Seada van den Herik:
Well, thank you Ben, for this introduction, and well, thanks for having us here on the webinar. I think it’s very exciting for us, for 100% Dutch company to actually join an international platform and to give the presentation in English and to tell you upfront, when we made the presentation for today, we were actually ourselves quite surprised, positively surprised of the road we had in the last five years. So, I am really happy to take you along on the journey we had in the last five years building on top of the last 125 years as Onderlinge’s-Gravenhage, and Ben it’s okay. There’s not many people except Dutch people who can pronounce Gravenhage all right, so I’ll call it OG during this presentation today.
We’re going to talk about how to turn a very decent 125 years old life insurer into a much more focused company, mutual company with a bright future ahead. And so, I’m going to take you on this journey today. And one thing I want you to know that there’s two things that have been with Onderlinge’s-Gravenhage for 125 years and that’s their core values of being together and sure. So, it’s really giving certainty as insurer of insurance and together is about doing it together. So, as a company and members all together.
Let me start by telling you a little bit who I am. So, I am Seada van den Herik, also a typical Dutch name, but hard to pronounce. And I’ve been for 16 years in financial services and last 12 years also as an executive and last five years with OG. I’m a mother. I’m a mathematician by my study, 49 years old. I love sports. I love innovative ideas and to bring on change to really improve the world and companies for the better. And I always do it with ambition. So, I’m going to hope that everything I want to tell you is going to fit in the next 45 to 50 minutes and well, you can see why I like working at the mutual because I believe people are the essence of our society and as well as nature is the essence of our world.
What are we going to talk about today? I already told you briefly. I’m going to take you on a short journey about what is OG, 125 years of life insurance, and what happened between, I guess about 2012 and 2020 with declining markets and declining interest rates, which made it really tough for a life insurer. And well, the toughness can always help you also to help you bring on the good stuff and move forward. So, we created this strategic program, we call OG 2 Go. So, in this program we decided we wanted to keep this strength of 125 of histories, hence the OG. And we really wanted to move forward, hence to go. And with all of that, we wanted to keep an eye on all of our stakeholders, both our members, our colleagues, society, and we wanted to look at servicing growth, and managing our company.
With that, we made some real big leapfrogs. So, I’ll take you along of some of the leapfrogs that were made in the last five years. So, being behind actually gives you the opportunity to not improve step by step. But if you’re behind on the market, you’re in an excellent position to actually jump towards the latest and greatest technology, or workplace solutions all at once. So, it actually gives you a potential advantage if you dare to see that you’re actually a little bit behind on the market. Also, we started focusing on seniors and members. So, I’ll take you along the journey on how we turned our older member population into an advantage and hence how we refreshed our products and services.
Those are the numbers of 2020. I know our 2021 numbers are almost there, but they kind of look the same. So, we are a mid-sized life insurance company in the Netherlands. We have 215,000 members, and we have 135 colleagues. Well, I know there’s a lot of big companies in the ICMIF, and I used to work for a bigger company. I used to be on the board of a bigger and broad insurance company in the Netherlands. So, I know what it’s all about, but what’s really nice is if you have smaller company, you can turn faster. And since we are focused on life insurance, that makes us on one hand vulnerable. And on the other hand, it really gives you the edge to get into a niche area. So, I’ll take you along on this journey and it might inspire small or mid-sized insurance company, mutual insurance companies, or also the bigger insurance companies for specific business units.
We basically have a balance sheet of three billion. We have gross written premium is about 100 million. Their costs are around 25 million. Actually, they dropped to 20 million since we did some great cost cutting in the last few years. And unfortunately our net result was negative in 2020 with minus 12 million. It was positive in 2019, and will be positive in 2021 again, and our solvency has been stable, I think for the last, I don’t know since we’re measuring solvency in a new way around somewhere between 170 and 210%.
What happened in the last decade? I think you all know, and especially for life insurances. In the Netherlands, there was a strong declining life market. So, as you can see on the left hand, actually between 2000, 2008, the premium volume in the market was six billion per year. And that dropped to one and a half billion. Actually, kind of stabilizing onto one and a half billion since 2015. So, that’s a huge drop in market space, which was basically driven by the Dutch stimulating fiscal regime that brought it also to long term bank savings products. So, a lot of people actually shifted from life insurances to bank saving products and bank saving products were priced better because the banking regulations were actually more favorable than the Solvency II impact, solvency II regulations.
