Ben Telfer:
Hello everybody. And welcome to today’s webinar. The second ICMIF Young Leaders webinar, “Engaging millennial employees through internal professional networks”. I’m pleased to introduce the moderator for today’s webinar, Jeff Puckering. Jeff is the strategy manager, NFU Mutual in the UK and he’s also a founding member of the ICMIF Young Leaders Forum. Jeff, over to you.
Jeff Puckering:
Thank you very much, Ben, and hello to all the listeners wherever you are in the world. My name is Jeff Puckering and I am a strategy manager in NFU Mutual, and I’ve been here over six years. And in addition, I started here through what we call a graduate scheme which I find isn’t quite as common in other countries as it is in the UK, but essentially it’s a process in which companies pick talent from university graduates, which obviously isn’t that unusual. But after that, we send them on a one to three year typically training and experience program to set them up.
And the reason I mentioned this is I believe one of the cornerstones of this whole process has been the networking element and the access to a wide range of colleagues and business people early on, has definitely been for me anyway, a catalyst for my personal career progression.
Today I’m really eager to hear from the two speakers that we have to learn from their experiences and how they’ve benefited from this network. And I really encourage all of you to think about how you might take some of this away, leverage your own personal networks and support your organizations to improve how they develop their own internal networks. We have two excellent speakers, Sander who we’ll hear from later is the financial controller Achmea in the Netherlands and is currently focused very much on things like solvency too and just 26 years of age, he joined the Young Achmea board, accelerated through his master’s degree last year. And in that board, the role he plays in the things that our board is doing some amazing things, it’s really looking forward to hearing about.
But before Sander we’ll hear from Brian, he is the manager of Diversity and Inclusion at Shelter Insurance in the USA. He’s played a core part in setting up this young professional network and he’s one of the network’s original leaders. His role in Diversity and Inclusion season support, what has now become a much larger initiative. And without giving too much of that away, I will hand over to Brian with a final reminder to use the comments section that Ben has talked about to send your questions in and really looking forward to answering some towards the end.
Brian Jones:
All right, good morning and afternoon, depending on where you are in the world. I will talk a little bit more about my role with our young professionals group as we go through, as I’m explaining how the structure works and everything like that. But I wanted to present naturally on our young professionals group, which is the Emerging Professionals Network (EPN) at Shelter Insurance.
Before getting into EPN, I want to give just a brief background of our company. Shelter Insurance, we are based in Columbia, Missouri, which is in the Midwest of the United States. Combined we have a little bit over 4,000 employees and insurance agents. And with our young professionals group, all of the employees and agents are eligible to join and be a part of that group. We operate primarily in the Midwest and primarily in the central part of the United States operating in 20 different states right now with 19 different claims offices.
We do also operate internationally. We offer it in several different countries around the world. However, all of our reinsurance account executives are still based in Columbia, Missouri. All of our young professionals are based in the United States. We don’t have any international overlap. That’s just the basic information with Shelter, you can understand a little bit about our structure and I will get more into how our young professionals group got started. With the young professionals group, a little bit of history, it came out of our Diversity Committee.
Our Diversity Committee was a corporate initiative that was started back in 2012, and it was headed by our vice president of human resources. When the Diversity Committee started, there were roughly 30 different employees. The employees represented several different levels of management within the company who represented all of the different departments. And we did have representation both at home office in Columbia, Missouri, and we had representation throughout the field. I happened to be one of those initial members at the time. I actually worked out of the field office as a national recruiter. At the time I was one of the few representative on the field on that Diversity Committee.
The first thing that the Diversity Committee did when they got together, they talked about the different initiatives that Shelter had, the different goals that we had for the Diversity Committee, which was really leading a lot of our Diversity and Inclusion initiatives. They had several different subcommittees that they wanted us to join and focus on different things. This has expanded the role of the Diversity Committee has expanded, but starting out, these were the subcommittees that we started with. We started with the focus on reverse mentoring, just in case anyone was not sure about it.
Reverse mentoring as well we have some of the newer employee, some of the less tenured employees, and they are providing mentoring and guidance to some of the executive level employees on different things. Typically, some of the more popular things and then technology. All technology and different ways of communication and things of that sort. It’s set up to where the newer employees first offered that mentor and then halfway through they switch and go back to the traditional mentoring program. The reverse mentoring was one of the subcommittees along with the diversity website. We had some people focused on having a larger diversity presence on the web and having different links from our main page. Hiring and practice and community partnerships were two different focuses of the Diversity Committee as well, making sure that we had a different diverse pipeline and making sure that we had stronger community partnerships on the diversity side of things.
