Episode 469: Travelers Institute's Joan Woodward on Mental Health & the Forces at Work Initiative

Well, it's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for hosting me.

Yeah. You know, our CEO Alan Schnitzer called me one day. I was sitting at Goldman Sachs running the Global Markets Institute and happily so. And he asked us to consider creating an institute for Travelers. And here was his kind of thought, I think if I could summarize, you know, he said, Joan, we insure the world. GDP, so anything you can touch and feel is insurable, we insure it. And so we're a GDP-driven company and sees across all industries, so we're into every industry out there in the business world and the services industry as well of course. We insure and so he wanted to explore a lot of challenges in society, whether it be the accessibility and the affordability of insurance in coastal areas where there's hurricanes, in wildfire areas. And so kind of putting out thought leadership ideas to help regulators and policymakers make informed decisions about our industry. Again, it's an industry that's, I don't want to say invisible, obviously all business owners have insurance, all personal individuals have insurance on their cars, their homes, their valuables, but really to talk about the pressing challenges facing society at large. So for example, distracted driving, and we see this in our claim data daily, unfortunately, about the dangers of distracted driving. And so we'll go through a number of our projects and programs, but it really is a thought leadership, not just a think tank, but it's a do tank. We've done over a thousand events out in the country over the last 15 years, attracting almost a million people to either listen to a webinar or engage with us in person. And so we're really pleased and happy with the last 15 and we're kind of looking forward to the next 15.

Oh, certainly. And it's not just, you know, it's almost daily something new is happening in the world and we have to pivot to talk about things that we're seeing. Again, our business folks, 30,000 experts in insurance, everything crosses our desks because it's all insurable. And so we have experts in all of these areas, construction, energy, healthcare, technology, you name it, we have an expert who's underwriting and insuring that risk for that business. And so we have certainly taken on a number of topics over the years that our business leaders come to me and say, Joan, this is a problem and this is a problem that we are seeing in this industry. Let's dig deep into it. Let's help policymakers, regulators figure out how to regulate this risk, if you will. And so because we're regulated by the states, there's 50 state regulatory bodies and they all act differently. And so we are here as a resource, a nonpartisan, bipartisan, research-based organization that does try to put out what we're seeing in these industries in a white paper, hosting a webinar, talking about issues to help our customers, our clients, our agents, our brokers, again, policymakers to make better decisions about the outcomes of what these challenges are.

Yeah, and we are so pleased to be able to really dig into this issue of workforce trends and workforce risks. And so we published a paper on this. We have lots of educational resources. We're focused on five key areas. One is the labor market. Look, demographic shifts, the baby boom generation retiring, 10,000 of us every day retire. The birth rate is down. And so the labor shortages that we're seeing in this macroeconomic environment really does influence the workforce, the employee, as well as the employer. That's number one, labor market. Number two is leadership and management. We really try to highlight the stories and strategies for effective leadership in this time of rapid change and uncertainty, if you will. Third is talent development and getting your skill set right for your labor force, attracting, retaining, and developing that talent. Talent is your most important asset in any company. So that's number three. Number four is employee well-being, promoting mental wellness, stress management, other aspects of holistic employee care. And when you show you care about your employees, they really are engaged, highly engaged, and more productive. And then lastly, risk management and insurance, offering those risk management strategies obviously through our workers compensation program. We have about 500 nurses on staff at Travelers. So when someone has a workers compensation claim, it's not just about the physical well-being of that person but the mental well-being. Think about if you go out on a workers comp claim, you're sitting at home alone and want to be back in the game, but you can't physically. Your mental health is really important to get right for your recovery.

Yeah, we are certainly in a mental health crisis in America. The National Institutes of Health reports that one in five adults experiencing mental illness today. So it's 20% of our population. And unfortunately, there's a stigma still associated with a mental health condition, which is one of the main reasons why we took this on head-on to try to bring more light and awareness to this, because there's really a strong connection towards mental well-being and physical health. We want to reduce that mental health stigma and promote employee well-being. So it's just not a topic that we can avoid at work. You know, your manager has more influence on your mental health than your primary care physician that you may see once a year for your physical checkup. So well-being can be taught to managers to identify someone who might be struggling. Someone who might be struggling, who's coming to work late, chronically late, when they were always a punctual employee, maybe they don't care about what they look like anymore when they're coming to work. Maybe they're just depressed and you could see it in their eyes. They're so sad inside. And so there's a number of things you can do as a manager to detect that and try to help that person without invading their privacy. So we're promoting that in the workplace.