All of this happened also in a low interest environment. As you can see in the mid graph, the market interest rates dropped. We’ve all been there from the four to 3% until below 0% since 2019, which is for life insurance with a lot of guarantees is very tough times to be in. Additionally, we introduced the Solvency II in 2013, ’14, and the Dutch regulator has been very strict, and with only a few transitional arrangements. So, that actually had a pretty tough impact also on how to run the business and how to tweak the business. And then we looked at our population and said, “Oh, but we really have an older population, both on our colleagues side and both on our client side, on our member side.” And basically we just said, “Oh, well, traditionally, nobody wants to have an order population.” That always is bad for business. And then we actually turn it around. What if we don’t say it’s bad for business, but we actually say let’s focus on the assets.
Why don’t we start focusing on creating products and service specifically for older people because we know a few things. One is that the number of older people in the Netherlands will grow in the next 20 years. So, it’s actually a growing population and target group. The second thing is the number of seniors will double, but the number of caretakers will half. And also we know that they’re actually… They have a lot of wealth, but a lot of wealth is sometimes into their house and not really liquid assets. So, there is actually, we do think there is issue in this age group, but traditional financial services have not targeted this age group. We thought, well, there’s actually an opportunity. It’s a great target group and why not go for it?
As you can see, tough times create urge to move forward. So, actually, we stopped defending and started looking forward. How could we actually make from everything that’s threatening us, turn it around into our advantage? So here we get back to our strategy OG2go. As you can see, I’ll kind of help you to translate some of Dutch in English. We put on top our members. So, Layden is actually the member, so we put them on top. And then in the bottom half, you can see on the left side, the colleagues, and on the right side, the company. Basically, we said, that’s where we are creating the magic for our members. And in the yellow one, you can see the service. So, that’s how we service them members. And in the red one is society. So that basically is all about the partners we work with and doing good for society, and in the blue area and the bottom, we created the growth.
Then, there’s four points that I wanted to take out of this to talk you through, like what we really achieved in the last five years. So, as I told you, we said, we believe that actually there’s an opportunity with our older population. So, we said, we want to become the financial mutual for people 45 years and older. And sometimes people look a little bit strange, but I tell them, “Well, in the Netherlands there’s also two banks that are really all about ESG, and they have a proposition in a Dutch society based upon their positioning as the most sustainable bank. We want to become the financial mutual for the seniors in the Netherlands. So, that’s what we’ve been working on for the last few years and continue to work on.
So four areas I want to take you along. It’s first one is our leapfrogs we made in our organization. The second one is the development of our organization and our colleagues. The third one is the focus we put on our members with the servicing products and marketing and how we turn that around. And the fourth one is the developing a growth of some new product services aimed at members and senior population. And in all of those areas, I’ll try to touch upon how is being a mutual differentiating in how we took some of those areas along.
Let’s have a look first at our leapfrogs that we made in the last few years. As I told you, when I arrived in 2017, we were a very solid organization, a little old fashioned deal. And you could see that as a negative thing, but being solid really in insurance is very nice to have a solid organization. And we looked upon it and said, “There’s actually an opportunity here of the leapfrog jumping towards what’s new. And we took a few areas where we really jumped. And the one is we took our data center from the basement. It was literally in the basement of the building and we took everything to the cloud. We’re a midsize company. We are now with very professional infrastructure services at Amazon and using Microsoft 365, and it’s done a lot of good for us. We decreased cost. We increased services and performance, and it’s actually much safer.
Together with a regulator, we ensure that the contracts that we had with all of those parties actually comply to all the Eiopa, Seolvency II regulations. So, that really helped us. And it also helped us with no more paper in our work or in the building. So, we set a pace of digitalizing, digitizing everything, preferably digitizing towards the client. But if that was not possible, we would digitize it internally. So, we outsourced the print work, we outsourced the scan work, and basically we set all of the workflow, everything is digitized. And within the digitization, we primarily work with all the services that are being offered by Microsoft or AVS. So, we also standardize very strongly on our whole architecture, driving down costs, and making it easier to work together. And also on the information security and cybersecurity.
