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All right. Thank you, good afternoon, good morning for everybody. We're happy to be here to present the January edition of our labor outlook study. This study has been done for nearly 10 years now with Ward Group and Jacobson Group. For those not familiar with Ward, we are a business unit of Aon, and we provide consulting and analytics around benchmarking, specifically things around expense, operational analytics, staffing, and compensation data. I'll flip it over to Greg.
Thank you, Jeff, good morning and good afternoon, depending on where you are, thank you for joining us. For those of you who are not familiar with The Jacobson Group, we are the largest executive search and staffing firm in the insurance industry in the U.S. We provide a variety of talent-related solutions, including executive search, temporary staffing, professional recruiting, and we provide subject matter experts for special projects as well. Welcome today. Our study objectives, this has been the same throughout the tenure of the study, have been to analyze the current labor trends and future staffing expectations. We'll talk about current trends and what we expect to see in the future. Provide an overview of staffing challenges by discipline and provide commentary on the industry's labor market.
Before I do go any further, if you do have any questions, please feel free to put those into the chat box and Jeff and I can see those questions, and we can answer them. We do have a first question, and I'll have a quick answer for that, and that's, "Will you send us a copy of the information?" Absolutely. We will send out a summary of all this information to everybody who is attending the webinar. That will come out in a couple of days. We'll go on to the next slide. Thank you, Trish. Our participant profile is this for the study. The study represents 153,000 employees, roughly 10% of the U.S. carrier market. The breakdown is 65% of the companies tend to be more regional in nature, and 35% of the companies are multinational or national companies.
The study is more heavily weighted towards property and casualty, as it has been for the entire tenure of this study. 79% of the companies who participate are property and casualty insurers, and 20% are life and health insurers, and just 1% are reinsurers. Company size, average total number of employees for the entire study is 1,820. We're pretty evenly split between companies that are small, medium, or large. Under 300 employees, you got 36%. 37% between 300 and 1,000 employees, and 27% of the companies participating have over 1,000 employees. Moving on to the next slide. I'd like to just kick us off by sharing the information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics related to the unemployment rate in both the general economy and the insurance industry. The general economy's unemployment rate is down to 4.1% through January.
The insurance industry's unemployment, which by the way, most economists will tell you anything below 4% is full employment, it's actually jumped up to 2.2%. The month prior, it was actually at 1%. The difference is most likely related to a lot of storm adjusters who were handling cat claims, and then some of those people have been rolled off. There were several thousand of those people that rolled off because they finished their projects, and then when the surveys come out, they probably mark themselves as unemployed. Regardless, the trend line is probably a more important note here. That's that red line that you see, that's overlaying the insurance industry's information, and that is showing a trend line of 1.7% unemployment for the industry. It's obviously a very competitive world right now in terms of employees. Moving on to the next slide.
We'll talk just quickly about growth. The insurance industry has grown very substantially since the recovery from the last recession started. We are up almost 7.5% in terms of total employment, over 100,000 new jobs. This is for insurance carriers only. This does not include brokers or third-party administrators or claims adjusting firms. You can see we've seen substantial growth. That growth is starting to slow down, and we're starting to level off, and that will really be the theme for our discussion today.
I did want to just share with you that I looked back at data going before our study started, and there are actually more employees working for insurance carriers than there were 15 years ago, which is a little bit of an interesting thing to think about given how much has been invested in technology, and I think Jeff probably can share some information about that. Jeff will talk more about some of the expectations that we've seen.
Yeah. To kind of piggyback on that, we can see here that we asked everybody, "What are your 12-month staffing and revenue expectations as of January?" We can see here that it's typically fairly correlated that as companies are expecting to grow, we also see a percent of maintaining or increasing staff that's relatively consistent with that. As we see here that 10% of respondents on the left show that they're expecting to decrease staff in 2018, about 32% are maintaining staff and 58% increasing. That compares to about 79% of companies that are anticipating an increase in revenue and just 7% that are expecting to decrease.
