CEO, MSIT Industry Advisory Board Member Puts People First

Crawford & Company is the largest publicly-listed independent provider of claims management in the world with almost 9,000 employees around the world. When a person or business has a traumatic incident in their life that requires a claim, be it a lost car, a burnt-down house, or a personal injury, Crawford & Company helps process the claim as efficiently and accurately as possible.

Rohit Verma is CEO of the 80-year-old company, and he sees his responsibilities as twofold. First and foremost, he is tasked with driving the overall strategy of the company, but just as important to him is ensuring and prioritizing the health and safety of the company's employees. As the newest addition to Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Information Technology (MSIT) program's Industry Advisory Board (IAB), Verma (MSIT '99) recently took time to talk about employees being the biggest asset for an organization and how MSIT is preparing students to enter the workforce and help drive digital transformation.

  

As CEO, what is the biggest challenge you face?

My biggest challenge is to make sure we have a workforce that feels secure and completely engaged. After that, my focus is working on attracting talented people to join our organization.

How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact your business and how you work?

We were impacted by the pandemic earlier than other corporations because of our international presence. Our China office closed in January 2020, our Singapore office closed the last week of January and first week of February, so we started to see the impact of the pandemic early on in the process. Our adjusters are spread across 70 countries in 700 offices, and we already did a lot of our work remotely, but now we have 97% working remotely. We had to make that change in a two week period in late February and early March 2020. 

The other change we made related to making sure all of our leaders prioritize the health and safety of our employees, because at the end of the day, if people are not feeling secure and safe, there is no way they can meet or exceed our client expectations. At the onset of the pandemic, we said, let's prioritize our people because that's the most important asset we have in our organization.  

How did you know what needed to be prioritized?

We launched an engagement program and we did a number of surveys of our employees to try and understand the challenges they were having. I also do a video call with the whole company once a month, and now every week I hold a virtual coffee session with a different segment of employees in some part of the world. It's a small group of eight to ten people, and I tell them nothing is off the table. They can ask me anything or discuss anything, and that really helped us understand what challenges our employees were facing. Some of those challenges we could solve and we tried to, and some of them we couldn't, but at least we provided a listening ear.

Where did the idea for the virtual coffee sessions come from?

I used to call it 'Breakfast with me,' and anytime I would go into an office, I'd have breakfast with a small group of employees. Once I couldn't travel anymore, we decided to do virtual coffee sessions. I started doing one every week, and we would not hand-pick people. We would send the invite out and the first 10 people who responded were the ones who made it, and it really caught on. It started as a pilot but now it's become a tradition, and I make sure that time on my calendar is well protected.

What do you take away from those sessions?

They help me understand how people are feeling and what things we're doing as a management team are resonating with people and what things are not. I tell people that these sessions are like Vegas — anything we talk about here remains in this session. I'm not calling their manager right afterward to say, 'Can you believe what your employee said?' I also say that if they have a message they do want me to take to a senior leader, I'm happy to do that as well.  

In an organization like ours, people are spread all over the world, and this helps me short circuit those distances and still get in touch with what's happening. It gives me unprecedented transparency into the organization and issues and challenges our people feel. 

As CEO, what are you most proud of?

There are few jobs that you do where you deliver on a higher purpose and where you help people in the way that we do. I take extreme pride in the fact that we have a rich legacy and that there are countless lives, businesses, and communities we've restored or enhanced through the claims process. 

What are you most excited about with joining the MSIT Industry Advisory Board?

Digital is influencing every aspect of our lives. We're now doing things on our phone that were considered extremely manual like depositing a check or going grocery shopping. The pandemic will accelerate this digital transformation, but this transition is not just about technology. It's about a whole mindset shift that people need to have. As people are joining a workforce where a large part of management is what I would call 'digital immigrants' as opposed to 'digital natives,' MSIT is helping close that gap and preparing students to join an organization to help with that digital transformation. I'm excited to advise the program so that the courses are more relevant for where the industry is heading and more relevant to enable that digital transformation, which I think every organization is going to go through or is going through as we speak.  

What skills should MSIT students be sure they've developed by the time they graduate?

People get enamored by what looks cool, but they don't look if that's relevant for their organization. The biggest skill is understanding and having the ability to articulate why digital transformation is so critical for their organization, and the "why" really matters.