It’s kind of easy to say we’re going to digitize everything and we’re going to move to a new environment. But then for people working already over a long time on the same platforms, it’s actually a big jump. And there was one thing that really helped us to pinpointing, this is the moment where it’s going to happen because we were moving to a new building. And we said, moving to a new building is a great opportunity to actually tell them, “Well, we are moving to the new building, but the computer is not coming along and the printer’s not coming along. So, you’ve got one and a half year to make this happen and we’re going to support you. We’re going to train you. We’re going to help you. We’re going to hire consultants, but this is what we’re going to do.” And we said, “We’re going to move to a place that’s actually great.”
We also asked all the colleagues, what does a great workplace look for, for you? So, we really asked them, what do you want to have in your workplace? And they chose for homely, a lot of green plants and professional work attire. As you can see, this is a screen print of our new office, and I think it worked out, and people feel very comfortable there. With this new office, we also introduced a new flexible workplace concept. Nobody has his own table or workplace anymore. On one half of the building, we’ve got the workplaces for working together, for co-creation and working together. It’s very open. And then on the other side of the building, we have the concentration workplaces. You’re supposed to be quiet there. And also the workplaces are structured so that you can’t see each other too much. And that really worked.
And we specifically said, “When we’re moving to a new building, it’s a great opportunity to actually create new habits and rituals. We really turn it around and said, “Well, we want to take the people all. We want to make them part of the movement of the new building, and we want to change our habits as soon as we start working there.” And for example, the whole ground floor is now open area where we also invite partners and members, and you don’t need a badge to actually walk around on the first floor. It’s a very open area where we invite all people that work together with us to join our company and to come in. And the best thing about this, actually, we moved in the July 2019. Came March, 2020, we had to start working from home with COVID and guess what? We turned it around in half a day. So, within half a day, everybody worked from home. The timing of doing this was really great. So we could get through this whole COVID and working from home area very seamlessly, almost.
Brings us back, I already talked about changing habits and changing the way we worked. In the last five years, we really worked hard on changing our company from a hierarchical family culture, to a result oriented culture, with all the positive aspects of family culture. We wanted to remain the positive aspects of the family culture. So, people feeling at home, people feeling it’s their company, people having personal relationships at work. I mean, not unwanted, but just normal personal relationships. And we did a few short term interventions to actually work on it, and there’s also the longer term interventions. As with computers and process, you can actually do leapfrog.
It doesn’t work that way with culture. Culture is the sum of all the behavior in your organization, and you can’t change it on the Thursday afternoon, but you can do the short term interventions that really help and make clear that we’re serious about it. And the best interventions actually start from setting the example from the top. Doing the right thing yourself. We started to actually have different behavior from the top. And we started also with sacrificing some of the sacred houses. So, for example, one of the first meetings with all the employees, and colleagues, we actually did also in the boardrooms. We had people in the company that had been working there for 20, 30, 40 years, and they never ever visited the boardroom area of the company. So, it was for them a first time. That’s really helping to change the culture in your organization.
And also what we did was we asked all the interactions, all the colleagues for input. What are three things you’re really proud of you want to keep? And what are the three things you would like to change if it were up to you? And so, we started really solving the most common issues and also communicate, communicate, communicate to all of them. You can see two very heartily smiling people. It’s actually the HR directors that you are seeing here. And they invited everybody explicitly to go along on this journey, on this strategic journey. So, she was the pilot and he was her assistant, and actually handed out boarding passes to everyone. And we gave everyone a book to actually create exercises and views and opinions on how they solve the company and how they saw the journey.
For the longer term, you really need training. If you want different assets and different culture and different behavior, you have to give people the tools, and you have to help them to work with those tools. We have done a lot of intensive training on competencies, on using the new Microsoft tools and the AVS tools. Also, we did restructuring. So, the first two years we basically said to everybody, “We’re going on a journey, please go along.” And then in year three, four and five, we did restructuring of the departments. And we did one department every year because we said we don’t want a one size fits over the company. We really want to change this department into what we think is best to achieve in our goals towards the future, and that’s different per department.
