Sarah Teehan, head of protection at Pacific Life Re, explains how the reinsurer has launched numerous wellness initiatives to support employees during Covid-19. She also discusses lessons re/insurers can learn from the pandemic
How has Pacific Life Re supported its employees throughout Covid-19?
Pacific Life Re is always putting its employees at the forefront. At the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak, we set up a cross-functional working party to address what we needed to do for our employees.
We created an allowance on top of people's salaries, to pay for the extra bills working from home can bring, and to enable employees to buy the equipment necessary for a really good working from home environment.
We introduced a virtual wellness week and weekly yoga and exercise classes. In addition, our senior management talk openly about their own mental health experiences, myself included, and we have mental health first aiders trained across the business.
We have also worked with the ABI around mental health standards for the benefit of policyholders.
To alleviate burn-out and ensure our employees are getting the breaks they need, we introduced meeting-free Wednesdays, and a lunch break is booked in everyone's diaries every day.
The company also closed the office for wellness days, which gave us six extra days off in 2020, which has improved productivity.
All this shows how much the company trusts its employees and recognises the increased productivity the year has brought, which helps to create a more motivated workforce.
What lessons do you think re/insurers can learn from the pandemic?
I think many would have thought more developed countries would have handled the pandemic differently, but Covid-19 has turned that on its head.
Even though the virus originated in Asia, they have handled this in a way Europe and the US have not been able to, which is a massive learning across the industry, and may impact the appropriate relative capital calibrations across jurisdictions.
Overall, it has shown us that Solvency II, and similar capital frameworks have put us as an industry in a very stable capital position to weather this shock. It has also shed favourable light on the insurance industry and drives home the value of protection.
This is certainly an opportunity for the industry to capitalise on this emerging financial awareness among consumers and show we are there for people in their time of need.
In terms of how it's transformed the reinsurance sector, even though we are a business-to-business provider, we do value seeing our clients and I think clients also miss the face-to-face interaction.
I think many of our clients will move to more permanent working from home, so there's a mix there in terms of how we will do things in the "new normal".
What innovations has Pacific Life Re delivered over the past year?
On the UnderwriteMe [Pacific Life Re's fully owned subsidiary] side, we are constantly innovating. At the moment, there is a lot of focus on newer ways to improve the underwriting journey, including utilising electronic health records and data mining.
The big piece of innovation we are working on this year is around distribution and really understanding its impact on the quality of the business sold. Our strategic analytics team is building an analytics platform so that we can better analyse our data and provide a market-leading data service to our clients.
How is Pacific Life Re driving diversity and inclusion as part of its organisational culture?
Diversity is so important as it brings better decision making and, as numerous studies have shown, leads to a more profitable business.
At Pacific Life Re, we regularly celebrate our cultural differences across the organisation. There's still a long way to go with diversity and inclusion, and we do not purport to having solved all the challenges, but we foster open conversations and we are actively training our employees, with sessions covering unconscious bias and allyship. This puts us on a very good track to embrace the full benefits that a diverse and inclusive workforce brings.
