Signal Iduna has won back more than 100,000 hours of working time a year by reducing internal friction.
The insurer collected 170 friction points in a first round and tasked about 30 Momentum Macher with tackling the top 10.
An AI contact-finder saves at least 2,400 hours, and centralizing insurance condition documents should return about 8,000.
An insurer reclaimed 100,000 hours by cutting internal friction
Signal Iduna, a German insurer, treated internal friction as a cost it could count and set out to remove it. A bootcamp with Stanford's Huggy Rao supplied the method, a mandate and one day a week gave 28 employees room to hunt friction in their own departments. The results turned a pilot into a standing program, and the open problem is subtraction, because people default to adding.
Takeaways
Friction removal returned 100,000 hours a year. Signal Iduna's team told host Joël Kaczmarek the activity won back more than 100,000 hours of working time per year, convincing enough that managers stopped questioning the one day a week it costs.
Good friction protects, bad friction wastes time. Legal requirements and quality checks an insurer must meet are friction worth keeping, including rules that protect customer data. Unnecessary friction includes coordination loops and the CC trap, where everyone puts you on copy, and what annoys one person can matter to another.
Friction returns unless someone keeps at it. Friction usually has no owner, what Huggy Rao calls orphan problems, and it grows back unless fixing it is constant. Rao compares the work to mowing the lawn, and Sievers says simplification is a capability the company must keep acquiring.
Friction detectives carried the work into departments. Four people form the core team, named after the Momentum 2030 strategy. They recruited 28 colleagues who went into their departments as friction detectives, after a pilot with 30 employees in one large division.
Friction was measured in hours trapped. They collected 170 friction points in the first round and measured friction as hours of working time trapped in systems. The first 10 larger topics went to the board before cross-functional mission teams tackled them.
Subtraction is the hardest habit to build. Sievers says people reach for a new meeting, rule or tool, and 90 percent of ideas are additions. They have no final answer on leaving things out, so they ask what they would do with half the resources.
What the friction detectives found
Employees were logged out of the telephone system, partly caused by a browser efficiency setting each person could change. Some IT and security timeouts are required and could not be solved as easily.
Employees created follow-up reminders in the system to check whether a step was completed. Those could simply be left out.
Insurance condition documents sat somewhere on a shared drive. One central, searchable storage location should bring back about 8,000 hours.
An AI agent for finding the right contact person already saved at least 2,400 hours, though it has data-quality problems and searching for contacts costs a company of Signal Iduna's size more than 2,000 hours.
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