In this latest piece, Stuart Dennis, Industry Director for Finance at Six Degrees, a leading cloud-led managed service provider looks at how the insurance workplace is changing, with more outsourcing and freelance support. Balancing the need for innovation with data security and customer privacy is a tricky issue, but it can be done.
Attracting the best talent starts with building an inclusive and innovative culture at your firm. Leveraging the latest secure agile workspace technology will help you to achieve this.
Increasing competition and the introduction of new, disruptive technologies are driving a need for innovation across the insurance market. The way we think about ‘work’ is changing, and this was highlighted in a recent prospectus published by Lloyd’s, the world’s largest insurance marketplace, which argued for the need to build inclusive and innovative cultures in order to attract the best talent.
If your insurance firm wants to stay ahead of the competition in today’s global markets, it will need to attract top talent through a combination of brand, technology and work/life balance. The best candidates know their value, and will look to work with employers who meet not just their salary expectations but also their culture and career progression goals.
The latest cloud technology allows us to work effectively from anywhere, and there is an opportunity for insurers to leverage this to their benefit. An inclusive and innovative culture can be fostered through unified communications and collaboration tools that enhance creativity and accelerate innovation, along with the latest smart devices that enable access across through innovative applications, increasing engagement and productivity.
But before your firm dives feet-first into the world of agile workspace technology, you will need to ensure that cybersecurity remains at the top of the agenda. Insurance is a highly regulated industry, and insurers deal with large volumes of personally identifiable information (PII) on a daily basis. The FCA recently announced its intention to fine British Airways £183 million for a data breach it suffered in 2018, highlighting the need for all organisations to take cybersecurity seriously – especially when managing a large number of devices across multiple locations.
Competition throughout global markets is fiercer than ever before, and your insurance firm needs to choose between innovating or risking being left behind. In this article, I will explain how leveraging the latest secure agile workspace technology will help your firm attract the best talent and achieve competitive advantage.
More info on Six Degrees here by the way;
Agile Workspace Technology
We have access to an ever-growing array of devices and applications that help us communicate and collaborate in our everyday lives, and this is shaping our expectations of what should be available to us in the workplace. Consumer technology has taken giant leaps in the past decade, and the kind of capabilities that may have seemed impossible in 2009 are pretty much commonplace now in 2019.
If your employees are expressing frustration that the technology available through your firm does not match what they can access through their smartphones, you’re not alone. Fortunately though, secure cloud-based agile workspace technology is giving employers the ability to embrace the latest working practices and enable inclusive and innovative cultures within their firms. There are a number of ways in which this is being made possible:
- Increase productivity by enhancing application delivery. Current application delivery technology enables you to quickly deliver the tools your employees need to carry out their roles effectively, regardless of their location. So whether they are at their desk, at home or on a train, your employees will be able to work in a consistent manner that allows them secure access to the tools they need, whenever they need them. This increases productivity and alleviates many of the frustrations that can often come with working outside the office.
- Work smarter by delivering the right tools at the right time. The agile workspace doesn’t just mean the ability to access all of your data and applications, wherever you are. Your employees need time to integrate and collaborate, but they also need time to concentrate on executing. The latest agile working tools acknowledge this, and are designed to meet employees’ needs as they develop throughout the working week.
- Collaborate more effectively with dynamic workspaces. The latest collaboration technology allows you to right-size the workspace by enhancing remote working capabilities. Through allowing structured collaboration by combining voice, video, instant messaging, tasks and sharing within the same application, collaboration technology allow firms to deliver full cross-functional team working throughout their operations.
- Communicate seamlessly through multi-channel platforms. The latest unified communications technology delivers fully integrated voice, video, persistent team chat and messaging, and file and screen sharing. This enables a consistent user experience through desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones which drives harmonised productivity and efficiencies for all users, regardless of location, device or network access type.
- Enhance security with enterprise mobile management. When you expand the workspace, you introduce greater risk to your business. This is where enterprise mobile management comes in, allowing you to retain consistent control and management over your entire laptop, tablet and smartphone estate and ensure appropriate governance throughout.
Building Inclusive and Innovative Cultures
In today’s fast-moving global markets, technology is becoming a key differentiator that allows firms to deliver the agility that the best candidates expect. Potential employees expect their firms to allow them to work productively, smartly, collaboratively and securely, and firms that cannot facilitate this risk being left behind.
But with regulatory bodies threatening significant punishments for firms that have been found to suffer data breaches, your firm’s agile workspace strategy should include appropriate cybersecurity arrangements throughout. Prevention is always better than cure, and robust cybersecurity will allow you to mitigate the risk of incurring financial, operational and reputational damage as a result of a successful cyber-attack.
The latest secure agile workspace technology will help your insurance firm build a more inclusive and innovative culture that will help attract today’s best talent. Partnering with the right cloud-led technology partner could be the first step in enabling you to achieve this.
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