As we look at this in terms of the trend line as well, we can see that it's interesting from the standpoint that this is the first time we've seen a notable dip in the staffing plans in particular. We peaked out in the January and July 2016 timeframe, and we've gradually seen some of the companies that are thinking about their overall staffing plans begin to slowly decline. With the 10% that are expecting a decrease, that is consistent where we were back in July, and you can see that's as high as it's been since back in 2013. Long story short, I guess, as we look at here is, as companies are still achieving growth and as we think about particularly like the property casualty side, as an example, the average company grew close to 4% in 2017.
For many companies, we're expecting that most will probably grow about that rate. We're seeing continued premium growth, particularly in personal lines. While commercial lines is a softer market than perhaps the personal lines market. Most companies were getting about a 2%-2.5% growth in 2017. There is a renewed focus on expense management and a lot of pressure on expenses, which is starting to draw down some of these staffing expectations.
The other piece that we'll talk about in here is also the impact of technology that as companies have continued to invest into robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, and the replacement of their core legacy systems, we have seen that particularly in the support functions around all of the billing activities, the customer service activities, the claims support and first notice of loss reporting activities, as well as some of the, particularly in personal lines, the underwriting customer-facing activities. We have seen some automation gains in those areas, but that is being replaced with higher skilled, higher caliber employees in the analytics and technology and actuarial areas as well. As we look at this next slide, too, I just did want to point out how that the trend line with revenue and staffing expectations are linked up here.
Again, 79% of companies expect to grow in revenue, which is down two points from last January. We did see that the life and health companies, in particular, were more likely to expect to grow, with 94% of companies responding that on the life and health side. The other piece that I wanted to make a reference to is this last bullet, is that both P&C and life health companies responded that the primary reason that they were expecting changes in revenue was a shift in market share, with 67% of companies on the P&C side and 59% of life and health companies anticipating a market share. Obviously, if they're expecting to grow in revenue, they're expecting to grow in market share, which is different than perhaps what expectations were for pricing or policy or geographic expansion being a reason for growth.
Here we're seeing that companies tend to appear to be focused on the growth in the current market share opportunities that they have in particular. Here on the next slide here, Greg, I'll let you take this where we kind of look at the plans for actual versus plans.
Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. What we like to do is, we like to test our information against what actually happens, and then we also test that against, on the long-term basis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics information. We've seen that our study overall has very much The predictions have come true but not always on a six-month basis. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer than that for the hiring to catch up to the expected hiring. This graph is actually showing the staffing plans versus the actual hiring that took place. The dark blue, the bars on the top, are the number of companies that actually increased staff by those amounts that are on the left. The light blue, that bar is the number of companies that actually intended to grow by the amounts on the left.
Overall, we saw not nearly the growth that was expected to happen over the last 12 months that was put into the plans from the study a year ago. Most of that happens to come through those companies who are probably looking to grow between 2% and 4%, modest growth in terms of employees. You can see that only 14% of companies fell into that category when actually 24% of companies were saying that they were going to fall into those categories. There are some outliers. You can see there were some companies, there are a few more companies that had really significant growth, more than they expected. There were also some companies that had less growth than that was expected. Overall, there wasn't nearly as many companies growing as were anticipated to grow.
Maybe more interestingly, there were more companies that were shrinking than were anticipated. You can see all the blue bars, especially those companies that decreased by small amounts, the number of companies that decreased by less than 2%, there were 2.3% of companies that fell into that category only versus a planned 1.2%. Then there were almost 5% of companies who decreased staff by 10%-20%, and none had planned on that. Some of that is the things that you probably had heard of in the news, with some larger companies reducing staff as a result of poor results the year prior. We'll go on to the next slide, which breaks it down by industry. This is interesting. On the left, we have the property and casualty industry. On the right, we have the life and health industry.
You can see that actually the numbers were pretty close in terms of the amount of companies that were increasing employees versus those that were planning on increasing employees. Same thing with those, the numbers are fairly close in terms of the number of companies that were planning to stay the same. There was a pretty significant increase in the number of companies who decreased employees, and those decreases were not planned a year ago. I find that interesting in the property and casualty space. In the life and health space, you can see that many companies did not grow nearly to the extent that they expected. It can be probably anticipated that most of that was related to political things that were going on, primarily on the health insurance side of the business.