Procurement, making sure that we focus on a diverse contractor in diverse people that we do business with diverse companies that support our business, diverse technology, again, that’s kind of going along with the website. Some different things that we’re doing to help us be more diverse and how technology can help with that.
And finally young professionals was the other subcommittee that was formed and we wanted to focus on creating our first employee resource group at the time Shelter didn’t have any official resource groups of any kind. All of our any groups that were formed were more social, more casually set up. There was nothing official at the time. The first employee resource group that Shelter wanted to focus on were the young professionals. There was a subcommittee that was created for those young professionals. And I was a member of that subcommittee called young professionals. They had four primary focuses, one giving the young professional subcommittee group started. Ee wanted to make sure our focus on professional development, employee engagement, retention, and helping those young professionals get promoted.
When we started out the subcommittee, again, similar to the representation of the overall diversity committee, we had representation from multiple departments, multiple levels of experience and leadership. And at the time I was the only person from the field represented on the subcommittee. But we did want to make sure that we still had some diverse representation on that subcommittee. As that subcommittee kept going, one of the first things that we discussed were just kind of overall what we wanted to do with getting that started. How are we going to recruit? How would we want to get people going with it? Because what we wanted to do was get people in place that represented the subcommittee group, the young professionals group wanted to get people in place first and then collectively kind of set the direction, set the tone for the group.
Our thought process was that if we, as the sub-committee laid all the parameters, set everything up and built everything that was going to be very difficult to get buy-in from those leaders, because basically all we’re doing is bringing them in to execute what we have already put in place. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to make sure that the leaders that we brought in were trusted with being able to build something from the beginning of course. We wanted to focus on recruiting and getting the right people in because that was critical to really getting this group off the ground. When we first started recruiting, we certainly put out the basic goals of what we’re looking for, the basic things that we needed and we loved, again, the four functions that we mentioned in the previous slide.
And when you put it out to all employees, we’ve made it open to all employees of all different levels initially, we just wanted to see what the interest level was. We wanted to see who would be interested and who would apply. We did have an application process and we made a web based application and we had five short essays. But what we wanted to do was make sure that there was some actual buy-in. We wanted to make sure that any of the applicants put effort into it, and didn’t just throw their name in the hat, just for the sake of it. We did want people to actually care about this, take some time, and we want to make sure we finally did that were willing to commit early on, even in the beginning of the process.
We had five short essay questions. The questions were based on their desire. Why do they want to do this? What is their interest with it? What are some things they would like to see accomplished with it? And also talking about the leadership experience? From there we chose 12 people to be a part of that leadership team. As we were looking at it initially, which was 10 from home office and with those home office people, we had the team that we really loved, but we also talked about representing the field. I also mentioned that we have not quite as many in the field, but we do still have plenty of people in the field employees and we have even more on the agent side of course, that will be interested in being involved on the leadership side as well. We did want to make sure that you had some representation from the field. I was actually chosen as one of the leaders of the field to take over. We had 10 at home office, and then we also had two from the field. For a total of 12 subcommittee leaders.
Along with that, what we wanted to do was make sure that we had designated leaders within the group overall. We did choose two from home office to kind of overall lead the group in home office. And we had one at the field that overall led at the field, that was myself. We had our team of 12 people that we were excited about with getting the group going and getting the group started. We had our 12 leaders and with our 12 leaders, what we had them do were set up the initial task. When we got the group together, we actually brought everyone together and had a big meeting with the subcommittee and kind of laid out some of the things that we wanted them to focus on first. And it’s funny, when I say we, because I had to wear two hats at that time. I was the one the head of the advisory, but also one of the leaders.
We laid out the tasks of what we wanted to see accomplished and what were the first things that you wanted the professional leaders to do. So, one of the first things we wanted to do was set up a mission statement. What does this young professionals group represent? What are they about? What is the overall mission and goal of the group? We also wanted them to set up parameters, which is of course, naturally a challenge when you’re talking about young professionals in defining what is a young professional, we wanted to have the leaders decide what those parameters were for young professionals. And if they were going to be a hard stop on age, or if there’s going to be flexibility.
And actually we also needed to have a name. We had talked about different ideas with names, and I think they asked me actually they took suggestions. They did a big search for names as well. They had to decide on the structure of the group overall, now that we knew they had 12 leaders, what was going to be the structure? How was that going to be defined? They also had the set out the plan for growth and what they were going to do to market, to really develop that group in the core of that group? And finally, what was the transition plan? We didn’t want this to be something where once everything got going, it was, “Congratulations, great.” You have our leadership team that wants that leadership team. We didn’t want the group to grow away with that leadership team. We wanted to make sure that they had a strong, defined, transition plan in place.
