ASSIGNMENT 3: POWER, POLITICS, AND CULTURE Due Week 9 and worth 190 points In Assignment 2, you created a professional development plan using EI building blocks and motivation. In this last assignment
Assignment 1- Organizational Issues and Solutions
Liberty Mutual Insurance Company
Leanne Batiste
Professor Wanda Tillman
Leadership and Organizational Behavior
05/03/2020
Liberty Mutual Insurance is a long-time established firm founded in 1912 by a group of shareholders. In 1917 the company decided to use "Liberty Mutual Insurances Company" as its official name with automobile policy as the first insurance cover (Liberty Mutual History, 2020). The company history shows the great achievement of the year of the foundation. By 1973, the company expanded to 48 states of the United States, and in 1972 the company had around $2 billion net in written premium. Currently, the company provides its services to more than seventeen countries in a different part of the world, which are in regions such as Latin America, Asia, and Europe.
The operations carried out by the company are classified into three sections; that is Liberty International Underwriters, Liberty Mutual Surety, and Liberty Specialty Markets. As International Underwriter, the company evaluates risk/writes commercial and specialty insurance under marine, property, trade credits, and construction. Under the Liberty Mutual Surety, the company underwrites and evaluates risks concerning corporations and contractors using brokers and agents. The Liberty Specialty Market has three business units, such as specialty, commercial, and reinsurance. Currently, the company is facing a lot of issues by trailing behind in adopting technology changes in the insurance industry (Liberty Mutual Insurance, 2020). This issue has affected the company at a great deal leading to poor anticipation of demand and inadequate adjustment in its operations. This article provides my advice to the company as they currently hire a consultant (hypothetically) in the form of a solution and recommendation on how the company can overcome the challenge.
Before I provide my solution and recommendation, I prefer to outline how the company's current culture contributes to the issues the company is facing. First, the company has established a robust diversity and inclusion culture that enables it to effectively corporate with other companies, promote workers' engagement, and improve its services. However, changing the organizational culture that has been established for a long time makes the company the drag behind due to workforce resistance to change and to have traditional prospecting about technology the impact of technology on the insurance industry. Moreover, been a diversity orient organization, every technology change initiative must consider every individual contribution and interest, which consumes a lot of time during the decision-making process (Liberty Mutual Insurance, 2020). For example, the company must look for new ways to attract, train, engage, and retain its workforce/customers in the process of adopting new technology.
To ensure that this is successful, the company must take in-depth analysis and evaluation of the impact of adopting new trends in its operation as well as the company culture. Due to the high need for ensuring diversity and inclusion, it takes a long period for the company to fully adopt new changes hence slowing down the company's capability to be in par with the rapid changes in the world. Additionally, the company mission statement reveals that the company has a strong concern for the customers’ satisfaction to make every individual be a proud member. Unfortunately, adopting new technology is not easy for most insurance companies due to the complex nature of the industry and the high risk associated with new trends (Liberty Mutual Insurance, 2020). When I combined this with the company satisfaction-oriented culture, I identified that a significant number of customers would be disappointed. For example, early adaptor customers will not benefit from the services provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance due to the slow adoption of changes.
Before I give my advice and recommendation, I feel it is also important to outline some of the company weaknesses that I noticed through the SWOT analysis (Liberty Mutual Insurance, 2020). First, with the current culture, I feel that it will be difficult for the company to diversify to other products and services segment. The company is also slow in researching and developing new insurance policies that address trending issues as technology changes. Despite that, the company has several successful partnerships with different companies in the world. It is still limited to the only company that has a similar culture to its own.
After carefully evaluating the company’s issues and weaknesses, I would like to start with advising the company to shift its cultural centric partnership practices to inclusive partnership in the same way it promotes diversify and inclusion in its workforce. I believe that this approach will improve the company's expansion capability and thus develop a better tool for sharing ideas that would help it to produce a better measure for responding to technology changes. To effectively solve adjustment issues in the current rapid technology changes, I propose implementing agile approaches in the company (Liberty Mutual Insurance, 2020). I suggest this technique because I believe it will support the company's collaboration culture as well as help to transform an effective solution according to trending issues quickly. The agile approach also fits well with the cloud computing technology because it supports the segmentation of a business into different units that an individual can address separating. This increases the accuracy in intensifying the issues and well as makes it easy to generate a solution even within a short time notice.
I also recommend the company incorporate online services in the process of using the agile approach to farther increase flexibility and speed to formulate a strategy that can even predict possible future changes that are likely to affect the company. I also believe that used both agile and online techniques will help the company to optimize security for the update’s technology implementation and storage of electronic customer data
References
Liberty Mutual History. (2020). Access denied. Retrieved from https://www.libertymutual.com/about-us
Liberty Mutual Insurance. (2020). Liberty mutual uses new technologies and an Agile approach to develop a cloud-based solution providing competitive advantages | LMG. Retrieved from https://www.libertymutualgroup.com/about-lm/news/articles/liberty-mutual-uses-new-technologies-and-agile-approach-develop-cloud-based-solution-providing-competitive-advantages