Moving on, all this up until now, we're talking about how there's a slower growth in the number of companies who are anticipating adding staff. I think that needs to be separated from what might sound like there's going to be a reduction in staff overall, which is not really anything close to being the case. I don't think that there's going to be a reduction in the competitive marketplace for talent anytime in the near future. One of the ways of looking at this is to see how many jobs are actually open in the finance and insurance industries, according to a study called the JOLTS study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What's happening here is there's now in finance and insurance, they don't break down the industries, but in finance and insurance, in January, on average, there are 178,000 open jobs throughout the year. You can see how that's just increasing dramatically since 2009, when there were only 121,000 open jobs. What's happening here is that it's not just new jobs that are being created, but also the amount of time it's taking to fill jobs is increasing. That's piling jobs on top of jobs, open jobs on top of open jobs. What this actually tells us is there's going to be a lag between the number of open jobs and the demand for people versus the timing that you see when companies stop growing, just because there's so many jobs that are open that have never been filled. Jeff.
All right, this slide also, as we're looking at the 2018 plans, just to give you some relative examples of how the staffing plans in 2018 compared to 2017. Again, the dark blue here represents the 2018 plans and light blue being the 2017. It just shows for those companies that are increasing or decreasing staff, the ranges of shifts that they're expecting in the employee population. One thing we noted that was 74% of commercial lines, P&C companies were expecting to increase staff, which is about three points higher than the personal lines group, and 37 points higher than those that responded as being balanced in both personal and commercial lines. A lot of growth in commercial. Of those companies who plan to add staff in the next 12 months, 88% did increase expected revenue, and 71% expecting to grow market share.
34% of companies who plan to maintain staff were expecting to grow revenue. In that case, as they're growing, they're hoping to achieve an improvement in their expense ratio as well. The biggest thing that we've noted is you can see for, particularly in the 2018 plans, that there are a number of companies that were expecting to grow revenue. If you look at the second and third line here for 10%-20% and 5%-9%, that nearly 28% of companies were expecting to grow staff by at least 5% or more. There will be some notable headcount jumps for a handful of companies. Likewise, down at the bottom, we can see that 5% of companies, nearly 6% actually, were expecting to decrease staff by 5% or more.
As we see on the next slide here, it does tie in a little bit by company size. Actually, on the next slide after this, just to look at those plans again by 2018 and 2017. In summary, if you look at the P&C market, you can see fewer companies expecting to grow on the left, likewise on the right-hand side for the life and health, about a similar gap, even fewer companies expecting to grow in 2018 relative to 2017. A slightly bigger jump there. By company size, we can see that the smaller companies marked as those in the dark blue versus the medium-sized, 300 to 1,000 employees, companies with more than 1,000, the larger companies were much more likely to maintain current staff size than the small and medium-sized companies.
This has been true in most years that we've conducted this study, that we find the smaller the organization typically reflects the more nimble they are, and they're generally more likely to have more aggressive growth targets in place. Certainly as you're adding perhaps a group of 10 people to only an employee population of, say, 200 or 250, it does, on a proportional basis, add a lot more to the overall headcount. We do expect this to kind of reflect that for many of the larger organizations, again, to reinforce, a lot of focus is on expense management and maintaining the profit margins that they expect to return to their policyholders or their shareholders as well. Here, I think on the next slide, this gets a bit from a temporary employment.
Greg, one of the questions that came through was also asking about the impact of contingent workers in this, because I didn't know if this might tie into your temporary employment, if you want to just to kind of address that as well.
Absolutely. I'd be happy to. What this slide is showing you actually is the percentage of the total U.S. labor market that are considered temporary staff. That number has been growing. We're actually at a peak, an all-time high of about 2.03%. Basically, 2% of the entire labor market is considered a temporary employee. It's the highest in the history of the temporary staffing business. It's kind of hit its peak, at least it appears to have hit some sort of a plateau, I should say. We'll have to see what happens because contingent labor and people who are looking to work in a different way is changing and rapidly increasing. That's really the answer to the question. We're seeing companies that are using contingent labor for a variety of positions, well beyond things that have ever been thought of before.
