Welcome to Risky Business Commercial Insurance with Butler Byers.

This is Paul Martin, the business commentator here on CKLM. Again, we’re talking with Colin Rooke, the commercial risk reduction specialist with Butler Byers Commercial Insurance.

As we always do in this time slot, we look at all things insurance. More appropriately I think Colin you would correct me, and we’ve been doing this for a couple of years now.

You’d probably wag your finger at me if I didn’t say risk management and your step by step risk assessment program that is available to any business owner, any commercial operation that is interested in digging in just a bit deeper to figure out, do I have the proper coverage, have all the right questions been asked, and can I save any money doing this?

One of the topics that we’ve talked about and we’ve touched on a few times, I want to get into a little bit deeper this week if you don’t mind. The issue of employee engagement.

Now you keep bringing this up and I must say, I scratched my head, and I wonder what does employee engagement have to do with buying insurance on my business? You assure me every time we talk about this, it’s actually a real thing.

So let’s dig into that today. Employee engagement, why would an insurance company care whether or not my employees are happy coming to work?

I guess the really easy answer is, engaged employees that love what they do, that love their job. In fact, they don’t look at their job as a job, it’s a career.

The most simplistic way I could sort of portray the effects of having an engaged workforce is, engaged employees make sure the coffee pot is turned off at the end of the night.

Why do we talk about engagement? Why does that matter? Why is Butler buyers… I’m an insurance broker, I’m not an HR consultant. Why do I bring it up every single time in every single workshop? Doesn’t matter what class of business, I’m going to ask you questions about engagement, because it’s so important to the culture of the business.

It’s so important to the profitability of the business. If you look at the flip side, the negative, it’s a ginormous risk to the business.

First and foremost, I’m in risk management, and I’ve always said insurance is only one of the tools we use. It’s one way of dealing with risk. So, if we’re not having these conversations, then we’re not truly protecting our clients against quite frankly, one of the more the costliest risks that they’re going to face on a day to day basis.

Last time when we were talking, we mentioned two things that triggered my thought process. One was the issue of a more engaged workforce leads to a more profitable company.

All of a sudden you’ve just created a linkage for me that I understand now, why insurance companies are more concerned about it. Or that this is a topic that they want to dig into, because it affects profitability, and profitability is a critical factor in risk assessment.

If your company is very profitable, it is a way different company than one less marginal. I’m starting to understand this, but we talked about it in the context as well of of mergers and acquisitions, and we see that increasingly. It’s becoming increasingly common.

I can think of probably a handful of companies in Saskatchewan in the last year that have changed hands, and not the least of which was one that created an awful lot of attention.

National headlines, a marijuana company that got taken over for north of a billion dollars. So, mergers and acquisitions is big things, and the corporate culture plays into that significantly.

We talked a lot about culture last time, and it really plays well into the discussion on employee engagement. Simply, culture is the way things work around here, which we talked about. When you look at engagement, it’s more how the employees feel about the way things work around here.

You can’t have a discussion on culture, and then ignore engagement. You’re going to have two businesses that are merging together and say okay, I now understand the culture. That’s only one part of the puzzle.

If you’re unaware of the levels of engagement, if you haven’t dug deep, if you haven’t thought about that, if a survey hasn’t been done, you really don’t know if things are working. You don’t know if you’re getting the productivity you think you’re getting.

You don’t know if you’re getting again, a happy workforce that will do anything to see this company grow. That’s why it’s so important that engagement, is part of every risk assessment that we do.

I’ve talked about-

Maybe just before you move onto that, and keep that thought because we’ll come back to you. You mentioned the word employee engagement survey, that’s interesting.

I assume that if I did a survey, there’d be some database I could go and compare to, to see how my engagement levels stack up against other companies in my industry, or in my community?

Absolutely, we do a lot of benchmarking, for example. We also provide our clients with access to either the survey itself, or at least the framework that will allow them to complete the survey.

For example, if we have about 20 questions that we feel should be on any engagement survey, but of course the businesses are always allowed to say we’re going to move some things around, we’re going to add, we’re going to take away. But, the answers really provide telltale signs of where the company’s going.

It’s so important that on an annual basis that management is aware again, of how their employees feel about the way things work in the respective businesses. The other funny thing about employee engagement is, you often hear what are the effects of low engagement?

High turnover, feelings of fatigue, confusion, low performance, and customer service suffers. You can say, well that’s one of the main arguments for we need to dig deep and we need to have an employee engagement survey done. A really interesting study just came out from Yale that shows that engaged employees also struggle.

About one in five hyper engaged employees are also feeling overly stressed and burnt out at work. Amazingly enough, it’s the over engaged that are the most likely to leave your organization as a result, than the lease engaged.

That poses a couple of problems. One, you have your best working employees saying, I worked so hard, I’m so engaged, that I just need to leave. I’m stressed out. I don’t know why I’m confused, and I need a change. Which is a huge risk to any business.

But, then even more alarming, you would think the least engaged employees would be the most likely to leave. They look at it like a job, a means to an end, it’s just a paycheck to them, but they’re not leaving, which is worse.

