Mercer is a bureaucratic business with a complex structure. It lends itself to poor and slow decisions being made. Often the business chokes itself unnecessarily because of this. The business would benefit from a more flat structure, allocating budgets to departmental heads who can then make quick decisions on how to run the business area. It would make the business far more agile and adaptable throughout the economic volatility we see today. Those closest to the clients understand the challenges that need addressing, and talent management requirements. My overarching concern with the structure is that at the very top and bottom of the business we are seeing alignment in terms of values, culture and strategy, but we have a lot of out of touch, stale and self-serving senior managers and partners who do no have the firm or it's peoples interests are the fore. Instead, it is about self promotion, and as a result, they are poor leaders, out of touch and leave many feeling resentful to work here. The go to market strategy is being undermined by these people as they often instruct their teams do underhand things in order to gain additional revenue. This is not a client centric thing to do and is often brought up in client conversations. Reducing reliance on commission and charging a flat fee with a proposition bundle will improve the perception of the value we offer. If we contracted for 3-5 years, then
Lastly, in most areas of the business we have specialist on health and risk, rather than being multi-disciplined. Our competitors have moved away from this model as it is inefficient. A client does not want to see 3-4 people on a single call to discuss a renewals. The different teams also are poor at communicating and it does not lend itself to having strategic conversations with clients. Some large corporate clients I think warrant it, but aside from this, it is not needed and it not wanted by clients. It makes us appear outdated and fragmented. The majority of those colleagues who I speak to are unable to have any kind of strategic conversation with clients about this as their knowledge is too narrow, and ultimately, their line managers don't focus on the other benefits as they are not remunerated to care about it.
