Diary of an Insurer: RSA’s Cath Frost

Monday

I started my week off with a meeting with my coach. We workshop well together and this morning she helped me to frame a difficult conversation I need to have and to develop a plan about how I’m going to tackle it.

Next, I took some time to review the scores from our annual employee engagement survey. It is helpful to have some hard data on how my extended teams are feeling to ground our plans for continuous improvement.

Next week, my leadership team and I are delving into the results to pull out common themes from which we can create an engagement plan.

After lunch, I joined a session to walk through some broker feedback and identified the most critical areas of focus for the team, excited that we can now focus on progressing these.

Improving broker service is our number one priority in the regions and the focal point of our 2023 plans.

After work, for the first time in what felt like weeks I finally went out for a run. It was very cold but dry. The air smelled amazing, I’m sure you know what I mean. Time to decompress and clear my head. I’m lucky to live by the coast and grateful for the freedom it offers.

Tuesday

I began the day with a call with our employee resource group co-chairs to discuss the exciting plans for 2023.

I’m the executive sponsor for the Building Pride ERG and we have an amazingly enthusiastic and passionate group of people who are dedicated to supporting our LGBTQ+ colleagues at RSA.

Our aim is to enable them to be their whole selves and perform to their best in a diverse and inclusive workplace culture.

I was lucky enough to spend the rest of the day with my leadership team, which I loved. We’ve all become very capable of conducting our business remotely, but I really enjoy meeting up with people face-to-face and feel energised by it.

We spent time reviewing performance metrics, collaborating on an operational challenge we’re facing and – by far the best bit of the day – reading our quarterly recognition nominations. We’ve chosen three worthy winners and will share who those are with my wider team next week.

Wednesday

Profin director Jo Darkins and her team have worked with marketing to create material for some roadshows we’re running in 2023.

We walked our CEO, Ken Norgrove, through this material and shared some of the amazing broker feedback for the teams we’ve received to date.

Today ended with a broker dinner, which was a great opportunity for both sides to get to further deepen relationships.

Thursday

I’ve been recruiting for a strategy implementation role – the successful candidate will be critical as we seek to implement some of our plans for 2023 with pace.

We have lots of great ideas and it’s a good feeling to be in the place to now implement them.

I met with a candidate today who came across with such passion and enthusiasm, they were a joy to speak with and I think we’ll offer them the job.

After lunch, I met with Mandy Hunt, our commercial lines chief underwriting officer, to walk through our plans for 2023 and make sure they’re aligned.

I work really closely with Mandy and learn so much from her – she’s so generous with her knowledge and guidance. I always come away having learned at least one new thing.

Friday

I enjoy mentoring people across RSA and started the day with one such mentor session.

It’s a new working relationship, so we were discussing what my mentee hopes to get out of the time we have together, where I can support and what we can learn from each other.

I want to focus on enabling our teams and investing in training for them, so this afternoon I met with our learning and development team and discussed what’s available and have agreed on some training across regions in Q1 2023.

We met some friends for dinner on Friday night.