Covid-19 Resilience Survey finds insurance employees most concerned about mental health and mass sickness

In total 342 people answered the survey, with insurance companies (56.4%) and insurance brokers (21.1%) making up more than three-quarters of those who answered.

Asked how their employers had adapted working practices in light of the Covid-19 outbreak the majority had either required all staff to work remotely (53.8%) or for the majority to work remotely, with skeleton staff remaining in the office environment (43.3%). 

In terms of how confident they were that they could perform their day-today tasks while working at home for the forseeable future, 53.8% were very confident (five out of five), with a further 36.4% confident (four out of five) of meeting the challenge of remote employment.

When asked about specific challenges if staff are asked to work remotely for a prolonged time most were optimistic when it came to areas like internal communications with departmental colleagues (89.1% very confident or confident), internal communications with other departments (84.7% very confident or confident), cyber security  (83.7% very confident or confident),regulatory compliance (79.4% very confident or confident) and meeting external customers’ needs’ (79.1% very confident or confident).

The respondents were not so positive when it came to the topics of reduced staff numbers due to health/sickness and staff wellbeing with those surveyed scoring these challenges very confident and confident falling to 57.8% and 53.1% respectively; with those very confident making up only 18.9% and 18.7% of those who answered each question.

When respondents were asked an open question about the biggest challenges to be addressed with home working, ‘mental health/well being’ was unsurprisingly top, with other words like ‘isolation’, ‘morale’ and ‘engagement’ featuring highly. These also fed into the open question about what people would miss from working in the office with ‘colleagues’, ‘people’, ‘face-to-face interaction’, ‘social interaction’ and ‘camaraderie’ the top five answers.

These results in the main paint a very optimistic picture of the respondent employers’ resilience to carry on in the face of Covid-19. Although it will be interesting to repeat the exercise in a month or two to find out if the market remains as positive in terms of how they are managing their day jobs through prolonged absence from their desks or offices.

To access the research click here