A long-term labor shortage looms as the U.S. labor market cools: Labor-supply projections suggest that within just eight years, the number of available workers will fall by 6 million behind the nation's population growth.
Yet most organizations only look at the short term, investing in attracting the best candidates rather than finding the best talent. and Those who want to work for us for the long term, not just for a few years.
One finance chief with a long-term perspective is Renae Flanders, CFO of World Insurance Associates. Flanders finished 24 years at Aon, including eight years as CFO of Aon Risk Solutions, just a few years ago. Flanders recognizes the value of nurturing promising finance professionals and giving them the opportunity to grow within the company.
“The employer-employee relationship is changing dramatically, and accounting and finance need to adapt to those changes,” she tells Katie Kuhner Hebert.
In the interview below, Flanders talks about his hiring and development approach and the importance of data in the company's decision-making.
World Insurance has been consolidating smaller brokers over the past three years and raised $1 billion in debt and equity from Goldman Sachs Asset Management in 2023. As World Insurance grows, how are you approaching scaling your finance team?
Building the right team starts with retaining, not attracting. A valued, engaged team always delivers their best. As a leader, I strive to ensure my team members feel engaged, inspired, and professionally fulfilled. Creating an environment of transparency allows my team to understand how their work directly impacts the overall organizational goals, including the company's expansion plans, which often require the implementation of new technologies.
Earning trust and respect through transparency and feedback fosters open, honest and collaborative dialogue, especially during times of change. My job is to support my team's success and career growth, helping them get out of their comfort zones – and sometimes getting in their way! I also want them to feel good about their contributions.
When making staffing decisions, I leverage data, analytics, and industry standards to get a solid baseline of where finance sits within the organization. At the same time, I recognize that data alone doesn't provide a comprehensive view, which is why I prioritize feedback from executive leadership, as potential stress and burnout can be hidden deep within the data. Ultimately, serving our clients is paramount, so we need to have the right people on our teams to make that happen.
How do you build the right team in a tough hiring market?
Even in a competitive recruiting environment, I follow the same guiding principles: I seek to attract new colleagues who are focused on long-term success and therefore long-term retention. At the same time, I focus on what's best for our workforce as a whole and align that with what drives business success. Ultimately, I'm only as good as the team that supports me, so I put a lot of effort into getting the right talent mix.
You mentioned leveraging data and analytics, how does data analytics help shape the company's growth strategy?
Data analytics is crucial for CFOs and provides the basis for informed decision making. Without data analytics, decisions are blind. Data serves as the single source of truth and is leveraged for modeling around sensitivity analysis, long-term planning, capital allocation strategies, and overall risk management.
Because the CFO is the custodian of the single source of truth, continually providing analytics to the wider leadership team keeps them informed and accountable for decisions and results. Through data analytics, trends, patterns and anomalies in business performance can be identified and potential issues can be addressed before they become real challenges. Data analytics is also a powerful tool for measuring employee performance and aligning goals and objectives.
What processes do companies use to assess the quality of the data they use as input for decision making?
To effectively partner with business leaders, CFOs need to rely on data that is consistent, timely, repeatable, verifiable, and actionable. To achieve this, they need to have a strong trust in the data, because errors can be costly. [World Insurance] We have quality metrics to assess the accuracy, completeness, validity and integrity of data – in other words, we trust but we verify.
We've all had the awful experience of distributing a report only to have recipients immediately question its accuracy. That's why your data and data collection process must be backed up with documentation that's easy to access and cross-reference, ensuring the data is robust, reliable, and relevant.