The stars are leaving because they’re overly engaged or for a lack of better words, the duds are sticking around because they’re so disengaged, they actually can’t move on. Won’t move on. Yet the workplace is suffering as a result.

I’ve heard business people describe it as, my really good people, I’m worried that they will quit and leave. Another business person will say to them, you should be more worried about them quitting and staying.

Exactly. In fact, I’m going to use that.

I worry that they’re going to quit and stay, rather than quit and leave. There’s an argument behind this for why you would invest in training. For example, why would I train my employees, they’re just going to get better and leave. The worst case scenario is you don’t train them, and they stay.

These are the kinds of topics that you’re starting to ask business people about, and employers about, and they’re really filling out a form for insurance?

Exactly. We’ve really dug deep on the subject, and again, how does this ultimately affect my policy?

Well, we share this with the insurance markets, we share this with your insurance underwriter. We learn so much about where a company is going just based on their willingness to send out an engagement survey. At the end of the day, you have someone behind a desk that sees thousands of similar businesses every single year.

Our job is, the submissions that we send in, the clients that we work with, we want just a glimmer of light coming off that page, so that the underwriter is excited to work with you. The underwriter is excited to place your risk and the underwriter is confident that they’re working a plan. They’re trying to get better.

All right, we’re going to come back and talk about that in a moment. We’ve got to take a little break. You’re listening to Colin Rooke, the commercial risk reduction specialist with Butler Byers Commercial Insurance. This is Risky Business taking a break, back in a couple of minutes.

Welcome back to Risky Business commercial insurance with Butler Byers. Paul Martin here, and my guest today is Collin Rooke, the Commercial Risk Reduction Specialist with Butler Byers Commercial Insurance.

Collin, just before the break we were talking about how you gather up this information, and then how you use it. You inform a much more informed application when you’re putting together a submission to an insurance company on behalf of a commercial client. Are you just trying to make your clients look better than everybody else in class?

Exactly, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Working on, or understanding your level of engagement in your workplace is definitely going to affect the bottom line.

But, this is an insurance program. It’s a risk program. Again, if we can convince an underwriter that you’re in a different class of business, a different type of business, a business that works on their risk, a business that’s working a plan, you will see the savings. You will see the results.

Quite frankly, it makes sense. You’re investing into your business, you’re trying to make positive changes. It is our job to make sure the markets are aware of that. It’s our job to make sure that your pricing structure is based on the work you’re putting in.

You’ve had considerable success with some of your clients when you take them to market. Some of your clients have seen significant savings in their premiums.

The ones that save, when we’re talking deep discounts, and there’s always a lot of shocked faces in the room because this process, it’s not the norm.

The market isn’t used to hearing, well we’re gonna step back, we’re not going to quote this, we’re not going to fill out an application. We’re going to work on risk first. Until you’ve gone through it, until you’ve seen, it’s tough to realize the potential.

So, when we come back and we say, look, we’ve done a plan, we’ve worked a plan, we’ve presented the plan, we’ve shared the plan. Now, the market is confident that you should be in this category, this range. It’s really eye opening, but I always say you’re paying what you deserve to pay.

The problem has been lack of understanding, lack of awareness, lack of a process that will adequately portray your business to the insurance market. Again, you’re finally at the point where you should have always been.

When we discuss employee engagement again, and if anyone that’s listening now is thinking, geez that sounds like a lot of work. We make it easy for the client. So, I mentioned that we’ve developed the typical questions that could be asked. Nine Times out of 10, that’s all that’s required.

It’s as simple as sending it out, making the survey anonymous. Looking at the information, getting together as a management group, picking out key trends, and saying we have to do something about this.

It’s that simple. But, to even further simplify the process, let’s say our initial meeting is with one or two members of the management team, and there’s several other members, or maybe there’s several other layers of management.

We’ve even developed a presentation that you can give to the management group, to your staff, to the board, to an advisory board that explains what it is, what the problem is, how you’re going to address it. We’ve even taken that step to say, we’ve made the explanation as to the why, easy.

Because, we really believe in the subject and we say okay, if we’re going to dig deep, if we’re going to sell this, we need to make it easy for our clients to understand and follow through, because if it’s a lot of work, it’s not going to happen. The results are so impactful to our clients.

Now, when you talk this topic of employee engagement, the need to do a survey, and all that sort of stuff, what are the kinds of things that you’re trying to identify in the survey? What does an engaged employee look like, and what are the characteristics of an engaged employee, and maybe that helps business people understand this just a little bit more clearly.

Really good question, and there’s no magic formula and it’s funny when we go through this process and often we share the questions on the survey, they seem like common sense. They see my questions you should always be asking.

Companies are surprised that they don’t already have the answers, but we’re asking things of the employees like, do you know what is truly expected of you at work? You’d be amazed at how often the answer is no.

You say, well, this is crazy. The average employee tenure here would be 13 years, how could they say they don’t understand what’s expected of me at work. But that comes down to communication and clarity.

Questions like, do you trust your immediate supervisor? Do you receive consistent feedback on your work?

There’s a beautiful topic. This notion of a performance reviews. I remember I spent some time with a fellow who was an expert in this, and he would ask employers, how many of you do performance reviews? About half the hands would go up.

