Zurich CPO: ‘If our people aren’t engaged and motivated, they can’t excite our customers’

Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) wants to be one of the most socially and environmentally responsible businesses in the world. Being sustainable, the global insurer maintains, is just “part of our business”. This also includes a commitment to take care of its employees, more than 60,000 worldwide.

So, with that in mind, Zurich’s Group Chief People Officer Jolanda Grob, took to the Strategic Talent stage at UNLEASH World in Paris to talk about just that: how Zurich’s focus on sustainability extends to how it thinks about people.

She tells UNLEASH: “We are in a unique position to support customers to transition towards a sustainable future, mitigating and adapting to climate change.

“At the same time, we are committed to future-proofing our people through up- and reskilling so they can remain employable for the long-term”.

This plays out in Zurich’s so-called ‘People Sustainability’ aspiration, which has been in place since 2018. “We’ve been talking about this before other organizations, before it was trendy”, Grob says.

This is because Zurich sees its employees as a true differentiator: “We are a people business. If they’re not engaged and motivated, they can’t excite our customers”, which in turn “will have a negative impact on our business”.

Therefore, says Grob, “it was so clear to us that we truly need to focus on our people first and foremost”.

People Sustainability is paying off – engagement is up substantially since 2018, customer satisfaction as well, which also translates into financial results, with Zurich reporting record operating profit in 2023 and through the first half of 2024.

Given the challenging work environment – labor shortages, demographic shifts, low unemployment rates and changing employee expectations to name a few – Grob says that she would be “very surprised” if HR leaders are still having to make a business case around people-first approaches in their organizations.

Why internal mobility is good for Zurich’s business

One of the core pillars of People Sustainability at Zurich is having a skilled and employable workforce. It’s important that this sits alongside a second pillar of having a work environment where everyone can thrive, and that supports an inclusive, resilient and engaging organization.

“We need people with the right skills, but because of the demographic shifts, we won’t find all of these people in the market going forward”, notes Grob. Therefore, “we have to invest in our people, and we want to invest”.

There are true business benefits to this. Not only does it cost more to hire someone new than to upskill and reskill someone internally, but Grob is also aware of the link between talent retention and giving people successful career paths at Zurich.

Plus, “insurance is a trust business – a trusted relationship is not something you develop through a piece of paper, it is something you will develop with a person”.

This is why “it’s so important for us that we have people who have a very long tenure” – they have so much expertise about the business, about Zurich’s customers, which “you can’t find in the market”.

Of course, bringing external people in means new perspectives, which are needed as well, “but your way of doing things, your history, that’s very hard to develop” at speed.

Zurich has made huge strides in internal mobility – in 2021, 66% of roles were filled from within; this has now reached 73.4% at the end of 2023.

As Grob shared on stage at UNLEASH World, this really shows employees that Zurich is truly committed to career development and skills, and it isn’t just lip service.

The insurance giant is not focused on specific future skills because “skills are constantly changing. I don’t believe we already know what will be relevant in five years’ time; that old view of strategic workforce planning doesn’t exist anymore”.

Therefore, the key for Zurich is to think about cultivating a growth mindset and willingness to adapt to rapid change.

Zurich on balancing AI experimentation with ethics

This learning mindset is particularly relevant when it comes to emerging technologies and GenAI in particular.

Grob is very clear that “AI is not taking away all of our jobs”.

The reality is “we won’t have enough people, so we need technology to support them to actually do more meaningful work”.

The job of employers is to support employees with the right skills and mindset to thrive amid all of this rapid technological change.

UNLEASH was keen to find out how Zurich is thinking about and adopting AI internally. Since insurance is such a regulated industry, Zurich built ZuriChat, “our own AI chatbot”, in the words of Grob, which is run in a safe and protected environment to protect our and customers’ data.

The insurer also quickly established a framework around responsible AI. “We deal with very sensitive data, so we have for example very clear rules about when a human being is truly required, and when we can let a machine do something”.

“We see a lot of great opportunities” from AI – “we are prepared to harness them” with currently more than 200 use cases deployed across the global organization and many more under development, and “always within guidelines”, states Grob.

Examples include piloting digital twins in the claims’ organization; advancing automated submission processing and policy consistency checks for international programs in underwriting; and leveraging Josh Bersin’s AI-powered HR assistant Galileo in Grob’s team.

During his UNLEASH World Day Two keynote, Bersin reflected on the AI HR tech market.

Grob was in attendance, and her takeaway from that was “for us in HR, it’ll be a key task to not be too easily seduced by all of these tools, but to think much more holistically about what we want to achieve and what are the right tools”.

She calls on HR leaders to look at their main HR system providers first – for Zurich, it’s SAP SuccessFactors – and understand their capabilities and “where do you really use targeted add-ons” while not losing sight of the employee experience.

Grob is excited by the new AI agent capabilities, which Bersin also talked about in his keynote.

“That’s even better for the employee experience going forward” – however, “we’re not there yet, everyone is now starting to experiment with it”, but it’ll save time for employees and “have a great impact on HR”, allowing the team to focus on “truly adding value”.

Beyond the future of AI, another top long-term priority for Grob and Zurich is equipping managers and enterprise leaders with “strategic foresight”, which UNLEASH keynote Futurist Amy Webb talked about.

This is so important in the ever-evolving world of work – “people have to deal with ambiguity and feel comfortable taking decisions in that environment”.

For me, as a Chief People Officer, focusing on our senior leaders and up-and-coming enterprise leaders, helping them be able to grasp the macro-economic situation, and what that means for our business, and how that creates strategic foresight, will definitely differentiate us”, concludes Grob.

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