I think in the last five years, we went from a workforce from 180 people to 135 people. But the fascinating thing is because we changed our way of working that actually, I think, we’re almost doing twice as much as we did five years ago. Not in means of how much insurances we have and handling on insurances, but the amount of change that we’re implementing and adjusting in our company is twice as much as five years ago.
What we also did is we created a very strong alignment between the OG2go strategy with the teams by team manifests and also then through to every colleague. So, every year we create this sheet of the KPIs, but also the milestones for that year. And we ask all the teams in the organization, how are you going to contribute this year? And then we ask all the people in the organization, how are you going to contribute to the team manifest? And we ask all the teams to report on it every quarter, which is also a part of the basis of a quarterly report. So, there’s really, it’s the strategy all down to the colleagues, and it’s also rolling up through the reporting on what are we actually doing, and what’s going well, and where do we see improvement? And not to forget, celebrate. Celebrate, and have fun on the journey because everybody spends a lot of time at work, right? So, why not make it a nice experience? And that also goes to working together with members.
So, we put member intimacy at the core. I think at OG doing the right thing of the customer for the members has always been at the core. I mean, I’ve seen adjustments to policies where we thought, “Oh, well, we are a few cents off. We should restructure this or restore this.” And I’m like, “It’s just three cents. The whole sending the letter is going to cost more than a few cents.” But then the people say, “No, no, but they have to write on those few cents.” So, I thought the amount of detail and making sure the member gets what he deserves is really into the heart of the people.
Where we could see a very big improvement is on how do we actually interact and communicate with our members. We made a few changes there, and there’s also one thing that we really pinpointed, and that’s the call us. Actually, in the Netherlands, if you want to contact an insurance company, you’ll have a hard time actually trying to find a telephone number to call them, and we put a telephone number on our phone page, and we explicitly ask everybody, call us, just call us. We are there for you. We’ll answer the phone personally, and we’ll try and fix your question first time. So, we really focus on helping the customer and not on the average call time. It’s about helping the members. Also, we adjusted all the communication, we adjusted some of the interaction methods. We created a panel, a member panel, and we are providing actually members to our building. Here you see one of our older members actually visiting one of the general meetings year.
How about a focus on seniors? Well, we’ve had focus on seniors for the last few years because we have a lot of pension products, employee benefits, pension products, and also individual pension products, and those work fine, but there’s more to it. And the interesting thing is that traditionally in the Netherlands, everybody wants to get old, but nobody wants to be old and you can see it slightly turning around about it’s actually okay to be old because even if you’re a senior, you still have wishes. You still have dreams. You still have a future. I mean, you might… If you’re 65, you might have still 20 or 30 years to live. Why not be, have dreams on what you want to achieve in those years or what you want to contribute to society in those years? So, we’ve been inspired by blue zones in the world where actually people achieve a higher age and also are much more incorporated still in society.
We’ve been looking at countries with more cultural respect for the elderly, and also the espirit that’s coming out of the current seniors. We are seeing a lot of… Oh, people in the seventies, beginning of seventies who really still have high espirit and want to contribute to the world, learn new things. And so, we decided that we always want to keep the upbeat, respectful few on seniors and focus on the dreams and future of seniors. So, we’re not looking to see them as helpless or old. We want to see them also in their power and what they can contribute to the world. And that’s really changing the whole perspective right now on how we do our marketing, how we do our positioning, how we do our offering and how we work together with our partners.
And that also brings us to new products and services and life products. So, we changed the way we design products. We really do it in more co-creation with our members and we use design thinking methods. And one of the things we improved is our life products with guarantees. It’s an individual life product with guarantee. It’s a capital with a guarantee. And what we see is that we’re actually unique now in that society with this product because all other insurers actually move from transferring risk in building up life savings to the members. They don’t give any guarantees or they hardly give any guarantees anymore on the life savings. We do. And we actually choose to do that because we can do this because we have a lower required rate of return than listed companies.
And additionally, our customers, they understand that the guarantees are maybe lower than the expected return on investments, but the risk is also lower. And if we do well, if we have profits, we’ll share it with them. Not with shareholders, but we will share it with them. So, they can actually step in with very risk averse attitude, and they can always hope for more. Well, basically, I shouldn’t be telling you this. You’re all mutual. You know the scheme, but it’s really different than the life insurance schemes, and the trends that we see with other life insurance companies.
