“Our Most Valuable Asset is People”: Practising a Popular Philosophy in a Life Assurance Company
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000000778 |
| Date | 01 May 1990 |
| Pages | 14-23 |
| Published date | 01 May 1990 |
| Author | Veronica Hope |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
"Our
Most
Valuable Asset
is
People":
Practising a Popular
Philosophy in a Life
Assurance Company
Veronica Hope
14 PERSONNEL REVIEW 19,5
S
taff in personnel seem confident of their
role and contribution to the general
business strategy of the company.
Introduction
Allied Dunbar
is
one of the recently formed life assurance
offices specialising, initially, in unit-linked policies. It set
out to compete aggressively with the more established
life offices, many founded 100-150 years earlier. Allied
Dunbar was formed in the early 1970s by a team of five
directors, a number of
whom
are still connected with the
company. It has been extremely successful, achieving,
over a ten-year period, a sales volume far outstripping
many of those companies with more than 100 years'
experience. From having a staff of less than 100 at the
start of the 1970s it now has a salesforce of
3,400
and a
head office staff of about
3,000
and growing.
Both the established life offices and the new unit-linked
companies, like Allied Dunbar, have experienced a decade
of massive growth and increased competition
in
the 1980s.
This has been nurtured by government legislation on
pensions, self-regulation within the industry and the
process of economic deregulation. As a result the life
insurance offices' staff numbers have increased despite
the developments in
IT.
It should also be noted that the
development of the style of management within Allied
Dunbar
was
atypical of the industry as
a
whole
in
the 1970s
and early
1980s
as illustrated
by a
previous article
by
Hope
et
al.
[1].
Nevertheless, many of the more established life
offices are now trying to emulate certain aspects of the
management style in Allied Dunbar in an effort to move
away from a paternalistic approach characterised by job
security and an internal labour market.
The company was visited briefly in 1986, and then again
in 1988 and 1989, when access was granted for a series
of in-depth interviews with staff within the personnel
department from director level downwards, and with
general management and directors from outside the
department. All interviews were tape-recorded to
minimise partial recollection and extensive documentation
was examined such as management training manuals,
recruitment literature, staff magazines and management
meeting minutes, and the researcher sat in on staff
meetings. Qualitatively the response during the semi-
structured interviews illustrated the
way in
which staff are
encouraged to reflect on the style of management within
the company.
Management Philosophy in Organisational
Design
Organisational Design
From its outset, Allied Dunbar has had two distinct
organisational characteristics which have made major
contributions to its rapid growth and shaped its personnel
policies. First, it was decided from the outset that the
company would not employ its salesforce but instead retain
them as self-employed associates. The client relationship
is regarded as paramount to business success rather than
the traditional revering, within other life offices, of the
actuarial skill.
The second distinctive characteristic of the company is
what is known as the "Allied Dunbar Approach". The
employment policy emanated from the approach of the
founding fathers of the company and has been developed
and formalised over the years into a strategy for managing
the social relations of production. Its development is
detailed in the following sections and the positioning of
personnel within the strategic planning process is also
examined. It
will
be argued that the importance attached
to the policy illustrates how Allied Dunbar senior
management reflect upon staffing and management issues
at
a
strategic planning
level,
and this explains the strategic
significance of the personnel function within the
organisation.
The Philosophy and Vision
of
the Approach
The director in charge of the administration for the first
phase of Allied Dunbar was reported to have had an
exceptionally clear vision of
how
people should be managed
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