One Friday in March 2020, Nicole Brouillard was dealt one of the biggest challenges of her professional career – to set up Aviva Canada’s entire workforce for remote working by the following Monday. That’s not exactly a call anyone wants to receive on a Friday evening, and yet the chief information officer (CIO) and Aviva’s IT team put in a “spectacular” shift so that all of the insurer’s 4,200 employees were supported to work from home within 48 hours.
This monumental task was aided by the fact that Aviva had invested in remote and flexible working capabilities prior to the pandemic. The insurer had equipped its employees to have “an office in a bag” – as Brouillard put it – meaning that everyone had laptops, soft phones, and ways to communicate and collaborate from remote locations. This wasn’t necessarily done with a global pandemic in mind; rather it was meeting Aviva’s philosophy of keeping employees safe and productive amid disruptive events like natural catastrophes. But as fate would have it, Aviva’s prior investments enabled the insurer to react quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic and mobilize its employees for remote working.
“There were a lot of very long weekends during the first few months of COVID-19,” Brouillard reflected. “The proudest moment for me as the leader of a big team was watching how they continued to make the remote working experience better week after week. We actually changed collaboration tools early on because our prior collaboration tool wasn’t stable enough to accommodate everybody meeting over video. We also upgraded our VPN to improve that experience and to give employees stable home access to our network.
“We did face a lot of new challenges, mostly around the way we worked and engaged with employees. For example, we had to figure out how to upgrade our laptops when we couldn’t do it in person. We had to ship equipment, receive equipment, and make sure we had the right logistics capabilities to do that. Likewise, our whole mobile phone upgrade was done remotely. We really had to think about the services we offer in order to keep Aviva technologically strong – and we had to come up with new solutions.”
It’s that sort of problem solving, which is absolutely necessary to any organization’s survival in this digital world, that insurers need to shout about and celebrate. Talent acquisition is one of Brouillard’s core areas of focus as CIO because everything the IT team at Aviva does revolves around people. That became clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, she reflected.
“As CIO, I would rarely get emails in the past from employees outside of IT thanking us for supporting them and helping them to work productively at home, but every time I send a communication now, I get replies from colleagues I’ve never met before, sending thanks to our IT team,” she said. “We have had to increase training and awareness to ensure that people are comfortable using new technology and working from home without that physical IT support. So, COVID-19 has definitely created more touch points between our work-from-home user base and our IT team; it has meshed that fabric of IT and the rest of the business together.”
That message – that a career in IT is about more than just technology; it’s about how technology positively impacts people’s lives – is something that the insurance industry should “amplify” as it competes for technology talent, according to Brouillard.
“Technology in insurance can actually help people during some of the worst moments of their lives,” she told Insurance Business. “When there’s a claim, which is often a moment of great anxiety for customers, technology enables claims professionals to resolve claims quickly so that customers can get their lives back on track. I’ve found throughout my career that if we can translate the positive impact that technology can have on people’s lives, then we can generate more connection and attract more diverse talent to the insurance industry.”
