The organizational process helps in decision-making and adopting strategies that improve business performance. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, also known as MetLife Inc., has developed organizational structures and designs which has improved the company in acquiring and managing its competition. It is one of the global providers of flexible life insurance coverage, annuities, and employee benefit programs like grief counseling after loss (MetLife, 2022). It has a diverse product mix with services including preparations of wills, settlement of estates, and counseling to employees. According to Dahesh et al. (2020), the company’s organizational process is designed to improve the implementation of strategies and organize responsibility and team awareness toward achieving goals and objectives.
The company’s corporate governance identifies its commitment and responsibility to employees, the board of directors, shareholders, and customers that facilitate its operation. Additionally, the board conducts annual self-evaluations to determine its performance and review its corporate governance guidelines to ensure they follow the statutory requirement during the audit. MetLife is a leading innovator and recognizes leaders in protection planning, savings, and retirement by presenting a solid market through growth in market shares, partnership, acquisition, and joint ventures (MetLife, 2022). This increases the company’s product and service delivery to customers and employees, thus, building a sustainable business environment for stakeholders.
Comparison with Competitors
The company’s product and service delivery are relatively higher than most competitors, like Aflac and Sun Life. It offers various products and services customized to customers’ needs and preferences. For example, Stand-Alone Life Insurance is a customized plan that can run short-term or long-term. Compared to its competitor Sun Life which provide fixed healthcare plan for customers. MetLife seeks to understand its customers’ needs and employees’ improvement to expand its global supply chain management.
Bottom-up Approach
The bottom-up approach is the corporate decision-making criteria that begin from the low-level management in the hierarchy. The approach considers customer feedback and employees’ opinion and experiences to evaluate the decisions. The top-down approach is, however, limited to recognizing employees’ potential, skills, and talents (Chanias et al., 2019). MetLife adheres to a bottom-up approach by including its employees and customers in decision-making. Employee benefits programs provided by the company help in understanding their experience at the workplace and collect customers’ evaluations about their service delivery.
Horizontal Collaboration and Open Innovation
Additionally, the company has engaged in horizontal technology collaboration in other regions like Europe, Asia, and Middle East Africa. For instance, the TrustSphere program in Singapore uses technology to analyze employee relationship networks to the metadata through digital interactions. The model integrates employees of the same status to improve their performance toward the organizational goals (Audretsch & Belitski, 2022). Customers and partnerships promote the company’s innovation process by engaging in skills and needs. MetLife considers internal and external technology to improve service delivery to customers. Employees are engaged in internal crowdsourcing ideation platforms to share their experience and ideas toward delivering customers’ and employees’ needs. Strategic partnerships with tech companies such as Microsoft and Cisco help MetLife Innovation Officer (Met.IO) develop tools and programs to drive innovation to global standards (MetLife, 2022). The company often updates its website and offers discounts to new customers, thus, attracting a large market and collecting data on the preference of customers.
HR Policies and Procedures
Human resource is significant in the organization and must be constantly managed. As a continuous process, human resource requires the adoption of strategies that helps in job analysis to determine the required talents. HR policies and procedures affect hiring and recruitment, training employees, and termination of contracts at the workplace (Hamza et al., 2021). The recruitment process can either be internal or external. The organization, through Met IO, has integrated innovation ecosystem design that engages employees with innovative experiences. This requires innovative employees with business skills to incubate business trends. Priorities are given to current employees of the open position to improve their commitment and advance their careers. If the internal process does not produce competent personnel and the external process is adopted. The company can advertise the opportunity on its website at career opportunities to interest individuals. The careers web pages provide job titles, job responsibilities, location, and date and deadline of application for the job advert (MetLife, 2022).
MetLife Diversity
MetLife is significantly impacting its customers, employees, and partners, who are inspired by the company’s innovative strategy and products. It has encouraged its employees and partners to identify, recognize and reward talents and skills, and share their personal experiences with MetLife (MetLife, 2021). To achieve a sustainable environment for stakeholders and the community, it creates values and is committed to a culture that ensures the values are delivered to the community.
Innovation provides a competitive advantage; however, the company has created a network with its customers and partners towards the future in the supply chain to achieve global dominance in the market. Customer-oriented and innovative contributions to improving understanding of demographic factors and needs of customers (MetLife, 2021). These factors provide a better perspective of the company since it adopts the latest market trends and delivers products that align with the demand.
Recommendation
As the CEO of MetLife, it is recommended to implement innovative strategies to help collect and analyze data to improve understanding of the market dynamics. Global strategies, such as adopting research strategies to collect and analyze big data, optimized the personalization of algorithms for customers. This will improve the understanding of the customers in the local market and help expand the demand for the company’s product.
References
“MetLife, About Us” (August 22, 2022) MetLife. www.metlife.com
Audretsch, B. D., & Belitski, M. (2022). The limits to open innovation and its impact on Innovation Performance. Technovation, 119, 102519. Web.
Chanias, S., Myers, M. D., & Hess, T. (2019). Digital transformation strategy making in pre-digital organizations: The case of a financial services provider. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 28(1), 17–33. Web.
Dahesh, M. B., Tabarsa, G., Zandieh, M., & Hamidizadeh, M. (2020). Reviewing the intellectual structure and evolution of the Innovation Systems Approach: A social network analysis. Technology in Society, 63. Web.
Hamza, P. A., Othman, B. J., Gardi, B., Sorguli, S., Aziz, H. M., Ahmed, S. A., Sabir, B. Y., Ismael, N. B., Ali, B. J., & Anwar, G. (2021). Recruitment and selection: The relationship between recruitment and selection with organizational performance. International Journal of Engineering, Business and Management, 5(3), 1–13. Web.
MetLife, Inc (2021). Annual Report (Form 10-K) U.S. Security and Exchange Commission.