I don't mean just filling a job on a temporary basis, like a temporary controller or something like that. I actually mean we're seeing a lot of companies that instead of going to consulting firms, they come to a staffing firm like ours and look for individuals who can do special projects. Not only are we seeing an increase in the number of staff in the industry that are considered temporary, but we're seeing higher-level people than ever before in these contingency buckets, or those contingent workforce buckets. This represents about 30,000 employees currently working for insurance companies right now. We also ask, what are the plans for the future in terms of use of temporary staff and contingent labor and so forth.
Actually, the number of companies that are looking to increase their use of temporary staff has been pretty consistent for the last couple of studies. It's about 12%. We're actually seeing a slight increase in the number of companies who are looking to decrease temporary staff. That doesn't really kind of follow through with my earlier comment about the need for workers on a temporary basis, I think that this number will change because it's going to be more difficult to find people who are willing to work on a full-time basis, and sometimes you have to adapt and bring in people who are willing to work on their terms, which tend to be a little bit more on a contingent basis, part-time basis, and so forth.
Just to provide you some trends that we've seen so far, that we've talked about so far, the total industry grew about 79 basis points versus an anticipated rate of 1.56%. The growth was about half of what was anticipated a year ago. A lot of that happened in the property and casualty industry, and that grew just over about 0.84% versus anticipated 1.8% or 1.79%. The life and health industry did not grow as much, but it did not anticipate growing as much. That leads us now to talking about the challenges of recruiting and measurements for that. What we have here is two bars. The dark blue bars are the stats from this study, and the light blue bars are stats from the year prior. The vertical red line is a representation of where filling a position becomes difficult.
We ask participants on a scale of zero to 10, rate the difficulty to fill certain positions, and five is considered moderately difficult to fill. You can see virtually every position, with the exception of reinsurance underwriting now, accounting and operations are considered at least moderately difficult to fill. Overall, actually, there's been a little bit of an easing of recruiting, just slightly. The average ranking for all positions in this study was five point six. On average, all positions are considered moderately difficult to fill at a five point six. A year ago, it was five point seven. Not a significant difference, but we're seeing just a little bit of an easing. Product line has a significant impact on these things. In fact, the most difficult positions to fill right now are property and casualty technology positions.
Jeff and I were talking a little bit before we came on live, and what we're seeing anecdotally is a lot of companies going through systems integration transitions. We don't even see that there's enough people that have the experience that are in specific systems that companies are looking for in order to fill all those changes in technology. Basically, you can see that the most difficult positions to fill are technology, actuarial, analytics, and executive-level positions going down the list. The easiest positions to fill are operations and accounting, and claims actually surprisingly came. Claims bounces around a little bit. Claims actually was down at the lower end, but you'll see in just a moment, Jeff will talk about where some of the growth positions that are going to take place, and it's actually going to be in the claims area.
It's a good segue. On the next slide there, we can see that this is the areas based on whether our companies were balanced, P&C, commercial, personal, or life and health focused. By each grouping, you can see in total, technology remains the number 1 area that had the greatest likelihood for increasing staff. It was generally consistent, in particular, across all of the P&C lines. What was interesting is that if you look at the life and health, which is the fourth bar there, you can actually see that sales and marketing and actuarial positions and analytics were about on par with technology as well.
It kind of gives you a little bit of a shadow or I guess a look into those companies that a lot of focus on growth and product development, product management, automation of those products is as much of the influence as a kind of core technology replacement that we're seeing predominantly in P&C companies. Analytics, no surprise, remained very high in that grouping as well. You'll see that for claims, to Greg's point, that claims was the number 2 area by a close margin to technology for personal lines-focused companies to increase staff. That's not a surprise after the catastrophe activity that we saw in 2017, whether it's the hurricanes, wildfires, or tornadoes in hail. A lot of focus there.
I will also point out that for the commercial lines companies right there in the middle, you'll see that underwriting was actually a greater emphasis for growth in the P&C commercial lines-focused companies over any area. It kind of gives you a little bit of insight that in summary, a lot of the life and health and commercial lines companies growth in product underwriting functions, whereas in the personal lines and balanced companies, more focus on some of the claims and technology areas. As we look at the next group, this just shows in aggregate across all industries how the likelihood by function had increased. Again, you can see technology and claims, analytics.
