Pacific Life I Retirement Solutions Division
Employee Engagement
Challenge
For more than 150 years, Pacific Life has helped millions of people with their financial needs through a wide range of life insurance products, annuities and mutual funds. The company is known for its financial strength and its ability to meet changing investor needs.
Over the past decade, the revenue model for offering financial planning services and products to American households has shifted. For years, Americans invested primarily through a commission-based brokerage model, which assessed charges based on individual purchases or trades. By 2018, more than 60 percent of investors said they preferred a different model, which allowed them to pay a set fee to financial advisors for expert counsel and portfolio management services (Source: Cerulli Associates, 2018).
In response, Pacific Life formed an agile team to develop and market solutions to financial advisors, who work within what are known in the industry as Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) firms. The team grew from two to 13 members within a year, reaching full strength just as the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to restrict travel and impose social distancing requirements. Despite those limitations, the team needed to ramp up quickly and forge strong working relationships.
Project
Pacific Life retained SageRiver Consulting to design and deliver a two-day virtual team-building event for the newly formed group, whose members were dispersed across the country. In partnership with the group leader, SageRiver identified three goals for the event:
- Promote unity through team-building activities and conversations
- Deepen industry expertise through presentations from industry experts
- Ensure the team stayed closely aligned around strategic goals and objectives
With those aims in mind, SageRiver designed an interactive virtual retreat that kept team members engaged for two full days. The event included:
- Emergenetics assessments to help identify strengths and preferences among team members and build team cohesion
- Keynote remarks from the top influencer in the RIA industry to deepen the team’s industry expertise
- Conversations with industry members who market to and serve RIAs to improve understanding of customer needs
- Get-to-know-you presentations, which allowed team members to build trust by sharing more about themselves in and out of the office
- Fun team-building activities, which included stretching sessions and a wine-tasting event led by a sommelier (In advance of the session, all team members received a package with wine and wine glasses, cheese plates, and more.)
- Deeper-dive strategy conversations that enabled the team to apply insights from the session to their strategic goals and priorities
Results
The virtual event received overwhelmingly positive feedback from group members, who called it valuable and just plain fun. Following the sessions, participants reported they had greater appreciation for the cross-disciplinary strengths of their team, felt better connected to each other and better equipped to execute their strategy. They also understood their target customers better, which enabled them to develop more creative solutions to customer needs.
Story Categories: Strategic Planning and Team Building. Story Tags: Corporations, Custom Facilitation, Employee Engagement, Financial Services, Marketing Strategy, Strategy Sessions, and Team Building.
- Promote unity through team-building activities and conversations
- Deepen industry expertise through presentations from industry experts
- Ensure the team stayed closely aligned around strategic goals and objectives
With those aims in mind, SageRiver designed an interactive virtual retreat that kept team members engaged for two full days. The event included:
- Emergenetics assessments to help identify strengths and preferences among team members and build team cohesion
- Keynote remarks from the top influencer in the RIA industry to deepen the team’s industry expertise
- Conversations with industry members who market to and serve RIAs to improve understanding of customer needs
- Get-to-know-you presentations, which allowed team members to build trust by sharing more about themselves in and out of the office
- Fun team-building activities, which included stretching sessions and a wine-tasting event led by a sommelier (In advance of the session, all team members received a package with wine and wine glasses, cheese plates, and more.)
- Deeper-dive strategy conversations that enabled the team to apply insights from the session to their strategic goals and priorities