Then we also designed a new… A mortgage product, a senior mortgage, and we call it a silver home mortgage. And basically it’s in home equity mortgage for seniors. So, a lot of seniors, they paid off the debt of their house, so they do have wealth, but it’s stuck in the stones of their house. And they sometimes have a low income on their pension and the house does not fit the requirements of getting old comfortably and safely anymore. And so, it’s okay to get old in your own house, but how do you keep it safely? And there’s all kinds of things that help you by changing the bathroom, having more security on falling. And so, there’s all kinds of assets that you can bring in for elder people, but how to finance them?
Basically we said, we’re going to create this mortgage for seniors that will help them to turn their house to their needs on one side. And the other thing is next year, we’ll also add an additional feature so they can actually increase their pension with a monthly income or with on top of their pension. And our products is slightly different than that from the banks because we only give a lifelong in interest rate. There’s no chance that they’ll get any problems after 10 or 20 years when the interest rates are higher. There’s no monthly payments because we have a compound interest and no remaining debt guarantee. We introduced two life insurance elements into this mortgage with the lifelong interest rate and the no remaining debt guarantee that are not very natural for banks. And that really makes this product stand out for the regular bank products that are in this area.
Then we said, “Well, but we also want to create this platform to actually help people on how to improve their house, right? And we created first of all, a silver home platform, but actually we were enthusiastic about having this platform that last year we bought a existing platform, the largest senior platform currently in the Netherland called [inaudible 00:31:58], and we integrated with our platform. And on this senior platform, it’s the most used platform for actually searching for specific senior, rental buildings in the Netherlands. We actually have now the largest offering of all the senior livings, but also the practical and financial services around the house if you stay in your own house. We’re working here with interested parties. And on top of the platform, we introduce what we call. It’s a booklet and an online tool for family conversations, and it’s all about what’s your future plan towards living safely and comfortably in your own home or in a senior living? And also, how do you have this conversation about what’s safely, what’s comfortably, and what do you expect from your children and your parents?
Basically it started with ourselves. A lot of our people in our company are actually in the fifties and we see our parents in our seventies and eighties and we think, “Oh, are they doing okay in their home? Or there are some parents that actually depend upon us for services, but they’re not even even close by.” We said, there’s this interaction between the adults around their fifties and seniors in their eighties, and also shifting patterns with parents and children because the adult children actually start taking care of their parents. And how do you do that transition in a family setting? We thought we create this tool together with a specialized company to support having this family conversation about the future and how to keep it safe, and it’s really working nicely. So, we also think that this is typically an asset of a mutual company. We want to have an impact on the elderly people, not only sell them products. We to help them to live happily and comfortably in their homes.
That actually brings us to the next step. We’ve done all of this over the last few years. And basically we said, “Now, we’ve got a new why for this senior platform. It’s about together we grow older happily in the Netherlands.” And for happily, you might also adjust comfortably, safely healthy, and we see this as a new stepping stone to actually reach further in developing our strategy. So, we’ve come to here in the last five years, and basically we now said we want, “We really want to make a difference on growing older happily in the Netherlands together.” So, we’re not going to take care of the elderly. We’re going to do it together with the elderly.
There’s a few elements that we’re going to work out this year to actually enrich this strategy and then make sure we’ve got enough empowerment to actually create a new strategic outlook. The first one is on seniors and storytelling. So, we really want to start using storytelling, and we really want to start the interaction with seniors to involve them even more, activate them more, and also make them sure they start interacting with each other. All the while trying to improve the whole environment to grow older happily in the Netherlands.
We also think that’s a real important sustainability goal. So, yes, we’re going to do greenhouse gasses, and yes, we’re going to do sustainable assets, and yes, we’re going to do our own housing more sustainable. We are going to do all of that, but we’re going to be in line with the rest of the market. We really want to differentiate on the social part of the environmental, social, and governmental stuff. We really want to focus on having a positive impact on seniors in the Netherlands in everything that we do. So, in products, employees, assets, charity, and so on. And we think one of the things that next to the storytelling that could really help us drive that is data excellence. Since we are a mid-sized company and we have our centralized IT now, it really helps us in building the centralized data lake, and that approach enables us a new leapfrog based on our data lake and integrity for better servicing, product development, partnering, standardized reporting, risk management, and balance optimization.