One of the key things across this is that you see it's generally consistent by a study period going back to 2013, that we've not seen a major shift in perhaps any great area. We did note that back in 2014, if you look in the underwriting component there, that there was a lot of emphasis in 2014 for companies to grow market share and expand in geographic territories and new product development, which we saw result in an emphasis in commercial underwriting functions back then as well. We've moved a little bit away from that now as companies are trying to gain the premium productions that were anticipated with some of their growth expectations back then as well.
As we look at the primary drivers for increasing staff, again, we can see that expansion of business or expansion into new markets was the highest growth reason to increase staff, followed by an increase in business volume. It was interesting that 41% of companies say that there are areas that are currently understaffed, and they're trying to fit those needs as well. Improving the service delivery or customer service aspect was also a major reason. That gives you kind of a little bit of an insight there into what some of the reasons were for growth. Then likely, the next slide shows us the reasons why companies were expecting to decrease staff. Here we can see that for many of them, it was to gain the efficiencies through automation that they had seen, requiring fewer staff.
Reorganization was also another major area for decreasing staff. In general, there were fewer responses around some of these other topics. One of the other comments I'd like to make is, as we've looked at some of the growth in functional areas, there are three areas that we wanted to point out that we've seen notable movement in the job roles, and this is separate from the survey data. This is from our benchmarking work that many of you participate for our compensation and our expense benchmarking programs. The three areas that had the greatest job role movement over the last 5 years were roles in analytics, where these would include data scientists, modelers, data analytics, or research analytics type titles. We saw a growth of 103% over the last 5 years in those positions.
The number 2 area that we saw the greatest job role movement was in information security, where we saw a 79% increase in job roles around whether it's things like IT security analysts, security architects, things like that. Then the third area, which is probably more pertinent to a lot of the folks on the call here with an HR bent, is we saw a 49% increase in employee relations type roles, which were your traditional employee relations consultants or specialists and things of that nature. As we've talked about a lot of the change in investment technology, we don't want to underestimate the impact it has on change management and kind of organizational change in itself, which is often on the backs of human resources departments.
We've seen a lot of emphasis within companies to make sure they have the right types of people within their human resource functions to help manage that change as well.
Let me just answer one question before we go through our closing thoughts. I just want to Trish, you might be able to answer this question just to be clear. There was a question about whether or not the webinar itself will be accessible online afterwards, and I believe it is, Trish, can you answer that question and
Yes. We will be sending out a version of a summary as well as the actual presentation following the webinar. Everyone who registered and attended will be receiving copies of everything.
Great. Okay, we'll just wrap up with some closing thoughts. We can move to the next slide. All right, 58% of companies plan to increase staff during the next 12 months, driven by 74% in commercial lines and 71% in personal lines. Though we talked a lot about a wane in the number of companies that are looking to grow, still more than half the companies out there are looking to add staff. 10.5% of companies expect a decrease in staffing during the next 12 months, and that's five points higher than it was a year ago. 76% of small companies plan to add staff during the next 12 months. There's a big difference between small, medium, and large companies. Smaller companies are adding more staff.
This is 16 and 44 points higher than the medium size and the larger companies, respectively. Expectations to grow revenue are two points lower than in July at 79%. As Jeff said, there's a direct correlation with that growth expectation and the expectation for increasing staff. Large companies are the most optimistic in terms of looking to increase revenue as 86% expect growth compared to 80% for medium-sized companies and 72% for small companies. Optimism for revenue growth increased 13 points to 94% for life and health companies from July of 2017, while the property and casualty companies decreased three points to 77%.
This is the second highest total for the life and health segment since the survey began, a lot of that probably has to do with the tax bill that went through, as well as some clarity, although not a lot, but some clarity on what the future of healthcare, at least for the next year. Finally, 65% of the companies stated that change in market share will drive their expected revenue changes, with 20% referencing pricing.
