We hear these common adages thrown around all the time:
“If you don’t have your health, what do you have?”
“I need a day off to decompress.”
“Health is wealth.”
As familiar as these phrases may sound, they don’t touch on why mental health and well-being is so critical, especially within our industry. Our mental health has a significant impact on our day-to-day lives, personally and professionally. It’s also become an extremely prevalent problem. As the R&I Editorial Team writes for Risk & Insurance, “Nearly 9 in 10 insurance professionals report widespread stress and anxiety, with rising workloads contributing to a growing mental health crisis in the insurance industry…” and 81-82% of those aged 18-44 sought mental health support in the past year. These are staggering numbers! This isn’t just an employee issue either. Companies, executive leaders, and HR professionals need to take notice of what’s taking place, as the fallout is high turnover, poor morale, and difficulty attracting new talent.
No one wants to work for a company with a high burn-out rate or a culture that ignores the wellness of its most valued contributors. Nobody.
There are so many things that can impact our mental health working in insurance. Workplace arrangements can be a huge benefit to an employee’s state of mind and innate sense of value. For those of us who have made the change from the wrong arrangement to the right one, the sense of relief and empowerment felt is nearly indescribable. Having the wrong arrangement, though, can make you feel trapped in an endless, unhappy abyss. At the end of the day, we have a choice to “vote with our feet” and find a company and arrangement that works.
To make matters more complex, let’s layer workplace arrangements onto the uncertainty in the job market, inflation, and the overall economy. If you want out of a negative job situation, the lack of clarity about the direction of the job market can be equally frustrating and gloomy. I get it, and it’s a tough situation to be in. And the low turnover due to economic uncertainty also gives leaders a false sense of staff stability and employee retention, potentially disguising the mental health endemic as a whole. If nobody’s leaving then everything must be fine, right?
To think more broadly, there’s also the infringement of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) into the day-to-day activities of the workplace. While companies and employees alike are excited about A.I.’s productivity potential, some employees are concerned about its role within their own. And for valid reasons, too. For example, some companies are requiring new employees to sign off on having an A.I. platform monitoring them on a daily basis. While this is clearly a developing technology, its implementation has prompted concerns about privacy and an employee’s longevity with their employer, both of which negatively impact an employee’s sense of security, value, and autonomy. To avoid finding yourself in an unwanted scenario, you should question a potential employer about the use of A.I. during the interview process so you come into a job with open eyes and knowing more about its usage.
We cannot afford to overlook mental health and well-being. Insurance is just as susceptible to macro trends as other industries. Workplace arrangements, uncertain market conditions, and the onset of A.I. can have a seismic impact on employees. Recognizing the effects can inform what steps employees ultimately take to counter any potential negative impacts. While it comes down to the individual to curate a strategy unique to their own situation, I hope that this writing will be a meaningful step towards ensuring this topic remains front of mind for us all.
By Matt Nickens, Partner, Coleman Search Group
