Workforce Management Solutions

Workforce management solutions (WFM) are the driving force for insurance companies; particularly larger departments such as policy administration, underwriting, claims processing, shared services, and contact centres.
Learn to keep balance in managing your workforce
Ensure proper skill levels and mixes: Ensuring that operations teams consist only of experts can get expensive. This is why it’s important to assign a mixture of skill levels within the team – teams can have both junior and senior workers. The senior team members can mentor juniors and help with complex cases. Additionally, some team members can be cross-trained. This would allow teams to lend and borrow resources with each other.
Ensure flexible, real-time workforce management: When it comes to workloads there are daily spikes and lull times. This is the area where real-time workforce management increases efficiency to soften the extremes. For example, additional resources could be used to cover workload spikes, or employees can volunteer to leave early without pay.
Manage team cycles: Management styles for Adhoc / firefighting are confusing, thus they show lower performance. Activity consistency is important to manage teams and operations to improve performance results.
For example, Monday can be the day to discuss plans for the upcoming week, Tuesday to review the week prior and talk about key insights. Wednesday could be used to plan strategies for the next week. Another way to increase performance is to have daily huddles in the morning. In fact, there are numerous recurring operations management routine choices that can be implemented.
Balance loads across teams: To keep efficiency consistent, operations leaders can monitor workloads across all teams and make changes as needed. For example, leaders can transfer some of the workload from busy teams to teams with more capacity. Another method operations leaders can use is lending staff to assist other teams. Significant workload imbalance across teams increases employee dissatisfaction because they begin to feel like job distribution is unfair.
Plan your workforce efficiently
Improve resource forecasting: Knowing what future demands on resources will be and forecasting correctly means significantly fewer resources will be wasted. Insurance companies can hire the number of staff they need rather than hiring extra staff just in case they need them.
Improve forecasting horizon: Forecasting significantly into the future means companies will have time to hire the optimal staff from both a compensation and skill-set perspective.
Be aware of seasonality and consider it in planning: It’s important with workforce planning to consider changes in workloads during different seasons. Without considering changes you run the risk of having too many or too few resources; thus, negatively impacting performance. For example, work is busier for car insurance companies at the beginning of winter because of the impending frost and ice on the roads.
Monitor trends and embed them into planning: Knowing and embedding trends into workforce planning allows you to increase or decrease your organization’s team when the volume of work grows and decreases. This also takes away the risk of low performance and backlog.
Which WFM program is suitable for insurance providers?
The nature of operations is a complex topic. To run workforce operations efficiently requires an appropriate WFM solution for areas such as planning, forecasting and scheduling. Additionally, it offers transparency in regard to staff skills, performance and potential bottlenecks.
AchieveTM Workforce Management program takes a modular approach that combines a superior eWFM (electronic Workforce Management) platform with best-practices that are efficiently applied in the insurance consulting services.
AchieveTM quickly and efficiently delivers results because it optimizes manager’s tasks, how they perform them and which resources they use to carry them out. This is accomplished using 10 weekly cycles of learning, applying, and mastering. AchieveTM targets its focus on improved productivity and engagement while creating innovative ways to get work done.
AchieveTM increases team efficiency and effectiveness, which results in 10 -15 per cent savings within months.

The Burnie Group [https://www.burniegroup.com/] has brought this program to several financial and insurance services clients including areas such as:

Sales support and client on boarding
Claims processing
Policy administration/plan administration
Finance and collections
Back-office operations
Countless others

WFM helps you put the best people in the best place at precisely the correct time. It manages work schedules, tracks employee time (for billable projects and employee time), while increasing profitability and productivity at the same time.

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