Starting out with the mission statement, here’s the basic mission statement through out. I typically don’t like reading the slide directly, but I will read since it’s short, EPN is committed to engaging, empowering and connecting a diverse group of emerging at Shelter Insurance, through personal, professional development, networking, and community involvement. Overall that mission statement, they wanted to make sure that the mission statements still stood along the lines of what was initially tasked with engagement in power, networking reports, all of those different things for the focus of the group. We’ll want to make sure just to have an official mission statement to put out, to show that that is what we were still focused on.
From the parameter standpoint, as the leaders all get together and really started discussing it, we wanted to make sure that there was flexibility. As a group, we decided that we didn’t really want to set any type of defined age, because again, what is young? Young and 18 year old, are you still in your professional 35? Are you still young at 40? We had many of these different discussions and the discussions went a lot of different directions. And overall, the one deciding factor that we had was, young is a state of mind in a lot of cases, but also we just did not want to put a number on it. We also did not want to have a hard cap on that. The one thing we did not want to do was exclude employees, specifically new employees. That was something that was very important to us.
We saw our responsibility as EPN as a young professionals group to also be able to network and include any new people that we have coming through the door. And while we certainly do have a lot of what you traditionally call young people coming in as new employees, we also had new employees that came in at different levels that may or may not have been considered young. So that was the reason why we did not want to have that age limit, that age restriction. What we decided to do instead was market to people that were looking to progress. That was something that we focused on, what people don’t want it to progress in their careers, people that still wanted to get promoted, people that were still looking to develop. That’s what we focus more as having a progressive growth opportunity.
Through those parameters, setting the parameters actually helped us come up with the name. We wanted the Metro that the name was consistent with the parameters and kind of really express what the group was about. Of course, being an insurance company, we had dozens of different acronyms. We had tons of different letters thrown out there and of course we settled on an acronym as well, EPN, the Emerging Professionals Network was something that we all decided on and we all love. And we focused on the emerging groups. We felt like the word emerging really encompassed the spirit of what the group was about, really a purpose spirit of what we were looking to do. Emerging was the big focus of it. The Emerging Professionals Network was what we decided on.
And as we looked at the structure, there are a couple of different things that were already in place with the structure. The two biggest main that we did have an executive sponsor. That was something that was incredibly important to make sure that we had an executive level individual that supported the group, that understood what the group was going through and also made sure to give them guidance as they built this organization from the beginning. The executive sponsor in this case was the vice president of accounting. She still is the executive sponsor and she was fantastic with helping with the group. The executive sponsor was there, along with that, of course, being the advisory board that was the name that EPN decided to give to them. They’re not just the subcommittee anymore. They were the advisory board and that made up that the subcommittee and then the leadership team.
The leadership team decided to address several different levels of need for EPN as a whole. They came up with subcommittees. They mirror the structure of the Diversity Committee. The subcommittees for EPN were focused on education, development, social, community involvement, membership and the field. Since we had 12 members, naturally we had two leaders that we were going to have or that we’re going to be the subcommittee chairs for each of those areas. And myself and another EPN leader out in the field that they’re in the field and then we had the 10 home office people representing education, development, so forth, community membership. That was the structure of it.
And then from there, each of the committee chairs was been responsible for getting their committee members involved. Each of the committee chairs decided on how many committee members they needed and they were responsible for getting those committees together.That was the structure which where overall each of the committee chairs had separate meetings with their committees and then the leadership team would get together monthly and each committee would get their monthly report. They would report out on what’s happening and make sure that we’re all on the same page and moving in the same direction. And everything still… In the initial stages, especially everything went through the advisory board and the executive sponsor before one else, especially in those initial stages, because we wanted to make sure that the first steps that were made by this group, the first announcements, the first things were done properly. That’s the overall structure of the group.
From a growth standpoint, the initial growth went out through different distribution lists. We don’t get a ton of employee or messages going on, but we did get one employee all message going out, announcing the group. And they work with different departments to have individual, not individual, but each department head sending out messages to their groups. And in the field, we did the same thing, working with the claims offices and working with different marketing people to send messages out to their groups. Along with that, we worked at the new hire luncheons, and we’ve had some representative at the new hire luncheons and naturally word of mouth is something that we did to make sure and talk to each of our individual and recruit them that way.
