Kicking goals through change management

One fintech and insurtech HR expert spoke about how HR departments can come up with a plan to drive change amid AI and culture transformation through understanding business goals.

In a recent HR Leader Podcast episode, Scott Austin (pictured), group chief people officer at bolttech, spoke about the key challenges that HR practitioners in fintech and insurtech face amid major market upheaval and transformation.

Finding opportunities and supporting growth

Austin said HR professionals have a massive role to play in finding opportunities to grow in a fast-moving business landscape. He said that by getting the right people on board and driving the right behaviours, the function can be set up in a way that supports the growth of the business.

HR professionals must also ensure operational functions are working effectively, he said, which will enable business partners to be more focused on workforce planning, skills development, and working with talent, setting up the function to leverage its strengths.

Greater focus on initiative

Austin said that for HR professionals to fulfil their role in challenging their leaders, they must pivot from what was done to get us here today to land “where [we want to be] tomorrow”. He stressed that practitioners must look at the overarching goals of the organisation, then adjust their approach accordingly, to achieve their targets.

Austin said that in insurtech, HR departments must look to connect workers with “very strong insurance backgrounds” and “technologists” to drive the best outcomes.

He found that driving organisational culture through leveraging different skills and experience across different time zones is “one of the more challenging things” – especially when coupled with trying to learn what customers and partners are trying to achieve.

Creating connections during AI implementation

Austin stressed the importance of looking at broad applications of AI across the whole business. He called developing deep and trusted relationships with your business crucial so that HR practitioners can then help advise and build further connections.

“Using AI … to take away the workload, frees up those people to be doing other things around” other tasks, including the interpretation of data and generating reports, he said.

He added that companies must look at how they can “think through the ‘next layer’ and the value add around that,” by keeping a human in the loop when using AI.

Austin said companies must make AI experimentation more open by providing more opportunities for workers to experience and understand AI’s application in their work. He said that through educating the broader community in the workplace, companies can take the fear away from workers who think that they will lose their jobs.

Everything comes back to employee experience, he said, adding that organisations need to start looking at how they operate and carry out their consulting, while driving the right employee experience to reinforce the culture and values of the organisation.