No, we’re not going to sell data, but we truly believe that having good data will really help us in empowering our new strategic road. And we don’t have focus on it now as a strategic target, but good colleagues remain the basis of our success now and in the future. Currently, we already have a lot of good colleagues. We do have some vacancy, so we’re still looking for a few more good professional, nice colleagues, but we have good colleagues and we want to nurture them. And we want to make sure can grow into our company and also grow in with us to achieving those goals for our members and for society. I talked so much and so quickly, I did it in only 40 minutes. And I do have a lot more to tell you, but maybe I can turn it over to Ben and see if there’s any specific questions in the audience where you would like me to elaborate a little bit more.
Ben Telfer:
Thank you very much, Seada. You covered a lot there, and we really appreciate you going into so much detail about the OG2go strategy and also your future roadmap. We do have a number of questions already. We probably have about five or 10 minutes to get through as many as we can.
First question for you, Seada, talking about the flexible workplace. You obviously made that shift before COVID, and you are a bit of a head of the curve of what everybody’s doing now when everyone’s returning back to the office. What would you give? What would you sort of recommend are the biggest learnings that you’ve faced in those few months before COVID hit in terms of effectively managing remote working and flexible teams?
Seada van den Herik:
Good question. Yes, we were happy to just turn over to the flexible working in time. When we turned over, we actually… We didn’t about working at home. We gave the opportunity from working from home, but there was no obligation and there was also no stressing that you should be working from home. We first started out with flexible workspaces in the office because we also believe that working together in the office helps building culture and interaction, and actually to speed up processes. It’s actually interesting. I do a little diversion and I’ll come back to the question.
In the first year of COVID, we actually had a great year with regards to being very productive and very low absence leave with illness. It dropped from four and a half percent to one and a half percent. So, it has never been… We have never been more productive. That was 2020. And then in 2021, we actually saw that we started to get troubles on new projects. We started to get troubles on projects with issues, with new colleagues, and with also absence. So, the working from home started to take toll because we didn’t have enough interactions. So, we didn’t build up… The build up of personal relationships and trust, it wavered down, and that started to play up whenever we needed creativity, or whenever we needed trust to actually solve problems together.
I can tell you solving problems, it doesn’t work online, creativity, or getting started on something new. It doesn’t work online. And we also found out that really getting people up to speed, it doesn’t work online. You can get them to work, and so they will work effectively, but they won’t make the true personal connection to the colleagues and to your company, if there’s not physical closeness and the more regular calls. So, the big learning is make sure your IT really works good. If the IT doesn’t work good, it sucks. People get very frustrated.
Also, help people with the changing rules of the game. Working together online asks for different routines than working together from the office. And just train your people and make clear what those routines are, what you expect from them, train them in them. So, make clear what the different routines are for working from home and also change those routines again when you start working hybrid because we’re now going to kind of flexible scheme. We expect people to work two days from the office and three days at home or somewhere around that. So, we also understand now that there’s going to be a lot of hybrid working. So, we actually introduced a new way of working we call it for hybrid meetings, et cetera, because that’s different again than totally online or totally in the office.
So just make sure you’re very conscious about the communication aspects and the behavior aspects and the social structure aspects that impact. And I think also in the last two years, we did spend a lot of attention and time with our management on trying to get this social structure together. So, for example, I had personal walks with all of the management in our company, and then, also, we would make a little video blog to actually post it into the company so that people would see me and the managers. And they would get some personal information through the blog. Also, we would send them much more presence at home or compliments at home. We would really try to get the interaction meetings. And in the first year we asked all of the managers to actually meet every person they managed once physically. It didn’t matter how, but make sure you speak to them once physically to really interact and engage because we’re humans, we’re physical beings, and there is something about physical presence that we should not underestimate.