And there was also the big EPN kickoff, which was an exciting thing. And we had an hour or two where we actually had nearly 200 employees show up in person. And then we also live streamed to all of the claims offices in the field where we had the big promotional introduction video towards each department, or excuse me, each committee chair went up and described what their focus was with their committee, what they were looking to do. And that was kind of a recruiting pitch for each of the subcommittees along with also really recruiting as a whole. That was an hour and introduction meeting but that was wildly successful in really helping EPN get out there. They did some good things with growth to get started and the plan was very successful.
From a transition standpoint, this was something again that was very important to make sure we had a strong structure in place to really have transitioned people up. What we decided was that we wanted to make sure and have enough time for this initial leadership group to really have time to get things going and to really set the bar for what they wanted this group to do. Six of the first 12 committed to having a three-year term. We wanted to make sure that we had one leader for each subcommittee that committed to being on leadership team for three years and the other half committed to being on the term for two years. We wanted to make sure that we have the entire team that plays for at least two years. You’ll get everything set, but then we want it to have that additional year for half of the team so we could stagger the transition.
The goal was to, in theory and in a perfect world, we would never have two new people heading up the committee. The goal was to make sure that we always had one experience person that had at least a year of experience on the committee. And then we have one new person. We wanted to make sure that we continued that staggering and then have every new committee chair that was every new committee leaders serve a two year term.
One of the other goals was that all incoming leaders needed to serve on a subcommittee, it didn’t have to be that particular subcommittee that they were leaders of, for example, you could serve on the community subcommittee, and then serve as the social chair. We just wanted to make sure that you already had some previous involvement before you could serve as a leader and all the leaders had to be approved by the advisory board. We’d have one leader at the beginning of the fourth quarter to where they will submit the names for the suggestions that they have for leadership and advisory board would have to sign off for those leaders.
Some of the early challenges that we faced with the young professionals group, one of the early challenges was financial. And that was simply because when EPN got started, it was a great problem to have, but they really got up and ran a lot quicker than expected. Initially there was only $1,500 total for home office and field set aside to get professionals group started because that money was set aside… Initially the thought was to do just kind of seed money just to get whatever promotional pamphlets and things like that and to get the group in the right direction. And the goal was to get them in the right direction and get started and then fully get run that next year with funding. But the EPN leaders were very aggressive in getting everything started, very aggressive with marketing, very aggressive with getting the ball rolling. They got everything going 10 months ahead of schedule, which again is a great problem to have. However, there was no money in the budget. Early on, we got very creative with the programming, very creative with the things that we would do from a money standpoint.
Logistically it was also a challenge at home office, of course, everyone is there in the building, but in the field we are traveling from several different states. Logistically it was very difficult to keep the entire field engaged, we would do webinars and things of that sort which we did have some engagement, but it didn’t have the same feel as the face-to-face networking. Myself and the other partner Candice we would travel to different field locations. We would go to as many of them could, however, we still had paying jobs. We couldn’t constantly go out to the field. Logistically it was difficult to continue to keep buy-in from the field employees. But that was something that quite frankly, is still a challenge because it’s different when you’re not there in person.
Manager buy in was also difficult to begin with just because people didn’t know what to expect, didn’t know what was happening and there were times where they had some events occur during the day and getting managers to support that took some time. It took some time to really build that trust and I think that went along with name recognition with people not knowing what the group was about initially, not knowing what the focus was, not knowing what they were planning on doing. There were some challenges with that initially.
We overcame a lot of those different challenges, which I’ll talk about in a couple of different slides, but there are some that quite frankly are still ongoing as I mentioned, logistics in the field is still something that I don’t think that will be a challenge that just goes away. It’s always going to be the challenge of continuing to engage people when we have several different people in different locations across the country. That’s going to continue to be a challenge, but we will look at that best.
One of the challenges ongoing now is being a little bit stagnant. It’s been six years now that we’ve been as an organization being in existence and just kind of keeping ideas and maybe keeping ideas fresh, and keeping people excited about it has been a little bit of a challenge. As I mentioned before, with the perfect world of making sure it’s staggering the leadership of course, if not in a perfect world so we’ve had the challenge of people not completing full-time for a myriad of reasons, obviously some… We’ve been really good about not having a ton of turnover completely to other leaving, but sometimes they can move, sometimes they may take on a different role in the can no longer do it. And sometimes there’ve been the case to where an employee realized that then I did not want what they can’t chew and they could not commit to that time. For whatever reason it is, we’ve had issues to where in some cases we have had both leaders leave at the same time and we’ve had two new leaders taking over. That’s been a challenge.
