Fund Operator: Has the pandemic impacted the attraction and retention of Millennial and Gen Z talent? If yes, how?

Manon van der Lely: It is too early to see any effect at the moment, especially not within asset management.

The war for talent has been going on for around two years now and was getting worse, which I don’t feel will change.

What will change is the way that ASR handles its employees and tries to stay connected to them, which is especially important for the millennials.

"The war for talent has been going on for around two years now and was getting worse, "

The attractiveness of ASR might improve in the future because we are a stable company and provide many development programs, especially for millennials.

Since we are so well connected and have increased our focus on working from home instead of the office, I feel that in the future ASR will become even more attractive to the younger employees.

FO: What changes have you introduced to keep staff engaged whilst working from home through the pandemic?

Manon: We started what we call a ‘mood monitor’. Every week we have three questions that we ask all employees of ASR to answer.

These relate to their commitment towards the company, together with the pandemic that is going on, and working from home.  Every week we have different questions, so you can’t compare or see a trend.

What we have seen is that up until now the mood monitors have had a high response rate over the past 4-5 weeks.

The mood level is based on a 10-point scale, the lowest so far has been 7 and the highest has been something like 8.2.

We have found that millennials are a little lower in their scores than the average ASR employees. However, within asset management, we see that for 3 out of 4 the millennials are scoring a little higher than the average employee.

"We make sure that we offer management training as much as possible to help deal with the current situation."

When we look at the answers, we try to give extra workshops or community meetings etc. to make sure that we adjust our engagement based on the answers that we are getting from the mood monitors. This means that we can be changing workshops, trainings etc. on a weekly basis.

Aside from the mood monitors, we have also done a lot on culture and behaviour. There is a lot of legislation in Holland, especially on risk and risk awareness.

We have several training options, but also use an identification tool where you can answer three questions a day.

This has a very short cycle of learning risk elements and is an easy and fun way of learning. We have been doing this for a couple of years now, and it’s something that we change on a monthly basis based on questionnaires.

We also have several training programs for management. We implemented some a couple of weeks ago around management by distance or management by goal setting, etc.

We make sure that we offer management training as much as possible to help deal with the current situation.

FO: What is the role of people, processes and technology in creating an optimal operating and risk management process to overcome any challenges that you foresee?

Manon: The role of people has been expanded in the current environment.

In the past, we saw that agility was the most crucial competency for employees. So, we have been stressing the development of agility in our employees and are using assessments when we hire people.

Additionally, we are using agility within our development programs, because we feel that agility will be the one key factor that will allow employees to overcome all kinds of risks, processes, new technologies, etc.

"In the past, we saw that agility was the most crucial competency for employees."

We have been emphasising the importance of agility over the past two years, and we will continue to do this.

What we can’t say right now – as we will have to do the data analysis later on - is whether the mood monitor answers were more positive from those employees with higher agility scores.

FO: What are the key lessons learnt from the pandemic that will help you strengthen the resilience of your operating environment?

Manon: One of the lessons learnt is that within some parts of the company, some managers felt that people working from home wouldn’t work.

But because working from home had to be done, it required the managers to take a big step towards modern leadership.

You can’t deny that it has worked for almost 10 weeks now, so it will continue to work.

Another area that we are learning more about is how to connect with distance, as it is very nice to have teams.

"It will be a catalyst for a different way of doing things"

Being able to have meetings all day and see people connecting to each other via technology is very different.

This is an area that we will have to pick up in the coming weeks to see how we can use digital avenues to facilitate connection.

It will be a catalyst for a different way of doing things and a high percentage of the industry will never be the same again.

 

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