How Symetra is Future-Proofing Our Workforce

Symetra’s vision is: “Creating a world where more people have access to financial freedom,” and our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is as important to our employee experience as our business. Our Symetra Empowers Strategic Vision has been our north star for five years, with six tenants: to empower Customers, Partners, Employees, Inclusion, Community and the Future.

We empower employees by respecting every person, embracing their unique point of view an providing opportunities to contribute, thrive and grow. We create an environment where employees thrive by focusing on our culture, being an employer of choice, and having a future-proofed workforce, with tools, programs and opportunities for employees to cross-skill and upskill. When our employees grow their skills and career with us, they can build their own financial freedom.

This case study represents one of the submissions for i4cp's 2024 Next Practice Awards, winners will be honored at the i4cp 2024 Next Practices Now Conference. You can also view other Next Practice Award case studies.

Business challenge:

• At the global level, there is a skills revolution happening, and AI, automation and other technologies have, and will fundamentally change what it means to be an employee. What will jobs look like in the future?
• With the digital transformation of our business, there is widespread need to accelerate the skills and capabilities of our workforce. How do we ensure we have the workforce for the future?
• As new technologies endlessly rise and then fade as new ones take their place, affecting everything from people, systems and processes, we need to help our employees adapt and keep their skills relevant.
• We will be unable to adequately staff and resource key initiatives and enable our success with digital transformation without a focused effort on closing the skills gap of our workforce. The digital divide will only continue to widen and we will have to obtain the talent needed on the open market rather than growing the talent from within, and this was reinforced by the 2021 i4cp report “Accelerating Workplace Readiness” report.

Solution – Scope & Innovation

In late 2020, we formed an informal, cross-functional team to consider what the “future of work” looked like, in our region, industry and within Symetra. We knew Symetra had to take immediate action to not only help employees upskill for the future, but also address skills for current enterprise priorities. As one of our Symetra Leadership Commitments states, We needed to boldly perform AND transform.

We activated a Business Steering Committee in March 2021, with influential leaders and stakeholders whose teams lean into business transformation. The Steering Committee reviewed our research, provided feedback and added to our list of use cases.

In 2022, we kicked off the Future of Work initiative, with cross-functional teams for five areas of focus: Skills and Capabilities Framework, Upskilling Programs, Learning Content Strategy, Talent Check-in and Talent Intelligence Platform. The teams grounded their work in human-centered design thinking and developed employee career stage personas to guide our work.       

Future Skills & Capability Framework: How do we identify and build the skills and capabilities we need for the future? ​It starts with understanding what’s changing about the business and evaluating how our current skills stack up with our desired outcomes. 

Outcome: The Future Skills Playbook resources include scalable, repeatable tools for leaders to identify the capabilities needed in the future and the skills that support those capabilities.Learning Content Strategy: While we have a broad range of learning content and modalities, we find that learners often don’t know where to start.

Outcome: With a theme of Discover. Connect. Grow, our new online SwiftLearn Academy has three sections: Developing professional capabilities; impacting organizational capabilities and building personal capabilities. Within each, learners will find sub-categories like data analytics, emotional intelligence, industry knowledge or cultural awareness. When the learner selects the category, they see a curated portfolio of learning content.  

Upskilling programs: Provide access to focused and accelerated experiential learning to help build much needed business analysis skills.

Outcome: The team developed, piloted and implemented a blending learning internal “academy” to accelerate the development of “ready now” skills around Business Analysis to support Symetra’s Enterprise Priorities. The participants spent 50 percent of their time on a 6-month learning journey that included a certification path in LinkedIn Learning, internal training with subject-matter experts, and hands-on application of new business analysis skills, under the guidance of their mentor. Twenty candidates applied, fiver were selected, and three have been promoted since. We plan another business analysis internal academy in 2024 and want to expand the model to other critical skill areas.

Talent Check-in: Encourage regular and effective conversations between employees and managers about their future career aspirations, and where/how they want to grow, change or, even, stay in place.

Outcome: The Talent Check-in is an annual online process for employees and managers to connect and discuss employee learning and development, skills and career aspirations. Employees complete a few online questions, managers can see and add to their responses, and then they discuss results in a

Talent Intelligence Platform: Last, but not least … it became very clear that we would need additional technology to advance our work. We completed an extensive RFP and selected Eightfold.AI as our vendor, with solutions for both Talent Acquisition and Talent Management.

Outcome: The platform is powered by artificial intelligence and delivers several key benefits:

• Our leadership can understand our people and talent more effectively and accurately and at scale, to better support employee development while fostering increased transparency, diversity, equity, and inclusion. 
• Employees can unlock their hidden talents and be proactively matched with the right career opportunities and curated resources for professional growth.
• Every employee has a profile that includes skills for their current role and skill proficiencies that are a benchmark based on the job level in our career framework. The employee can self-assess their skill level (and their manager can contribute), and then the system serves up personalized learning recommendations to close the skill gap.
• The Career Navigation function shows recommended career paths (in line with Symetra’s paths), based on employee aspirations.
• The Project Marketplace serves up small, temporary parcels of work that can be advertised by any team, and employees can “apply” so they can learn new skills or use skills that aren’t part of their regular role. Over time, we expect that this opportunity marketplace concept will gain traction and larger projects and initiatives get resourced via the marketplace. This is a culture shift away from “talent hoarding” to greater cross-collaboration for increased talent mobility which is a next practice, as highlighted in i4cp’s guidebook, “Talent Mobility and Internal Talent Marketplaces”.

Videos:

Future of Work launch video, developed for the Career Hub launch:

https://symetra.wistia.com/medias/qryyf9ui1g

Welcome to Career Hub video, developed for online training page and workshops. Features our Benefits Division EVP who has strong credibility and is known as a long-time champion of employee experience and development.

Link to video: https://symetra.wistia.com/medias/bhl9nygy4z

Results & Impact:

In addition to the outcomes described above, Talent Intelligence Platform results as of Nov. 1, 2024 show:

• 64% of employees have claimed their profile in the Career Hub; near our goal of 65% within 60 days and on track for 75% by end of year.
• 75% profile completion rate; at goal of 75% complete within 60 days.
• 73% of employees have returned to Career Hub after claiming their profile; ahead of our goal of 70% return within 60 days.

Success Metrics into 2024

• “Opportunity for advancement” does not appear as a dissatisfier on our exit interview surveys by the end of 2024.
• Our rate of internal mobility increases – measured quarter over quarter including lateral job changes as well as promotions.
• Time-to-fill decreases for talent acquisition.
• Higher level Individual Contributor (IC) roles are filled by intra-company transfers and promotions from lower IC and Supporting Contributor (SC) incumbents.
• Skills gaps are filled more quickly with accelerated, experiential learning and developments, in the flow of work.
• Symetra projects and enterprise priorities are resourced by way of the Project Marketplace rather than hiring contractors or additional FTE’s.

Conclusion:

This is a journey that likely does not have a final destination but we are well on our way to future-proofing our workforce and empowering every employee to thrive at Symetra.