonas, general manager of the Group for Autism, Insurance and Neurodiversity (GAIN), launched in 2021 with founder members including Marsh McLennan, Swiss Re, and Zurich. The group aims to unlock the potential of neurodiverse individuals and give them opportunities in the insurance industry.
As Schönhofer said, many of the efforts to increase diversity have a long history. The ISC Group started as the Insurance Supper Club and was founded in the UK in 2008. The big insurers in the UK were also affected by the Davies Review in 2010 examining the under-representation of women on boards.
Nevertheless, the panel largely agreed the issue has come to prominence. “It is commercially, socially and economically the right moment,” said Schönhofer.
Wharton said Argo’s journey began in earnest about two years ago.
“We have a large US employee base, so the events surrounding George Floyd and others galvanised employees and made them start to ask questions of the corporation as to what it was going to do,” he said.
It is not just employees who have come to focus intensely on issues of diversity. As Cooke said, even if insurers wanted to, it has become impossible to ignore the pressure from multiple sources. “It’s the regulators increasing interest, our Lloyd’s market, the rating agencies, investors and shareholders, the public and our employees,” she said. “That shouts to me that it’s strategically important.”
For Aspen, she said, D&I is not an HR activity but a business-led activity that HR partners with.
Given the scale of the challenge it can be difficult to know where to start. Beazley has made diversity central to its business strategy, and Sprong focuses on the issue full-time. Many don’t have that luxury, she notes. Even there, she has found it crucial to focus.
“Begin with the one area where you can start to make a difference.”
Chelsey Sprong, Beazley
“If you try and do everything, you don’t do much of anything,” she said. “To make real tangible progress is sometimes about prioritising and making difficult decisions.”
At Beazley, it started by focusing on gender before more recently turning to focus on ethnic diversity as well. It’s a common and sensible approach, according to Schönhofer, given that women make up just over half the population.
“You can’t take it all on, and if you don’t get the gender equity part of it right, it’s very difficult to focus on other things,” she said.
The important thing is to just make a beginning, according to Sprong. “My tip to anybody who wants to know where to focus is to go with what your people are already passionate about,” she said.
“Begin with the one area where you can start to make a difference.”
Small steps and big assumptions
An incremental approach doesn’t only stop people from being disheartened—it improves the chances of real change too. For a start, it focuses minds. According to Wharton, it is crucial that employees drive the activity, but it’s also essential to direct and focus it.
“There’s no shortage of ideas,” he said. “You need a structure so the various parties and groups can agree to work on one or a limited number of things and get them done rather than trying to do everything.”
In Argo, a structure was created by drawing from eight employee resource groups to form its D&I committee, consisting of senior leaders across the organisation, with its chair reporting to Argo’s chief executive officer.
Related to that, focusing on defined, specific areas allows businesses to develop realistic and achievable goals.
“We’ve seen too many organisations set bold, ambitious public targets and fail,” said Cooke. With fewer than 1,000 geographically dispersed employees, Aspen doesn’t have a huge pipeline of talent to bring a rapid change in diversity. Instead, it takes a “considered approach” to start “chipping away” at the issue.
This is, however, tied to solid, well-defined goals, such as ensuring those it identifies as high potential talent are not disproportionately men.
The firm keeps a continual eye on where it stands empirically. “It’s great if our engagement survey is saying people see a change around D&I, but if you don’t see it in the data, I don’t think we’re truly making a difference,” Cooke said.
“There are some roles where an assessment of a person’s skills could be more effective than an interview.”
Vic Mazonas, GAIN
Sprong agreed that data analysis is central to success. “People often think the D&I space is all events and webinars, which I love, but a lot of it is just number-crunching,” she said. Beazley is aiming for at least 25 percent of people of colour (and 25 percent of that group to be black) but has set its targets on a departmental basis, recognising that some teams will find hitting the targets easier than others.
Crucially, focusing on incremental changes and small steps doesn’t mean big changes won’t be required. It may, in fact, mean questioning fundamental assumptions, according to Mazonas. Consider the search for talent, for example, where interview processes can prove difficult for some neurodivergent candidates.
As she put it: “Why do you need an interview process for a role that isn’t public-facing?
“There are some roles where an assessment of a person’s skills could be more effective than an interview, or there could be ways of changing the process and having questions in advance, so people have time to prepare and think properly.”
More fundamentally, it may mean looking outside the standard set of qualifications, she added. “Some people with great skills struggled in structured school environments, but when you assess how they think, view the world and analyse data, they have valuable things to offer.”
Focusing on specifics raises such questions and forces managers to challenge their assumptions and consider what matters for a role. That may change how interviewees are assessed; Wharton notes a recent example where a manager pointed out that the female candidate didn’t make eye contact.
“That’s because she was very nervous,” Wharton remarked, “but making eye contact is not what we’re hiring for. On the other hand, she did say she was very methodical in the way she prepares for her day, and that’s important.”
It may also change what organisations demand in terms of experience. Because, as Cooke said, if businesses do the same thing they have always done, they cannot expect different results.
“Do you really need 25 years of insurance experience for a particular job?” she asked. “Because if you do, you’re going to get a white man,” she said.
“We can’t wish for one thing and then narrow the box, so we always get the other. We need to think more creatively about how we recruit and what the core and transferable skills are.”
Image: Shutterstock / sirtravelalot