And also a challenge, a given good problem would have, but another challenge is there have been new ERG’s, more resource groups that have come into the market now. We’ve seen a women’s group come into the market. We’ve also seen a multicultural group that have come into the market, which are both fantastic. And they’re both doing a great job of partnering, but it’s one of those where EPN, the young professionals group is no longer the only group in the market now. There are multiple things going on. So since they have so many different events, there’s the challenge of kind of an overload of things going on with employees and employees having to choose what they’re going to through and what not to. Those are a few of the ongoing challenges.
However, we have seen some great successes from this organization. We recently had our five-year anniversary last year, but it was great because we brought back all of the original leaders to talk to the new leaders and to give some advice and to share some of the experiences they had with getting that going. We are still growing, obviously the numbers aren’t going to be as large as you saw in those first few years, but we are still growing. We did get a budget increase from that first year to the next so they got plenty of money to work with now. They have more than enough to work with that should do the things that they need to do. We have seen some retention amongst the leaders, at this point it’s still a fairly small sample size.
We’ve had less than 50 liters total over the last six years. It’s been a fairly small sample size, but we have seen retention among the leaders. They are certainly doing a fantastic job with engagement and we’ve seen a lot of leaders, especially in that first group of leaders that have gotten promoted. We’ve had some great success with that, wanting to share a couple of pictures with you. These are a couple of things that we’ve had. This was a mystery dinner at the bottom here.
The next one, I just want to show you, EPN does a fantastic job of planning out well in advance. They have their schedule done typically by October of the year before. They will still have some different things that come up as far as some different one-offs and specialty events. And then make sure to advertise those when you can, but they do a great job of having at least the core of their events planned out several months before the year starts.
Future, what we’re looking at with EPN, and this is my last slide, but we’re looking at making sure that they have more collaboration with other employee resource groups. And they’ve already done a good job of starting that. To make sure they continue to work with the ERG’s. Our leaders now are going to be taking a volunteer leader course. We realized through the years in that we are asking the leaders of our young professionals group to continually focus on developing their members, but what we didn’t have was development for the leaders themselves. We actually just put together a development course for volunteer leaders to help our leaders understand how it is to lead those that are in a volunteer role that don’t report to you on a regular basis, how to manage your time. We have that course coming here at the end of this year. And then we’ll be doing that.
An overall employee resource group summit where we bring all of them together to talk about different ideas and the directions that each group is going in. EPN put together a fundraising committee because as they continue to grow, to surpass the needs of what their budget allows. They’ve looked at different opportunities for fundraising and that’s a committee that has been successful so far.
We’re looking at a joint employee resource group calendar. So, rather than having different sources and having to go to each individual group to know what’s going on, we are going to put together a calendar so all of the groups can just have one big calendar to know what’s going on. And last thing, we’re always bringing in new people so they’re always bringing in new innovation. It’s been very exciting working with all of them. So ladies and gentlemen, hopefully I didn’t go over much with my time, but that is the case study for Emerging Professionals Networking group at Shelter Insurance.
Jeff Puckering:
Thank you very much, Brian. Some great insights there. It sounds like quite a journey that your initiative has been on. Lots of things to pull out for people I think. I know I’m picking up on the idea of emerging. I love the idea that you didn’t actually put an age against the group and the different millennial things that I’ve been involved in. I’ve been a very keen advocate of not to focus on, it’s not about whether you were born between a particular year, it’s more about the attitudes you’re looking for rather than the age. And what strikes me is I can see the importance that’s been given to these groups through the amount of governance and senior sponsorship. There seems to be a real focus on getting it right there.
I’m going to hold off on any questions gesture. We’re not going to wait until the end. Without further ado, I’m going to say a big thank you to Brian again.
And right now we will hear from Sander, if that’s okay.
Sander Montanus:
Thank you, Jeff. And hello to our listeners. First of all, I will just briefly introduce myself, then I’ll continue telling you something about Achmea in general and then I’ll advance to the young professional network, Young Achmea. My name is Sander. I’m 26 years old, and I’ve worked for this company since January this year. And from day one, I already subscribed as a Young Achmea member because I really feel the importance of these young professional networks just to be able to live up to my own ambitions. And two months later, I already joined the Young Achmea board. One of the board positions became vacant and it seemed it suited me perfectly. So, rest is history and now I’m responsible for external relations and the activities we organized together with other networks or other companies.
About Achmea: Achmea is the largest insurance company in the Netherlands. It has a rich history dating back to 1811 and it also has a history of a lot of mergers and acquisitions bringing it to the insurance group it is today. But you’ll still find a lot of this history back in the identity of Achmea. And Achmea offers all kinds of insurance projects with a small 15,000 people working at Achmea, of which only 19% is under 36 years of age. And I say under 36 years because this is our age limit actually.
