Retaining Your Best Employees
Employee retention is vital to growing your agency, and it’s a key issue for all agency principals. This section provides best practices for employee retention and offers resources that you can share with your employees that will help with their own career development.
Employee retention is critical to your growth and ability to plan for the future of your agency. Getting the right people on-board, in the right jobs and motivating them is a top concern for most agency principals. Many factors drive retention including recognition, career opportunities and promotions, and ability to have an impact.
Ways to improve the retention rate of your employees:
- Give top talent a chance to grow through stretch assignments, such as targeting a new market or implementing a new technology program within the agency.
- Take advantage of your carriers’ training and information programs – many offer webinars enabling easy participation for your whole team.
- Send top talent to industry conferences and enable them to share information and ideas with the whole team when they return.
- Enable open dialog – meet with employees frequently (informally and formally) to know what’s driving them and how they want to grow.
- Share information with your team about your strategy and goals – get them engaged in understanding how they can contribute to the agency’s success.
- Integrate your mission into the work by sharing client stories and impact at meetings.
Compensation and benefits actually factor lower than many of these other desires among employees. When it comes to millennials, many agencies say they’re looking to understand their career path and know that the work they are doing has an impact.
- Recognize great employees who are living your core values. A quarterly award program – such as a gift certificate for dinner—can be a big motivator.
- Invest in more advanced training, such as on-site carrier courses and designation programs like Certified Insurance Counselor for high performers.
- Give employees more flexibility through work-at-home arrangements, casual dress for charity days, volunteer time off and flexible hours.
- Investing in technology has a dual benefit of improving service to clients and getting employees more excited about the work.
You’ve spent time identifying, recruiting and hiring the right employees. Now it’s important to give them the right tools to become valuable contributors to your agency.
Setting goals is an important step—goals provide clarity about what employees should be working on and how that work aligns with the agency’s objectives.
The Importance of Setting Goals
- Clarifies what's important.
- Helps individual employees see how they can contribute to the agency's success.
- Sets the bar for high performance.
- Creates a foundation for what’s expected.
- Challenges employees to take on stretch assignments and develop new skills.
- Drives behavior and activity.
- Helps employees determine which projects deserve the most time and energy
Remember goal-setting is an annual process, and can often be conducted after you set your annual financial plan. But it’s also important to check in regularly (at a minimum quarterly, but some agency’s do it monthly) to talk about what’s working well and what should be adjusted.
There is no cookie cutter insurance customer, and there is no cookie cutter insurance agent. Communities are becoming increasingly diverse and agencies should strive to be representative of the areas they serve. This means not only hiring agents from different cultural backgrounds but also from different age groups. For example a millennials insurance agent will better understand how a millennial customer wants to conduct their insurance business.
While agencies should factor diversity into their hiring plans, they should also conduct training with their current team to help create a more inclusive mindset.
Below are some resources that can help agencies understand cultural differences, attract more diverse talent and build an inclusive culture:
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CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion
This initiative is the largest CEO-driven business commitment to advance diversity and inclusion within the workplace. It has compiled a number of resources including discussion guides, educational quizzes and videos to help broaden perspectives and create a more inclusive mindset.
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Systemic Racism Explained
Systemic racism affects every area of life in the US. From incarceration rates to predatory loans, and trying to solve these problems requires changes in major parts of our system. Here's a closer look at what systemic racism is, and how we can solve it. Video length: 4:23
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Cultural Diversity Training & Education in the Workplace
Employers that invest in cultural diversity training can benefit from improved employee relations as well as an enhanced ability to interact and manage employees from several perspectives. This article explores how training is important for an ethical work environment, customer service and creating a multi-cultural workforce.
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How to Teach Diversity Awareness in the Work Place
Modeling workplace diversity is an important key for teaching its value. This article highlights how businesses can incorporate diversity into their recruitment strategy as well as create mentoring programs, seminars and partnerships to help educate employees.
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Eliminating Microaggressions: The Next Level of Inclusion: TEDx Talk by Tiffany Alvoid
Microaggression is a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group. In this talk, Tiffany, lays out how this behavior manifests itself, the role you play, and what you can do to avoid perpetuating its continued existence in society. Video length: 8:59
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50+ Ideas for Cultivating Diversity and Inclusion at Your Company
There are countless ways you can invest in diversity and inclusion. This article highlights 50 ideas that businesses can implement right away regardless of headcount, budget and bandwidth.
CARRIER TRAINING
Did you know Encompass offers a variety of resources through their agent portal? Resources vary from 15-minute prerecorded webinars to agency-facing quick how-to videos to support you through the servicing of a policy. Some additional topics available include:
- College Students and Their Insurance Needs
- Transportation Network Companies
- Hidden Dangers of Flooded Vehicles
To access these resources, visit your Encompass Agents Only portal. Please note you will need your individual Encompass credentials to access.
