Insights Into Agency Cultures – Small Agencies In Small Towns

In my August 4 post “How Does Agency Culture Affect Best Practices?“ I discussed some issues that can exist in an agency’s culture. Before we can explore what your agency culture should look like, we need to look as some real situaltions.

Situation I – Small agency located in town of approximately 10,000 population:

In towns this size experienced insurance staff are difficult to come by. Also, it is often a challenge to find people interested in learning the insurance business and staying with the agency. Often, bright young people want to leave this size of town for bigger and “better” things. Here are the scenerios I often find in these agencies.

• The most experienced service staff member is close to wanting to retire, know more than everyone else in the office and have an attitude.
• Other experienced staff members know there are not people in the community to replace them. Some of them have a real attitude also.
• Young staff member who is eager to learn. May or may not have an attitude.
• Owned by one individual, or one majority owner and 1-3 minority owners.
• All owners are the agency’s producers.
• Owners don’t always see as much need for technology.
• For those owners that do invest and see importance of technoloty, staff is not always on board.

I have been told the following by some of these staff members:

• I am not learning anything new, I am going to retire in a couple of years and there is no need to change this late in the game.
• I worked for their father. I know these accounts better than they do. I can do whatever I want. They can’t afford to get rid of me.
• They can’t find an experienced insurance person to replace me, so I will do things my way and they will be happy.
• Why should we define new ways to do things when no one is going to enforce it?
• Why should the rest of us do things correctly and be held responsible when they won’t make “Jane Doe” comply?
• The experienced staff members won’t teach me what the owners have told them to teach me. They just dole out work they don’t want to do and tell me what to do with that.

Owners and producers have told me:

• We have no idea what is going on the renewal process.
• We can’t get information to the insurance carriers in time to get quotes to prospects.
• I need a system for training new staff members as the senior staff won’t train the young people and I can’t find experienced staff to replace someone or grow my agency.
• I bought this agency management system and no one knows how to use it. They say they need more training.
• The staff won’t even talk about scanning documents and doing away with the paper files.
• We have so many opportunities, but I can’t count on my staff to handle important and big accounts properly.

Now don’t get me wrong. I know a number of small agencies in small towns that are functioning really well and are high end users of technology and operate in a digital world with their data and documents. However, based on my experience and what I read and hear they are not in the majority. Next week we will look at some tools for changing the culture in the small agency in small towns.

Let me here your questions and your input if you have great solutions that have worked for you.

Topics Agencies Leadership