This 90%, for me, this highlights one of the important aspects of a young professional network. Because when I look at my own situation, when I joined the team and the company in January, about 90% of the people are above 45 of age and they have worked for the company for many years already. So, I know these people are very important for their knowledge and their skills, but for young professionals it is very important to meet like-minded ambitious people to motivate each other to exploit their full potentials, of which I know that Young Achmea can play a big role.
As I said before, you can still find a large part of Achmea’s history back in the identity of the mergers and acquisitions. First of all, there is a big diversity in the locations in the country. For those of you who don’t know, this is a map of the Netherlands. Besides that at some locations, all employees, they only work for just one of the brands within the Achmea group and they feel more like they’re working for that brand instead of Achmea. It’s harder to include them in a company-wide event and to include them in a company-wide network, but we’ll get back to that later.
At this moment, there are eight different office buildings spread around the country. And of these eight, two are to be closed down within two years but then we still have six left, which are a great distance from each other. For your ID, from the most northern office to the most southern office, it’s a two hour drive. It’s not that big of a country, but still for a Dutch, it feels very far away as it’s on the other side of the world. All these different locations in the spread around the country are a bit of a challenge for a network like Young Achmea. We had to give some thoughts about how to deal with that. And we also have to organize events all across the country, but I’ll also get back to that later on.
Within the Achmea group, we also operate a few companies abroad within Europe; in Slovakia, Greece, and Turkey. And also in Australia. And as of the beginning of this year, in Canada. Our young professional network mainly focuses on the Dutch part of the company. But from out of the international division, the question rose on how we can include the foreign activities more in the network, which obviously is quite hard. So, also a question to you, if any one of the attendees has more experiences with networks on a larger scale like that, I would love to hear more about that and maybe even Brian can tell me more about that because I saw you were active in 20 states in the US
Now we’ll get to Young Achmea, which is our young professional network. This network has been active since 2008. Very different from what Brian told us about the network at Shelter is that our young professional network was not a corporate initiative, but it was founded by young professionals and has also been operated by young professionals for the last 10 years. I tried to find out a bit about the exact costs which led to the beginning of Young Achmea, but I did not really find one single answer. It could be because of the lack of connection across the different locations within the company or the lack of possibilities in personal development outside of the regular business. Besides that in the Netherlands, a lot of companies have these kind of young professional networks and they are often operated by young professionals themselves. So, just a group of enthusiastic young professionals just decided that Achmea should also have one of these and the HR department was happy to listen to that, which brings us to where we are today.
We as the Young Achmea boards are… We are just young professionals ourselves. And every board can decide for themselves what Young Achmea means to them and just run it in their own way. Our board exists of five persons. They don’t have a fixed term. Naturally there comes a moment that you don’t really feel like being young enough anymore to run the board, and then we believe usually that’s between one and two years that people are on the board.
Every year, our board, they update a vision we want to pursue. And in a minute, I will also show you the vision we formulated for 2018. And what we do in general for our 1000 members is to help them with networking, organizing all kinds of social events internally and externally. We help them with exploiting their potentials, offering workshops and trainings. And in a few months, we’ll also start with an event that aims at career within the company. And we do this in collaboration with our HR department. And we help them by broadening the horizon, by connecting young professionals across different departments in different companies so they can open their eyes for other possibilities as well.
The network is open to anyone under the age of 36. Actually, I put 35 on the sheet, I see right now. And the membership is free of charge. And we are very strict on the age limit, which is also very different from what we heard from Brian. Actually on the day you turn 36, you will get an email basically stating, “Happy birthday. Unfortunately, you’re not a member anymore.” We have had some discussions about opening it up for just any age and with the ID that, what is young is a just a state of mind, but it’s very hard to pursue. And we also want to engage the youngest employees getting into the company. And that’s harder if you have people 40 plus still in the young network.
I showed you before that we have a lot of different locations spread around the country. It’s hard to get all of our members to attend all of our activities.We are also organized in location committees. That means that we have a group of young professionals on every location organizing smaller local activities besides the larger company-wide or cross-company activities. And all activities are open to members working at any location, but we see that not a lot of people go to a different location for activity. Each of these location committees get their own budgets. And if you have good ideas for new activities and they can defend the extra budget needed, we are always happy to give it some thought.
