A poll of workers recently hired into the property/casualty insurance industry conducted during a Travelers Institute webinar last month produced some unusual results, surprising one webinar panelist who leads a key business segment at Travelers.
Only 20 percent of responding webinar attendees who were hired into the industry in the last five years said they factored company “mission and purpose” into their employment choices, and just about one-third said they valued “engaging and interesting work,” according to the in-webinar poll.
Competitive compensation and benefits topped the list (63 percent) that also had more respondents choosing work-life balance (59 percent) and positive company culture (50 percent). Culture edged out the final factor on the list, training opportunities and career development. (48 percent).
“I am probably not qualified to answer since I didn’t join the industry in the last five years,…but I would have checked all of the above,” said Michael Klein, president of Personal Insurance at Travelers, who has been with the company for 35 years. “I’m interested in … the relatively low response on alignment with company mission and purpose,” he said. “I think our industry has a very noble mission and purpose,” he said, expressing the hope that the webinar conversation to follow would shed some light on the lack of interest in this factor revealed by the quick-response survey. Klein, who started his career as an actuary, did not reveal how many attendees responded to the poll, nor did he indicate that the results were statistically significant.
In fact, Klein and co-panelists Denise Perlman, chief executive officer within Aon’s North America middle market segment, and Robert Hartwig, associate clinical professor of finance and director of the Risk and Uncertainty Management Center at the University of South Carolina, offered repeated examples of the purpose-driven and interesting career paths available in the P/C insurance industry at various points during the webinar.
Perlman offered the first reaction to the polling results, stating that they “aligned perfectly” with an Aon survey of talent globally (across industries), which put company culture, work-life balance, and attractive compensation and benefits “definitely on top of the list.” (Most of the respondent population, 89 percent, of an Aon Employee Sentiment Study survey, however, consisted of employees who have been in their current roles for two or more years, and only 25 percent identified as being associates or entry-level staffers. The Aon survey was linked to an online description of the Travelers webinar as a resource for attendees.)
It was Hartwig who inadvertently shed light on students’ greater interest in compensation vs. company mission as he answered a totally different question. The question: How can small independent insurance agencies attract emerging talent?
“A student generally can’t focus beyond the first two or three years” past graduation, Hartwig said, summing up an answer that began with his report that the small agency segment is the one “in which we place the absolute fewest students.”
“It is very challenging for independent agencies to attract a new student right out of college unless there’s already a family connection,” he said. Based on his frequent interactions with university juniors and seniors who are filled with uncertainty and anxiety about what lies ahead, Hartwig said, “I’ll be blunt, part of it has to do with the compensation structure that we see for new agents. It winds up not being competitive oftentimes to a major carrier or a midsize carrier or broker. And that winds up being the obstacle. Particularly if a student might have something like some student debt to service when they get out…”