As we look at the primary reason, again, to increase staff in the next 12 months is the expectation of expansion into new business or markets. Also, 51% of companies listed the primary reason to hire, followed by 47% reporting an increase in business volume. 23% of companies report that automation will be the primary reason for reductions in staff, followed by reorganization at 17%. Technology claims and analytic roles are expected to grow the greatest during the next 12 months, and sales and marketing is the greatest need for life and health companies, while technology was the primary area for Property Casualty. The insurance industry continues to face unprecedented talent recruitment environment. Today's increasingly challenged labor reality is being impacted by increasing staffing demands, a growing mid-level talent gap, impending retirements, and virtually non-existent industry unemployment, and a shallowing talent pool.
It's going to continue to put a lot of pressure, and those areas in technology, actuary, analytic positions remain the most difficult to fill. Companies are requiring more temporary staff, with 12% of companies planning to increase their volume of temporary staff use up from 11% in January. Our projections in total is that with the anticipated growth in Staffing for most companies, we should expect to see about a 1.2% increase in the overall projected growth for both life and health and P&C, with a slightly higher volume of headcount growth in our P&C companies coming in about 1.6%. Again, you'll note that the commercial lines companies, despite the fact that they have the greatest headwinds from revenue growth, are expected to grow at 2% compared to P&C companies only growing at about 1% during that timeframe.
We'll open it up if there are any other further questions. Greg, it looks like it did one came through with the pressure on recruiting. Is this having an impact on compensation trends right now? Greg, I'll let you answer that maybe from an executive compensation. Have you seen, as you're recruiting, a major shift in compensation plans at this point?
Well, what we're seeing is a major difference between what the expectations are oftentimes and what realities are when it comes to supply and demand of the specific talent that companies are looking to fill. Sometimes it can make things quite difficult. For example, if it's only possible to attract one or two candidates who have multiple opportunities, it's going to drive up the cost a little bit. I think that it'd be interesting to see what stats you have, Jeff, because I know that the insurance industry's overall at about the same level of increase as the general economy. I think, if I'm not mistaken, those who perform at a much higher level, the A players, if you will, tend to get much higher raises than the industry standard.
We're seeing a lot of that, and that's who our clients often are coming to us to recruit, for the A players.
We've seen that, and it's been compounded quite a bit over the last five years. Actually, probably more, even close to eight years now that post the recession of 2008, 2009, and 2010, as companies got used to having only sometimes 1%-3% merit increases, whereas some of the top performers were able to maintain, oftentimes 3.2% to 3.5% or even 4% merit increases over a five or six-year period, it's caused a greater gap. We've seen many companies that they've had to do, not just within their executive ranks, but across the board shifts to make sure that employee compensation is at least at market. They have made some changes there in market pinning.
The last thing that we've seen is, I think for a lot of the mutual companies in particular, a growing opportunity for both short-term and long-term incentives to create programs that are more consistent with as they're recruiting from other publicly traded companies to have more opportunity there.
That's interesting, Jeff. Just really quickly, we've been doing quite a number of CEO searches for mutual insurance companies, and we're now starting to see where most companies, if they don't already have a long-term incentive plan, most mutual companies, if they don't already have a long-term incentive plan, they're at least developing one when they bring in a new CEO. Are you seeing the same thing?
I would agree with that. Sorry, I just got distracted here as I was reading one of the other questions that came in, Greg, as you were answering.
That's okay. I think what the point being is, as of years ago, probably 10 years ago, it was fairly rare to see a mutual company that could compete with a stock company in terms of total compensation. Now we're seeing it as a much more common thing, at least in having three components of salary, bonus, and a long-term incentive of some sort.
Greg, I don't know if you would have data on this one, but are there any statistics or results related to the hiring of new college grads into the P&C industry specifically? I know we don't capture that directly. Do you happen to have any data on that?
I don't have immediate data, no. What I do know is, I know that despite the fact that there's been a tremendous number of universities who've created risk management and insurance programs, they're only feeding 15% of the demand for people into the industry. There's virtually 100% placement rate of new grads who have that degree, and the remaining 85% of new grads coming into the industry are coming without any insurance background.
One, it kind of piggybacks a little bit on probably the earlier question, but how would you characterize the markets for executives for small and medium-sized companies? There's a follow-up question on here that do you see that changing over the next 24 months? The market for, and I would say here, it looks like for small and medium size, kind of in that ranking 500, 600 million and below.