Yeah. You know, we're not going to have an Excel spreadsheet that tells us we've been successful. It's not something that you can quantify or put in a box. It's raising awareness. Just for example, like distracted driving. The more we talk about people driving distracted, people are actively shopping online while they're driving. So we know raising awareness, for example, around smoking and the dangers of smoking, raising awareness around not wearing your seatbelt. So there's been a number of public awareness campaigns that have worked or at least are working or getting better, right? So most people wouldn't get in a car today and drive away without putting on their seatbelt. That wasn't the case in the 1970s. I recall sitting in the back of a very large, I think it was I don't know some knockoff Cadillac. It was certainly not a Cadillac, but it was a huge box. And, you know, it was okay not to wear your seatbelt and it was okay to smoke indoors and okay to smoke in restaurants. And we've changed that. So the stigma of mental health in the workplace or generally in society, raising awareness is step number one. I don't care that I don't have a P&L or a worksheet around this. I don't need one. I know that we're making a difference for employees and employers.

Yeah, we had after we rang the opening bell, by the way, we hosted a symposium on stage talking about all these issues. And we hosted two panels. The first panel was on mental health and we had the US former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams talking about that as well as workers compensation with some of our experts. But the second panel really focused on workforce and workforce trends and we had the former CEO of Deloitte, Dan Helfrich, along with our Chief Technology Officer, Mosh Ganshov, and they spoke a lot about technology and workforce and the intersection of those two in the current environment. Obviously coming out of the pandemic, we had a lot of disruption in the labor market, a lot of quits. A lot of people quit their job. My CEO calls it the Great Reshuffle. People rethought about their lives, and if they didn't like the job they were in during COVID and lost their job, they sought a different category of jobs. And so we saw a lot of people changing, pivoting in their own careers, and employers were kind of shocked, I think a little bit. And so some of the terrific HR strategies that we employ at Travelers, and we share that with our industry counterparts and in financial services. Work is excited to come to work every single day and loves their job. That's what you want. But you have people, according to Gallup polling, there's something called an engagement survey that come to work and they're not just disengaged employees, they're actively working against you. So you don't want a disengaged employee or someone who's actively working against where the momentum of the company is going. And so identifying those individuals, obviously attracting the right talent, going into not just colleges but frankly the trade, the community colleges, retraining people, reskilling them to better work with technology. I'm the older generation so I'm not as tech-savvy as you are, I'm sure. But I was the one rolling around in the back seat without my seatbelt in the 1970s. So technology has really propelled us and I'm going to ask all of your audiences to go back and watch the webinar we hosted at the stock exchange that day on April 7th, because Mosh really spoke about how technology can not only be a catalyst for propelling companies forward with cutting-edge technology, but people and training our people to use and embrace technology. We have a proprietary AI app. Every one of our employees is empowered to use our proprietary AI platform, and it's remarkable. It is remarkable and it's a game changer for sure. So we're doubling down on technology as a solution. But also we want to make sure our employees come to work happy, are engaged, and are moving in the same direction as the rest of us.

Yeah, it's not just enough to be a thought leader in our industry on these topics that we identify as really important to talk about, but to try to have actionable outcomes, right? And in terms of again, I'm not going to have a spreadsheet on this in terms of what people are learning through our webinar series. We have about six or 7,000 people that join us almost every Wednesday to learn something new and learn something that they can implement in their businesses on that day or the day after. And so we try to bring forward ideas, topics, speakers. Look, I had two Secretaries of Defense on, one Republican, one Democrat. One was Mark Esper during the Trump administration, one was Chuck Hagel in the Obama administration, talking about the effects of the Middle East crisis and the war in Ukraine and how that affects your business. And so we don't just talk about insurance on our webinar series. We talk about lots of different macroeconomic trends, geopolitical trends that are out there and facing our business owners to bring them content that is useful. We want useful content that we can implement the next day. We don't want to just be lectured in a college kind of setting. And so that's what we're hoping to achieve with our webinar series.