Let me advance to the vision we formulated for this year. As I already explained, we are very development oriented. We try to be approachable, open to all employees on their 36 and also be very involved in all opportunities we can offer for all young employees. And the only way to do so is by keeping up with the actualities, be innovative in our activities. We give a lot of attention to innovation in the insurance world. We need to be connected. We have the right connections within the company with other networks, with the HR department with our international division and also outside of the company. And we need to stay sharp to be able to listen to all of our members to keep on providing their needs.
And I think we are able to say right now that we are already reaching our higher goal. We do offer opportunities to all of our members, especially now we are collaborating with more different departments within Achmea to help attract and retain young talent. And we offer opportunities, but you have to be willing to grab them yourself. For our bold goal, we are on our way, but I can not say we are already at the point where we are of essential importance.
How do we reach these goals? We reach these goals by organizing events, which can be attributed to one of the four pillars you find important. Vitality, personal development, social responsibility. Yeah, we also find it very important to create value for a social environment and also to know what we do as an insurer. And actuality to keep up with new innovations in the insurance industry. For example, we organized a workshop on blockchain a few months ago and what it can do for an insurance company like Achmea.
And we translate these goals into activities both internally and externally. Internally, we offer social networking events like drinks, wine tasting, yoga sessions, and also the yearly golf clinic, which has to be held on coming Friday again. If anyone still wants to attend, there’re still a few spots open. You can always send me an email. But we also offer more content activities like workshops, which do or do not relate directly to the insurance business. One of the most popular workshops we have is a PowerPoint karaoke session, which we offer multiple times a year. It’s a fun way to practice presenting skills by getting random PowerPoint slides and you have to present on it.
And all of these worships are usually organized by the location committees. In July and August, we also organize summer schools for the ones that do not go on holiday during the summer season, which also one of the most popular events we have. I realize right now that I forgot to put our biggest event on here. It’s called The Big Event. It’s a congress we organize each year at the congress center of our head office in Zeist, with interesting speakers, all related to insurance industry and some workshops attached to it.
We also organize some activities. We organize together with some other networks and other companies, which is what I’m responsible for. I will highlight to some of them right here. First of all, we have Sure. It’s an event we organized together with the four largest insurers in the Netherlands, covering topics on innovation. Event covers interesting speakers cases on problems covering innovation faced by the different insurers. And also a network drink. I think it’s very valuable to meet like-minded people working for other companies to exchange thoughts about this.
Also, one of our most popular activities is Young Achmea on Tour. As you saw in the beginning of my presentation, Achmea also have a few foreign businesses. And the ID started to include these in the Young Achmea network by visiting one of them each year with a group of 25 young professionals. This year, instead of one of the companies outside of the Netherlands, we decided to visit one of the international partners. And we went to LocalTapiola in Helsinki, which was also very interesting.
We also tried to organize a communal activity every year. This year we went to an elderly nursing home to offer residents a fun day. This was highly appreciated and it turned out to be a great day. And it’s also very important to keep the policy holders inside and all people we offer insurance for. Young Health Insurers, it’s similar to Sure but then it’s more aimed at the young professionals in the health insurance business and we do it with the health insurers.
The Rays of the Classics, ROTC, it’s a great sailing event that’s organized for the largest companies in Netherlands. So it is not just insurance. But it’s a great way to meet other young professionals also outside of the insurance business. And it really helps for the network, which also is of great value for the networking we offer, is that we are a member of the Inter Company association as Young Achmea, which is an association of 40 young professional networks in all different industries in the Netherlands. And as an ICA member, our members can visit activities of all their other ICA members and the other way round. This really broadens the horizon of our members and they can have a look in different industries and the topics concerning these industries as well as networking with young professionals from these organizations.
And I’ll tell you something about their place within Achmea, because we are independent from Achmea but we are obviously very connected. Also because we are fully funded by Achmea, our budget is not fixed but every Euro we spend has to be explainable and defendable. But, we have a lot of possibilities if new opportunities come up as Achmea really understands the importance of the network.
We give a voice to young employees. So, we cooperate with the HR department in all kinds of projects concerning the young employees. Last year, we organized a questionnaire among all employees on their 36 and right now we are working on a project which uses the data we got from that questionnaire. And the project aims at attracting and retaining young employees in a better way. And we are mainly looking at ways to help young talent to grow internally and help them find their perfect job because Achmea is big enough, so there’s place for everyone. And also we give the company a platform to reach young professionals. We help the company to translate strategy into connection to the Achmea rent through Young Achmea.
And we’re also looking into ways to create an online community to offer more interaction between our members so they can help out to each other and also learn about different possibilities within the company on different locations. I think I’m almost out of time, so I’ll say thank you for listening. Also, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them. And if you or your company is planning to create a young professional network or if you already have one and you want to exchange thoughts about it sometime, just feel free to email me or just find me on LinkedIn.