Ben Telfer:
Fantastic. Thank you very much for that advice, Seada. Another question related a bit around your working colleagues and your culture. As you shifted and went away from that hierarchical structure, what was the response from the employees, or has there been enough time to see a response from the employees? And is it something that you use in your talent attraction because do you think it is a good way of attracting new employees to the company?
Seada van den Herik:
There’s actually two questions. Good questions. You should ask the employees, right? But not me. But I think for the first half year or year people, they didn’t really believe it because they had been in this safe hierarchical environment where it was very clear. If the boss told you what to do, that was what you had to do. So, it’s actually a pretty… If you are up to it, it’s a pretty environment. Okay, there’s not much about innovation and own initiative, but if you skip that, and if you don’t eager for your own creativity or your own initiative, and you’ll just do what you’re being asked, then that’s pretty safe.
I think for the first year there was a lot of disbelief and also people felt very uncertain because for them getting into this new situation where, okay, there was more freedom. There was life, but we also expected more ownership of their own results, and their own work, and their own ideas. And that was sometimes challenging. So, first there was the disbelief and then there was like, “Well, is it really here to stay?” And then we moved to, “Okay, I like the freedom.” And then we moved to, “Oh, but with this freedom comes also more our own responsibility.” And then there’s actually people who dropped out at the second or within the don’t believe it or don’t like it, or, “Oh, now they’re expecting much more of me.” And that’s also okay.
The one thing we always try to say, “Well, they’ve been working for this company and they contributed to this company.” Even if they don’t like this transition and they want to move out, we’ll always do our best to say goodbye through the front door. We really tried to ensure that also in saying goodbye to people, we did it nicely as to end off this journey together and open the front door to say goodbye. And then the second thing is, is it more attractive to new employees? It is. It’s so funny we had a… Every quarter, we do the introduction meeting with the board with all the new people in our company. And then we ask them what they actually think about the company and what their [inaudible 00:46:36] are about. And I kind of told them a story about how we were an old fashioned company and now kind of more modern company.
And there was this one guy, I think he’s 25. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about old fashioned company. This is just a great company. Look at the building. Look about this meeting we’re having with the board, and look, about the products. It’s great.” And I thought, “Okay, sometimes you need the outsider to actually tell you where you are in your journey.” So, I think this will be the last time I start talking about that we were old fashioned. We’re actually a great company and moving towards really making the difference for the elderly in the long run.
Ben Telfer:
That’s a great story. And I think, like you said, it’s a testament to everything you’ve done if new employees come in and say that.
Two more questions. I think we’ve got time for that. Just come in very similar, but I’ll ask you both of them separately. Firstly, do you think that the values of OG and the understanding of mutuality resonates more with the senior generation than it does with other generations?
Seada van den Herik:
Also, a good question. I’ll wind back the time six years ago as to why I wanted to work for the OG, because I was having a sabbatical, and when OG came along I thought, “This is really great,” because I’ve never worked for a mutual. I had worked for listed companies, et cetera. I thought this is really great because in this time, in my sabbatical, I had seen a lot of platforms, actually kind of new formed groups of people working together and sharing stuff like sharing platforms and kind of unofficial corporations. I thought, “Okay, there’s actually a whole new trend of sharing,” but basically if you look at life insurance being a mutual is all about sharing. So, it’s basically, a mutual life insurance is an ideal form for sharing wealth and risk. And it actually fits very nicely with all those modern structures about sharing.
You see those modern structures are actually very popular amongst youngsters about sharing cars, about sharing data, about sharing whatever. So, I came from the perspective of that it was really modern and popular construction. So, when I started working at OG, I actually thought that we’re going to really populate and make the OG younger again because I thought that was where the opportunities were, but it worked out differently. And I think now we’ve got a real great niche market on the seniors, and yes, I do think it resonates really nicely with them, but there is also resonation on younger people.
Ben Telfer:
Again, this is something we hear all the time that it’s with the younger generation, the values and the ideas of mutuality really does resonate, but perhaps the understanding of the mutual business model doesn’t as much. So, interesting to hear your perspective on that. The second related question was, again, around now you’ve changed target market. Have you had to adjust your mutual messaging in your brand, the communications?