Yeah, I have terrific partners at Travelers and our CEO Alan Schnitzer is quite a thought leader, but also our business folks, business insurance, personal lines, whether it's bond and specialty or surety business, they not only have my back, they have the momentum at my back, and access to their experts for all of what we do is critical. So you know, I don't know this myself, I am not an insurance expert, but I have 30,000 of them that contribute to our thought leadership. And I'm just so grateful to be the one that gets the title, but it's not me. It is a huge team effort by our senior leadership who has invested in this institute in a way that I'm just thrilled that we're doing this. I think we're moving the needle on a number of topics for society. And with all of these different opportunities to get the message out, right? We're talking about the Forces at Work initiative, we're talking about Wednesdays with Woodward, the webinar series which you mentioned, we're talking about the Risk and Resilience podcast, Travelers Institute's podcast. When you have so many opportunities to get the message across, how do all these different platforms really help you connect with as big and as wide of an audience as you can to make sure that you're reaching our audience? Well, you can listen to Risk and Resilience. You know, you're not listening to Risk and Resilience while you can focus on Forces at Work. So many opportunities to get the message across. How do you sort of blend them all together to reach the greatest audience possible?

That's right. So we're thrilled to be able to have these different channels. And LinkedIn has been a huge friend of ours. We use LinkedIn a lot. My personal LinkedIn, which is Joan Kedzior Woodward, K-E-D-Z-I-O-R in the middle there. An old Polish name. I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania. And so you got to put in the maiden name for that.

Yeah, actually I'm thrilled to say that I was glad to be a part of the first one that was done kind of in corporate America in a big way, which is the Global Markets Institute. And the CEO at the time, Hank Paulson, tapped me to be the founding executive director. And you know, we didn't know exactly what we were going to do, but we knew there was a need out there, a need for information, again industry information, not proprietary stuff, but talking about what that industry does for society and how regulators and policymakers who aren't experts in Wall Street or anything, but they're legislating and regulating these industries. So I know that J.P. Morgan has an institute now, McKinsey has an institute. I think ExxonMobil was looking at one. And I don't know if they stood one up recently, but I think it's important to know I'm completely separate from our lobbyists. And we have terrific lobbyists in all 50 states and in Washington D.C., and they're lobbying hard on bills and laws, playing offense or playing defense as the case may be. But I'm not that, right? The institute is here to be an educational resource to talk about these problems, these issues we see through our business lens. I'll give you another example of one of our platforms which is cybersecurity. And we stood this up about eight years ago when cyber insurance came on the scene. And so talking with the Department of Homeland Security, who has now joined us at over 60 cybersecurity awareness events that we did out in the country. So we always have someone from the DHS or CISA, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI, we've had the CIA talk about what they see in cyber, what's going on on the dark web for business owners to be aware. And then of course we have a cyber insurance product to talk about as well, and being that solution for a lot of business owners. So the institutes I've seen in corporate America, I'm just welcoming, I'm hoping a number of other companies start them.

Yeah. First, let me start out by saying Travelers developed its own, and early on we developed our own kind of ethical guidelines around the use of AI in our business. And so that's number one is to have a guiding light as to where it is okay or not okay to use AI. And understanding those guidelines for each employee is really critically important. But there is a concern. I mean, look, people don't know in the next 3 to 5 years if AI eventually will shrink the workforce in their division and their department and their company. And so we'll have to keep an eye on it because, you know, as you say, there's a P&L to be had. We want shareholder value to be created. And so we've been using, first of all, we've been using AI for a very long time. We didn't call it AI 10 years ago, but we've used smart computing for many years and used it very effectively. And so this is leapfrogging us to the next decade or so with this new version of artificial intelligence. And you say, you know, we don't know. And I think that's the biggest worry. I guess I could say biggest worry as well as the biggest excitement with AI is we don't really know what the future holds because we're seeing new models come up every day. We're seeing these new technologies arrive every day.

