Asteron Life New Zealand has launched a pilot program to provide its case managers and customer service staff with more emotional support. 

The Suncorp-owned insurer says the initiative is designed to assist employees through supportive workplace practices such as resilience workshops, mentoring, individual training and monitoring to help them in their emotionally challenging roles. 

It says the pilot is also set up to give customer claims handlers the opportunity to reflect on their case management and continuously improve their approach to help manage work-related stress and alert the insurer to risks that may otherwise go unnoticed. 

“The work our teams do daily to support customers is work recognised as having challenging impacts on their physical and emotional health,” Executive Manager Claims and Customer Solutions Seema Bangera said. 

“Vicarious, or secondary trauma, can occur as a result of their work helping others cope with traumatic events, reviewing distressing information and learning of serious injuries or in some cases death.” 

Asteron says the pilot will run for four months and backs up a suite of other employee support the insurer offers, including online learning programs and training modules focused on mitigating the psychosocial risk and building the psychological health and wellbeing of its employee base. 

The insurer will follow up with a review after the four-month run and consider whether to extend the program to other areas of the business.