2023 Executive Outlook | Christian Fournier, Beneva

Christian Fournier, executive vice president, leader of property and casualty insurance, Beneva

Our workforce situation — namely, the difficulties finding resources we need to provide the quality of service our clients have come to expect — is one of the most important challenges facing our industry today.

Many factors have combined to create this situation. Among the most obvious is that industry veterans are leaving for retirement quicker than we are able to attract new recruits to replace them.

Many who joined the industry during the two years of the pandemic are now returning to the industries from which they came; others are leaving the industry to find new ways to make a living in this new hybrid/remote work reality. No matter the reasons, the outcome is the same: many of our companies are currently short-staffed, with limited hopes of bridging the gap soon.

In the meantime, we need to be thinking differently to reduce the impact on the promise we are making to our clients.

There are no easy solutions, but I am convinced we will work through this as an industry. We have always been quite innovative, and I believe there has never been a better time to channel that strength. Technology is readily available to help us streamline and automate our operations; we will need to double down on that. This is true for carriers, distributors and all other industry partners. As technology evolves, talent development is a must to ensure people can keep up with the speed of change and adapt to a constantly changing world of work.

Despite our best efforts in the tech realm, however, that probably won’t be sufficient. Good people are a key ingredient of excellent customer service. We will therefore need to do a better job of attracting talent from new sources and training them when needed.

Perhaps more importantly, we need to work on retaining the talent we already have. We can do that in part by creating a compelling vision for them of where our industry is going in the future. And we can help them find a career path in which their talents will be put to good use, and their aspirations will be fulfilled. Many of us are already at work doing just that.