AGENCY MANAGEMENT: GETTING TO THE NEXT LEVEL
by Emily Huling
Whether you're a standard lines company or a specialty market, a small-town agency or a big-city broker, you have one thing in common with all those others besides insurance: You're in the people business. Even with the most advanced technology, most brilliant insurance minds, and deep-rooted community and business involvement, an organization will not flourish without developing its people.
Let's take a look at some of the challenges facing the insurance industry today. Four generations buy our products, and we need people who know how to reach each of them. We have an alarming shortage of qualified insurance people in our growing economy, so we need to retain and develop the people we have. Customers want consistently excellent service, which takes people with know-how. Finally, many of our products are very complex and require professional interpretation. We're expected to be the experts.
Who will meet these challenges? Your people. It's crucial that businesses create an environment for people to learn, to be challenged, to be personally satisfied with what they accomplish, and to be recognized and rewarded for their achievements. If you don't create this environment, your people will go elsewhere.
This theory is supported by the industrial psychologist Frederick Hertzberg, whose studies of the workplace in the 1950s distinguished what maintains behavior from what motivates people to get to the next level. Hertzberg found that salary, fringe benefits, and overall working conditions simply maintain employee performance-and don't motivate. This concept should not diminish the importance of these factors. In fact, these factors are how many businesses attract the quality of people they do. Even though they don't motivate, reducing or eliminating them would certainly demotivate employees.
So what does Hertzberg say motivates people? Interesting work, knowledge learning, a sense of ownership of the job they do, a sense of achievement, and recognition. It's the leaders of the organization-owners, managers, and supervisors-who create the motivating environment.
Here are some ideas for creating a workplace that motivates employees to take your business to the next level:
Create a learning environment. Your staff must learn more than your insurance products and coverage-related issues. Ask yourself what you're doing to help them manage the changes that technology and increased customer expectations have brought upon us.
Many shelf-product programs are available to help build this skill, from Stephen Covey courses to Nightingale-Conant audio programs. Although these are excellent tools, nothing is more effective than bringing the learning directly into your organization. You probably already have the resources to do that.
Set up coaches and mentors to help people learn and grow. A mentor differs from a coach in that the range of the relationship includes career guidance, personal development, and coaching. It's designed to expose the less experienced individual to the mentor's business situations for the sake of learning.
Here's an example of mentoring for a company: A manager may be assigned to observe a field underwriter on an agency call. The manager observes and gives feedback to the underwriter in the following areas: call preparation (including preparing an agenda with a clear objective and collecting pertinent information on the relationship, specific accounts, and service issues); communication skills (including listening, asking questions, and handling the agents questions and attitudes professionally); and knowledge of the company and its programs, the competition, and the general business environment in the area.
On the agency side, a seasoned producer may be teamed up with a new recruit. It's easy to appreciate the value of a mentor to the less experienced individual-but the mentor or coach also grows enormously by guiding and observing.
Another method of creating a learning environment is to use job assignments to challenge people. Be careful to avoid abandoning them once the assignment is made. After giving someone a challenging job, the manager needs to offer direction and set up check points to give regular feedback that will support and sustain the person through the learning process. This is a good approach when you want to raise an individual's skill level to handle larger accounts or risks in a new industry group.
Involve your people. CEOs such as Bill Gates (Microsoft), Lou Gerstner (IBM), and Jack Welch (GE) consistently practice this technique to achieve their incredible results. Employee interviews and surveys, focus groups, and brainstorming think tanks encourage creativity and personal accountability. They'll provide the most accurate information available so management can learn what's happening from both inside and outside your organization. Employees have a front-line perspective not seen by the leaders.
Be sure to offer written and verbal ways for employees to provide input. Most people communicate better and more honestly in one form or the other. Most important, pay attention to what your employees say.
One suggestion for an interactive employee discussion would be a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) brainstorming session. Select a topic for discussion, such as an analysis of your competitors, your delivery of customer service, or a review of your internal systems. All you need is a flip chart, markers, and masking tape to write down the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are for each topic and post them on the walls.
Use each person's unique talents. Each member of your team brings unique skills. Personal skills may be overlooked, which would be a shame because they could further develop the individual and add vitality to your organization. Match the individual's skills to a job that needs to be done. Different people may have a talent to create newsletters, structure databases, or organize and host client educational seminars. Create a detailed list of your team's capabilities and talents. Brainstorm together to determine how these skills can be used to expand all areas of your business.
Recognize and reward individual performance. This motivational technique isn't about money. After organizational and individual goals have been established, consider ways to acknowledge people for initiative, creativity, boosting the bottom line, providing outstanding customer service, teamwork, and so on. Examples of reward and recognition gifts include time off, movie passes, and gift certificates for meals. Larger gifts might include audio or video equipment and trips. Just make sure the recognition is tied to either quantitative or qualitative performance.
People want to do their best and work for organizations that are thriving and will be here in the future. If you make your organization's next level challenging, interesting, and fun, your employees will stay along for the ride.
This article originally appeared in The National Underwriter Property/Casualty edition and is reproduced by permission. Emily Huling, CIC, CMC, president of Selling Strategies, Inc., helps the insurance industry increase sales, improve customer service, and improve the bottom line. She can be reached at Selling Strategies, Inc., P.O. Box 200, Terrell, NC 28682, (888) 309-8802, fax (888) 398-7355, E-mail [email protected], Web site www.sellingstrategies.com. Please contact her for information about her new six-audiocassette album Customer Service -- 12 Steps to Excellence.