COMMERCIAL LINES
Agent / Broker Training Program
Six training programs offered, including:
- New product development
- New CSR development
Agent / Broker Training Program
CE/Non-CE classes available to help enhance team’s ability to write and service commercial accounts, in addition to:
- Hiring producers and CSRs training
PERSONAL LINES
Agent Recruiting Toolkit
Soup to nuts Reference Guide with links to various industry resources. Provides guidance on recruiting, candidate assessment, interviewing, selection & on-boarding
Agent / Broker Training Programs
New Producer, New CSR, Marketer Training & Others
Classroom Courses
CE & Non-CE:
- Products & Real Life Applications
- Management Classes (selecting / hiring high performing producers)
- Bricks & Clicks (digital space marketing)
Selling Skills Classes
Consultative Selling Skills
Virtual Webinars
- Product
- Desktop training
- Other topics
Progressive has a number of resources available including the Agent Growth Series webinars – below are some topics covered:
- Training Your Employees
- Marketing Services
- Learn to Grow Your Business
- Life Event Marketing
- Learn to Cross Sell
- Customer Experience
- Small Business Trends
- Behavioral Economics
- Mobile Technology
To access these webinars as well as other resources, visit the Progressive For Agents Only Portal. Please note that you will need your Progressive login credentials to access.
Selective Insurance offers several different programs to develop talent within our distribution partners. We currently offer programs that target new producers, experienced producers, customer service representatives/account executives, sales managers, and agency principals.
The training topics that are covered in our programs include: coverage training, sales training, customer service, customer experience, sales leadership, and much more.
To access a catalog of all of our program offerings, as well as a current schedule of program offerings, please log into eSelect, and select the Agency Programs option.
State Auto's PaceSetter producer development program is an intensive year-long sales partnership between you, your producer, your agency and State Auto. Their team of insurance sales professionals works closely with each PaceSetter producer and agency to develop the marketing, sales and underwriting expertise necessary to write quality business – and improve your agency's bottom line.
The Hanover provides many resources to help train your staff on technical aspects as well as sales-related training to improve your team's ability to sell on value, retain more customers, reduce remarketing and increase the number of policies per customer.
Trainings are delivered in large group formats or in smaller groups at your agency office. Work with your local Territory Sales Manager to schedule dedicated Personal Lines Accelerator training sessions and/or lunch and learns.
Technical TrainingLogin to tap.hanover.com and click on “Training & Support” to access all online technical trainings for:
- billing
- using our TAP Sales system
- endorsement processing
- comparative raters
- how to properly calculate replacement cost and more
For questions and to schedule a dedicated technical training for your agency, contactagenttrain@hanover.com.
For an overview about our Personal Lines Accelerator and available lunch and learn trainings, please review the two-page flyer and contact your Territory Sales Manager to discuss further.
West Bend offers an array of continuing education opportunities, including Wisconsin pre-licensing. We have a new producer program that teaches the essentials of insurance and provides opportunities for job shadowing within our corporate divisions and help with coverage forms. Our wide variety of continuing education courses includes ethics, E & O, and other hot topics. We also offer continuing education opportunities through webinars; those topics include E & O, cyber coverages, personal lines, commercial lines, and more! Throughout the year, we also host several designation courses, sales trainings, and perpetuation courses.
CERTIFICATION PROGRAMS
To earn the CPIA designation, candidates are required to participate in a series of three, one-day Insurance Success Seminars. These Seminars are designed to enhance the ability of producers, sales support staff and company personnel to efficiently create and distribute effective insurance programs. The three seminars are:
- Position for Success which focuses on internal and external factors affecting the development of effective business development plans.
- Implement for Success where participants are provided with specific tools and best practices for analyzing consumer needs and delivering an effective solution.
- Sustain Success which focuses on fulfilling the implied promises contained in the insuring agreement.
The National Alliance for Insurance Education & Research offers a variety of courses that can be taken either in person or online that allows insurance professionals to receive their CIC designation in the following categories:
- Commercial Lines
- Risk Management
- Personal Lines
- Personal Risk Management
- Life & Health
- Agency Management
- Insurance Company Operations
Employing CIC professionals helps improve client retention, reduces Errors & Omissions, helps grow your book of business and gives you a team member who can answer the challenging P&C questions.
The CISR program is a CE credit-approved, nationally recognized designation program that takes a practical, hands-on approach to learning. This designation is recognized nationwide as an important credential—one that benefits individuals, their agencies, and their customers
To earn the CISR designation, participants must attend class and pass exams for 5 of the 9 courses. However, anyone is welcome to attend the classes without taking the exams. There is no special order in which courses must be taken. If you are more familiar with a given topic, you may want to begin with that course. The five courses/exams required for the CISR designation must be completed within 3 years.