Jeff Puckering:
Wow. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Sander. What a different approach you have there and such an organic development of this. And it’s clearly standing the test of time because it looks like it’s been around for nearly 10 years now. So, it’s clearly very different, but the outcomes are very much the same. It’s very, very interesting to see these two different approaches here.
As Sander alluded to, we’re a little bit short time. We’ve got five minutes or so. I’m going to jump straight into some of the questions that we’re getting through. And it was really interesting on here. I’m going to just open it up to both of you, because I think it’s applicable to any networking group of young professionals. But, did you come across any issues or did you have any activities to help with any elitist feelings that might happen? For the people that are involved in your communities or are picked, was there anything done to make sure that it wasn’t an elitist view of these individuals? And I’ll ask Brian to start.
Brian Jones:
Yeah. Well, with our organization, we actually had a little bit of a reverse. Not so much on the elitist side, but when we started out, our group was so excited about having the networking aspect and really focusing on the engagement piece. Our issue was that we focused a lot more on the social piece to start with and we have a lot of happy hours. And with a lot of happy hours came a few beverages and things of that sort. And nothing get too crazy, nothing get too wild, but early on the concern was that we were starting to be branded as more of a party group than a development group. That was more our issue starting out, is that it was way more focused on the social piece than it was on the development and the engagement piece. From our end of things, it wasn’t the elitist by any means. On our end, it was more of what they’re just looking to get together and have an excuse to that party.
Jeff Puckering:
Very interesting. And then Sander, did you come across this at all?
Sander Montanus:
Not that I know of. It’s also because Young Achmea, it is open to anyone and we offer a lot of activities which are basically open to anyone. We do have some activities which require people to apply and send in their motivation letters, but I think we offer enough activities which are just open. It’s not really a concern for us.
Jeff Puckering:
Good. That’s fine. And another question that we’ve got going through is something that I think anybody who is looking to start something up in their company will come across, which is, success and measuring success and proving success. If you were to offer some advice to anybody who was looking up, how would you recommend they approach the senior leadership team with metrics or success stories that they would be able to sell?
Brian Jones:
With that piece from the success standpoint, all of our focus at this point has been marketing on the success of our leaders. Because our membership, similar to Sander, our membership is completely free. And quite frankly, right now, our membership in order to be a member, you just need to say that you want to be on the email distribution list. At this point, we don’t have a ton of tracking as to who has attended what events and things of that sort. Our only real accurate measure right now are our leaders. We focus on that piece.
We have actually grown out to some of our management team and shown them, “Hey, these are the number of leaders that we’ve had this far. This is the percentage of retention that we’ve had on our leaders.” And also, since it’s such a small sample size, we’ve been able to directly say, since they’ve been leaders, so-and-so, these people, here’s a list of the people that have been promoted since the time that they’ve been leaders and each of those leaders has been able to directly say that their experience with EPN has helped them with their interviews, because they’ve had stories to tell in interviews based off of experiences with EPN.
Jeff Puckering:
I think the key there is keeping it simple. There are a few key metrics there that you called out like retention and promotion, that people should just focus in on. And like you said, it should be very easy because it’s a defined list and group of people.
Last question, aimed at Sander. It was more actually advice. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more because it’s something we spoke about, which is the age question. Someone suggested that, why don’t you create a network? It’d be like an alumni type network. Has that happened naturally at all or is that something you’ve thought about?
Sander Montanus:
Yeah, we have some people which have been very active during their membership of Young Achmea, which stay connected. But I think it might be a good idea to look into that. Because I think it can still offer also a lot of insights and it keeps the alumni approachable for the members right now.
Jeff Puckering:
Exactly. I think we’ve probably got a lot of knowledge and advice to give to the next cohorts. I’m going to wrap up. We have it four o’clock. So, listening to you two has been really, really interesting. It’s made me start thinking about my own network and what I can do to leverage that and how I can be more involved and ultimately it will benefit self, the wider networking group and hopefully the organization with people that help here and a few mutual. Big thank you to Ben, who I’m going to hand over to now. As I said at the beginning, none of this happens without him. Ben, thank you for the opportunity. Brian, thank you. Sander, thank you. And everyone who’s listening.
Ben Telfer:
Thank you, Jeff. And thank you to Brian and Sander for these excellent case studies. Just to let you know, the recording of today’s webinar will be sent to everybody who’s registered. And I encourage everybody to share these with colleagues within your respective organizations.
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