How the pandemic has shown leaders can trust their staff

Most property and casualty insurance brokers have been working remotely from home for nearly two months, managing a crush of client needs during the novel coronavirus pandemic. In doing so, they have provided a lesson in trust.

Serving customers successfully doesn’t come down to where brokers work: They can accomplish just as much at home as in the office. The lesson has not been lost on industry leaders.

Originally, Stanislav Kojokin, managing partner at Toronto-based KASE Insurance, didn’t feel comfortable having his employees work from home. The pandemic has changed his thinking.

“We can actually do a pretty good job working remotely,” he told Canadian Underwriter in an interview. “Even after this whole thing is said and done, I think I’ll be more comfortable allowing my employees to work from home. That’s a lesson learned. We can actually run the business pretty effectively remotely, and I don’t really need to have people come into the office on a daily basis in order to do their job.”

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It comes down to trust, something AA Munroe has worked hard to establish with its staff.

“When you send people home, you trust them. And we have always trusted them,” said Wayne Ezekiel, the Antigonish, N.S.-based past president of AA Munro who is currently serving as the company’s culture champion. “We know they’re there to service customers. With the trust we have in them, we know they’re going to do that when they [work from] home.”

How do you build that trust?

Through a strong culture, Ezekiel told Canadian Underwriter. “We like to say we’re a people-based, performance-focused company. We recognize that people are the most important thing first. So take care of your people, and they’ll take care of your company. We like to keep people flexible — have a flexible approach to workdays. We’ve always had that, but we’re allowing that even more now that people are working from home. We understand that it’s a different situation.”

The topic of trust also came up during Canadian Underwriter’s recent webinar, Business Continuity in The Digital Age. Remote employees have been empowered digitally, and leaders are managing them with a level of trust, said Steve Whitelaw, vice president of industry and partner relations at Applied Systems. It’s possible to have trust and at the same time “have metrics in place to demonstrate control, measure KPIs at whatever level — whether it’s the senior management level or operational level,” he noted.

Don’t forget who you hired, Ezekiel reminded. “When we hired these people, they were all adults,” he said. “They came to us with good intentions to do their best, so it’s our role as leaders to find ways to allow them to maximize that potential. That’s the first thing: Operate from a position of trust.”

“When we hired these people, they were all adults. They came to us with good intentions to do their best.
So it’s our role as leaders to find ways to allow them to maximize that potential. That’s the first thing: Operate from a position of trust.”

Webinar panelists discussed the industry’s agile reaction to sudden change, an agility for which the industry has taken a bad rap in the past. Brokers were trusted with making it work.

“If an insurance company had said four weeks ago, ‘We’re going to go and force everyone to work remotely, we’re going to make you do as much digital as possible, we’re going to remove people from dropping off cheques at the office and see you — and we’re going to do this now,’ the uproar would have been huge,” said webinar panelist Joseph Carnevale, president of the Insurance Brokers Association of Ontario (IBAO) and managing director of sales and partner at Brokers Trust Insurance Group Inc. But the pandemic made people adapt, and the industry has proven itself capable of doing so.

In fact, now that industry pros have proven they can perform from a high level at home — and anywhere, for that matter — panelist Graham Haigh, vice president of broker distribution at Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company, started to wonder about the future of office spaces.

“I’d be a little bit nervous today if I was owning commercial real estate and what the value of those are going to look like as we look at things like permanency,” Haigh said during the webinar. “Are we going to see people perhaps not working full-time at home going forward, but working more part-time at home?”

Feature image from iStock.com/LoveTheWind