Insurers have made some significant changes to their businesses off the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, but another side effect may be starting to emerge in staff - one of burnout and ‘change fatigue.’

Commenting on the changes that have been implemented to adapt to the pandemic over the last 18 months, Pinnacle Life general manager operations Amy Cavanaugh said that March 2020 resulted in some rapid-fire adjustments across the industry. However, she noted that the end of the year saw more “change for the sake of change” - something which seemed to be resulting in higher levels of stress and burnout.

“I think that it’s a cop-out to say that COVID is the entire reason that we’ve been working differently,” Cavanaugh said.

Read more: Insurers in lockdown: “this will be a very tough time”

“New Zealand has been really fortunate in how little an impact we’ve had in comparison to what the rest of the world has experienced with lockdowns - though of course we have been impacted. We definitely talk about COVID as though it was this pivotal moment when everything changed, and ever since March last year, we’ve been completely flat out because of it.”

“Realistically, we were in lockdown for seven weeks, and it forced us to think differently about things,” she explained.

“It meant that businesses had to re-prioritise things, resources got re-allocated or shrunk, and people’s capacities were stretched. I think that as a result of that, we were almost so busy reacting to something while still managing everything that we were proactively doing, that our project world and our crisis management world just morphed into one big busy whirlwind of work.”

“At the end of last year, we were busy for the sake of being busy, and we were delivering change for the sake of delivering change,” she said. “We had to share some really honest feedback at management level that our staff were experiencing burnout and change fatigue.”

Cavanaugh said that management ended up reflecting on the changes that were being implemented, and analysed how they related to customer, business and staff outcomes.

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She said one of the most important parts of addressing fatigue was giving staff at all levels the chance to reflect on how the changes were affecting their work and their motivation, and this was done via a combination of one-to-one meetings, opportunities to connect, and surveys.

“We had to ask whether we were delivering change for the right reasons, and whether it was resulting in good customer outcomes or business outcomes,” Cavanaugh said.

“That was really hard, and once we gave space to reflect on that, we found we could be creative and have conversations that wouldn’t otherwise have happened. We started to build a time for everyone else in the organisation to have equal space to do that too, and as a result, everyone had an opportunity to reflect through surveys and one on ones.”

“It certainly gave us an insight into people’s thoughts around their work, whether it was what they wanted to be doing, whether their motivations have changed, and what those changes meant for them,” she concluded. “We’re still on that journey, and it’s definitely an honest conversation that everyone needs to have.”

Insurance Business NZ