Seada van den Herik:
A simple question. No, no, no. I think we have more like the core values of together, sure, and we actually included involved within the last few years. They’re still the same. So, the basic message has not changed. The way we use graphics, the way we use wording has already changed. And we think we’re about on this new journey to even change it more to really make it upbeat and about dreams of the seniors and the elderly, and also the family conversations between the fifth years and the eight years. We think that’s a really interesting area where there’s a lot to do. And there’s a lot of uncertainty and unclarity, and I think whenever there’s uncertainty and unclarity, it’s where the opportunity is to go and help and improve. So, no, the core message has not changed, but the way we interact and the way we bring it out has been changed and will change again for the next few years.
Ben Telfer:
Thank you so much, Seada. I did say that was going to be it, but I’ve got one final question just to ask you because I think it’s a really great and interesting one. Which steps or results are important to you in the come years for the purpose to succeed further and achieve your purpose of together we grow older, happily in the Netherlands?
Seada van den Herik:
I think the most important one is to interact with members and seniors because our company, we’re 135. Even if we double, we can’t drive this if we’re going to do everything personally. So, we have to be in this platform inspiring partners, working together with partners, inspiring groups of older people to actually interact and engage with us to actually drive this change. The only thing we can do is be at the heart of the change, be a trusted partner, but we can’t work the change ourself because we’re just too small compared to this whole big group of seniors. The most important one is how are we going to engage all those seniors, and as 50 years old on this journey with us? So, it shouldn’t be about us. It should be about how do we create this platform of working together on helping each other?
Let me clarify for one thing. A very small example. We said one of the pitfalls is that all of those seniors are starting to call us, and we know that a lot of times they’re lonely. They will really be looking forward to talking with us, and we can’t afford to be talking with old Dutch people for half hour every week. And then we said, “Okay, so that would be a problem.” So, if you’re really successful and they’re still all calling us, we really have a problem. And I said, “Wait a minute, because those same members are the members who have a lot of time on their hands. So, basically what we should do is we should also try and involve them to maybe answer the phone for us if it’s just about talking to other people.”
We are really looking together. So, we don’t really need to answer all the phones if they just want to have some simple information. We could actually ask members if they want to be trained by us and to get active, to actually answer some easy phone calls for us. So, they would be engaged again in this community. So, that’s an example of how we think that yes, we can play a pivotal role in really engaging those seniors on the different platforms with different partners and with each other. I think that’s going to be the crux of our success and really achieving the why in the next few years. [crosstalk 00:54:27] 10 years, yeah.
Ben Telfer:
That example really, really shows your purpose, and it’s great example.
Seada van den Herik:
I think, I actually forgot to ask an important question because I’m not really sure who’s on the webinar, but it would really be awesome if other ICMIF members have great examples of products for seniors or on platforms or services for seniors or on how seniors are being shown more respect in their culture. I would really love to have those examples and to actually bring it together to learn from, and if we’re getting a lot, we’ll also share, of course. Again, because I think we’re not the only country in the world who has an aging population. So, I think there’s actually opportunities for other countries as well.
Ben Telfer:
That’s a great rallying call and a great way to end the presentation, Seada. And again, I can imagine there’s lots of people listening to this webinar now, and also watching the call that would like to engage with you and speak about this further. I know lots spoken about attracting the younger generation, but as you’ve put today, the senior population is just as important and especially around aging population. If anybody is listening and would like to share some examples, please do get in touch and would happily connect you with Seada. As well, if you have any further questions, please do get in touch. Again, we like to connect you with members from different places around the world, and hopefully it’ll lead to some valuable conversations.
Just on that note, I just want to thank, Seada again for her excellent presentation. A reminder to everybody in the audience that this webinar has been recorded. And I know many of you will be watching the recording. This was episode eight in our mutual advantage webinar series. You can see the details on screen and how you can access all the previous episodes.
Enjoy the rest of your day. Goodbye.
Seada van den Herik:
Bye.
The above text has been produced by machine transcription from the webinar recording. ICMIF has made every effort to ensure that transcriptions are as accurate as possible, however, in some cases some text may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. Listening to or watching the webinar recording will allow you to hear the full text as delivered during the webinar but this is available in English only. Our transcriptions are provided to enable members to select the language of their choosing using the dropdown menu above.