Well, I think our study shows that there's going to be continued growth among those companies. A greater percentage of those companies will be growing in terms of staff versus the larger companies. I think that there's still a tremendous amount of turnover that's going to take place as a result of retirements, and a lot of it is in those smaller companies. Those smaller companies are having to compete with sometimes things that are difficult, location being one of those things. I mean, a lot of the smaller companies tend to be in smaller towns. You're now asking executives to move to a small town and maybe a town where there are no other insurance jobs, which creates risk for people or the perception of risk for people. That's one of the big challenges that we see with the smaller companies in general.
Here's another one that just came through. What are the trends on seeing folks staying employed longer with companies being more willing to support a more flexible work schedule, contract work instead of full-time work?
Do you have comments on that, Jeff? I'm happy to weigh in.
Yeah. We've definitely seen, I think this is more of the long-tenured staff. Well, I guess we see both in tenured staff that are looking for retirement options that it gives them a softer way to go into retirement. They're often being engaged for short-term to long-term contracts, often up to even two years. That gives them the ability to stay in the workforce. The other piece is that we are seeing more companies adopt greater utilization of flexible work across the entire employee population. We are doing a study on this to capture where it was as of 2018. As of 2016, I believe the number was just under 9% of the average company had employees that were working on a flexible work schedule.
It actually ties into a question earlier, Greg, that we kind of skipped over that talked about the temporary placement rate, that the number industry-wide was only about 2%, I think we've seen a greater utilization of more than 2% of the workforce in insurance companies. I don't know if you have anything that you would opine on that to see, is it a higher utilization rate of temporary workforce? I know you have a temporary staffing group. Maybe you can comment on that.
Yeah, I've looked for numbers on that. I have not been able to find numbers. Also, I will say this, in general, the numbers are probably much higher than what they appear to be through that study that I showed through the government study, because sometimes people who are considered independent consultants are not captured in that group, that's a lot of what we're seeing, we're seeing a lot of actuaries who we're bringing to companies on for contracts, compliance people, product development people, accounting, statutory accounting people, and so forth. These are jobs that never were considered to be those in that contingent workforce, and today are. They may not even be captured fully in the government study, but it's very difficult to tell based on the way the study's built.
Yeah. That goes up. There was another question that came in as a follow-up. Are carriers embracing the concept of remote workers? Yeah, we are definitely seeing a higher utilization of remote work staff. Right now, it's interesting that they tend to be more technical positions, both from the technology side around application development maintenance areas, we've also seen that being applied to many smaller companies who aren't based in areas that if they're trying to attract pricing actuaries or other analytic actuarial-type positions, oftentimes they are bringing those job roles in on a remote basis as well. In terms of more of the traditional support functions and things like that, I'd say they're willing to embrace it. It's just not been as widespread as perhaps some of those other areas. Okay, well, that looks like there one other question that just came in.
Is there any data around outsourcing trends? We do capture the data from our expense benchmarking, and it tracks around the expense levels. We have seen a slight uptick in consulting utilization, but it would not be around what I would define as true outsourcing, whereas companies are trying to outsource an entire task, like maybe it's a portion of financial reporting or customer support or activities like that. The biggest utilization of true outsourcing we've seen being adopted by more of the large carriers. For definitional purposes, we would say these are companies over $5 billion in premium or more that tend to have enough scale and, for lack of better word, management capability to outsource and manage those processes. More of the smaller organizations have struggled to find a cost benefit of going full utilization of outsourcing.
There will be some bespoke activities that may be outsourced here or there. Right now, we've seen it more dominated by the larger organizations. Greg, I don't know if you have anything to fill in on that as well.
No, I don't because we don't do outsourcing. We just do temporary staffing. We're not really tied into that.
Okay. Thank you everybody. This comes up to our end of our webinar today, and we will continue to update this again in the July timeframe of collecting data and present in August. We appreciate all your support, both providing your content, filling out the survey to provide the content for this, and participating today. If you have any follow-up questions or would like more information on how to participate, you can contact Edwin Albers, who coordinates the data collection of this effort, and feel free to reach out to Greg or myself. On behalf of Ward Group, we'd like to thank you so much again for participating in today's webinar.
Thank you on behalf of the Jacobs-