Hastings Direct is a UK personal lines insurance broker servicing 3 million policyholders through digital channels. With over 3,300 employees, Hastings Direct recognized that its people are essential to the success of its vision of being the best and biggest digital insurance provider.
In 2021, Hastings saw an acceleration in its digital products and services for customers, as well as undergoing a rapid transition of its UK colleagues moving to a hybrid working environment. Committed to investing in the development of the leadership team during a national pandemic and a period of significant change, Hastings Direct identified an opportunity to uplift the capability of its leaders.
BearingPoint partnered with Hastings Direct to implement ActiveManager, a transformational leadership program.
The initial phase covered a series of interactive workshops to identify key competencies and core behaviours that would enable Hastings Direct’s leaders to be successful. The insights generated four key focus areas to support the leadership capabilities program. These included creating high-performing teams in a hybrid working environment, increasing resilience, agility, and responsiveness to change, adopting a consistent approach to teams’ management, and increasing managers’ confidence to drive accountability and ownership.
BearingPoint provided leaders with accelerated one-to-one coaching to facilitate the rapid adoption of knowledge, techniques and digital tools, enabling leaders to interact creatively and meaningfully to support cohesion, teamwork and shared experiences. The ActiveManager platform provided immediate access to a digital collaborative environment, interactive tools, progress trackers and digital learning. The ActiveManager program involved over 70 leaders and more than 500 employees.
Hastings Direct now has an enhanced leadership capability, delivering a 14% uplift in team performance across several key business metrics including productivity, revenue growth, customer retention, first contact resolution, and customer quality scores. This enabled the operation to absorb increased work volumes and deliver meaningful outcomes for customers, during a period marked by significant growth and volatility in demand.
The company’s teams are more effective and efficient, moving toward more consistent, collaborative ways of achieving common goals and objectives. The impact and value of investment activities increased significantly by fostering a coaching culture and leveraging tailored methods and approaches to meet specific individual needs and contexts.
The new sustainable and hybrid ways of working allowed leaders and their teams to engage confidently, interact and perform effectively, regardless of their working location, using the ActiveManager digital tools, methods, and approaches. Managers are now more proactive, future-oriented, and less reactive. It also increased accountability and ownership of leadership performance, encouraging creativity, flexibility, and sharing best practices across the team.
Hastings Direct is a fast growing, agile, data and digitally focused general insurance provider. They offer a range of competitive and straightforward products and services, which include car, bike, van and home insurance and a range of additional products like breakdown cover and family legal protection.