Yeah, we certainly are embracing it at the institute, and again there might be different pathways or different venues or different outcomes for our content to push out in different ways. So there could be a technical aspect of getting our research and getting our content pushed out to society more broadly or differently in different pathways. But also again, those 30,000 insurance professionals who I rely on for their expertise and deep expertise in understanding what it could do to their businesses, whether it's a surety bond for a municipality in rebuilding bridges. We saw after many hurricanes, we're right in there working with the legislators and getting a surety bond to put up a new bridge where it is completely decimated in a hurricane zone. We're using AI in looking at the fire zones and early predicting, making sure people remove trees hanging over their house. So we will proactively go in and say to an insured, look, we think there's a fire risk here with your house, please remove these three trees overhanging your roof. And so there's a lot to be done proactively using AI technology and geospatial technology, which of course we've used and been using for decades. So the applications we think are going to be very, very helpful in our businesses and we certainly intend to use them at the institute, you know, as appropriate, with the guardrails that we set up with our ethical guidelines. So we're excited. We're very excited. I'm one of those highly engaged employees that comes to work and just loves it every single day.

Yeah. First of all, our people. I am just amazed every single day how engaged and highly attentive our people are. Claim professionals working with people at their lowest moments. They may have just lost their house. They may have had a flood and they may have not understood their insurance policy. So we have terrific caregiving people in our claim department that work with individuals and businesses every day. I also think that a trend in the last 15 years that has grown, that's a challenge for our industry. So that's the good news. The good news is we're here to help and we do that really in a way that every single one of our individuals who work with the client and the customer, the insured, does it with great care and always paying what we owe on time and early. But I think there's challenges and the challenges we see on the horizon is again the litigation environment and educating consumers that, you know, hiring a lawyer all the time and these third party litigation financing groups from around the world are financing litigation that the individual claimant probably has no idea that they're part of putting money into the system, and at the end of the day that claimant doesn't end up getting a lot of that money, it goes to the lawyers. And we're very, very hopeful that in some of the states that have some policies that really are anti-consumer, we can try to turn that around, like again Florida has done. We've had some success in Georgia working to show consumers that the cost of litigation financing is not helping the actual individual person who's had a tragedy in their life. So we have some challenges on the way ahead. There's some opportunities as I said with AI and other things, but we're going to be right there meeting people at the moment where they want us to be met and talking about issues that are important and we're expert in in the insurance industry and getting it out to the public. So raising awareness again is what I'm all about.

So, if you're a manager of people, maybe you're a senior leader, there's five things that we recommend. One is active listening. Practice active listening skills to create a safe space for employees to express their concerns. So do have those one-on-one meetings with your staff. They can only be 15 minutes just to touch base. But know your staff. Know the people that you work for. Know the challenges they may be facing in their personal life. But also number two, recognize those signs of distress. So train your managers to recognize common signs of mental health struggles, such as changes in mood, productivity, maybe showing up on time as I said, or their behavior. Number three, again, those regular check-ins. Schedule one-on-one meetings to discuss their goals, their overall well-being. Know what's going on at home in their lives with their children, with their maybe elderly grandparents, with their own health without trying to be looking at their privacy. Some people are less talkative about their personal life at work. But as a manager, it's your responsibility to understand what that person who works for you might be going through personally. Number four, lead by example. Demonstrate healthy work habits. So take your breaks, take your vacations, respect boundaries. I know it's all 24/7 now. We all have laptops at home. We're all emailing on the weekends. But you can tell your team, I may email you something on a Saturday or Sunday, look at that email on a weekend if you want, but you don't need to get back to me until Monday morning. But set the boundaries so your employees know they're not always having to be focused on their cell phones or on their laptops. Lastly, open communication. This is really important. It's okay to ask your team, are you okay? Will you be okay? We want to create a supportive environment. And it's okay not to be okay. But once you identify an individual who might be struggling, make sure to get them the right resources quickly. So they could try to move along in their journey to a mental well-being place for them.

Thank you so much. It's very warm in the Ice House. You're very welcoming. So I appreciate your time and actually highlighting the mental health crisis is really important. So thank you.