And, They say how many of you liked doing them? Half, of those would drop their hand. Because, it’s the thing that people try to avoid, but it’s very simplistic, very simple basic feedback. And you say that’s on a high priority for an employee.

Yeah, and if any of these questions that I’m asking have sparked interest, or if you’re thinking geez, I don’t know the answer to that.

Here’s another one that it’s my favorite. At work, do your opinions seem to count? If you don’t know those answers, and what I mean is I’m not suggesting that you think you know the answers, but if you haven’t seen those answers on paper, your employees putting pen to paper saying yes, I believe my opinions do count at work. If you haven’t done that, that’s why you need to sit down with us and have a risk assessment done.

We’ll discuss engagement, we’ll prep you, we’ll give you everything you need to know and to do, and we’ll find those answers, and we will help boost productivity retention.

So my point is, you can’t take two groups of seemingly happy people, put them in a bucket, and say, well you’re happy here, you’re happy there. We’re all going to be happy. Because they’re happy for different reasons, or could be happy for different reasons. So again, having that conversation and using a tool that’s going to identify the differences. What makes them happy? What makes each business successful? And then amalgamating those in a way that everyone’s on the same page, employees included. That’s going to truly define success in a merger.

Collin as always, the time just slides by. Thank you. This has been a most interesting and insightful conversation.

You’ve been listening to Collin Rooke, the Commercial Risk Reduction Specialist with Butler Byers Commercial Insurance.

I’m Paul Martin, you’ve been listening to Risky Business Commercial Insurance with Butler Byers.

Yeah.

We talked corporate culture, and you’ve just described it as the way things work around here. How do you scratch that surface to be able to figure out how things work around here? What kinds of questions are you looking at?

Yeah, so I’ll sort of I guess reference some of what’s in one of our culture assessment tools. But the biggest thing is how does the organization think? Now this is for both sides. Consider each are being asked this because they’re merging. So how does the organization think? And what do we value? And it’s one thing to say it, those values have to be proven by actions. Butler Buyers could say insurance made easy, but if we’re not making insurance easy, then we’re not really insurance made easy.

So again, it has to be something that’s tangible, that you can articulate how we do it. So that’s one of the major topics. We also talk about okay, why are we in business? What do we do? And again, let’s say it’s a sheet metal manufacturer. So the answer really isn’t when we say, what do we do? We’re not trying to say well sheet metal. It’s what do we do that keeps us in business. Why are we in business? What do we do different? What’s great about us? So we have that talk as part of the assessment. We get into leadership quite a bit.

How clear are expectations between the two cultures? How are people evaluated for performance? How do they motivate people on each side? And what’s the style of leadership exist in each company because again, if there’s differences there … If the one group is used to something entirely different, there’s going to be challenges. We talk about strategies, what useful strategies are being used today in the company? Skipping just, we talk about the clients. How are the clients treated? You could have two different businesses doing the exact same thing that have a completely different approach to customer retention. They could have a completely different approach to the acquisition of new customers.

Maybe one business is very strong in acquisition. The other one is very strong in retention. And without again, having this talk, you’re not going to know that. We talk about marketing. What are the two different marketing strategies in the business? Has it been communicated to both sides? What’s the social media position? Their digital marketing strategy. Things like that. We talk about operations. We talk about sales. We talk about normal behaviors. What is a normal behavior at each company? And we actually write those down.

We write down what is normal. So if beers in the boardroom is totally normal, every Friday at five, we write that down because again, if one company’s coming from beers in the boardroom, and they’re moving to a company that is very against beers in the boardroom, it just allows us to have that conversation and make sure things happen smoothly.

Is it your experience that … This is kind of a foreign topic for a lot of business owners. They just … They’re too busy being busy. they don’t have enough time to get into this stuff.

Yeah, as you mention, it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you’re talking about acquisition. You mentioned is this a foreign topic? It definitely is when it’s coming from your insurance broker. Right away, why are we having this talk? Especially if it’s a newer client. But then the light goes on. They see, they get it. This is a risk. I’m trained as a risk manager. Yes, one of the tools is without doubt the commercial insurance policy. But again, one of the tools. So when you explain it right, that look, together I’ve identified this risk. We have a plan.

In this plan, we need to address this culture issue. So I guess it’s kind of two surprises. One, I didn’t really think about that before I jumped in and bought this business. And I’m thankful that someone is having this conversation with us. And not just pointing it out, there’s something I can use, something that we can work on together to really solve this. But then yeah, I’d say especially again on the … And that was my insurance broker that brought that forward.

Do you find that most deals are driven for financial reason, never for cultural reasons?

Yes, yeah.

Yeah. And so hence, so many times the opportunity to stub your toe?

Yet you ask again, business owners, how do you define your success? And they’ll say, it’s our people. It’s our culture. They don’t say, strong, strong financials.

Yeah. And yet they can’t define their culture. They’ll say, it’s the best thing I have going for me, but I can’t describe it.

Yeah, tell me about it. What do you mean?

Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that a fascinating topic? Well, as always the time just blasts by Colin. Yeah, we’ve gone through another show. It’s hard to believe, but the end of the show is upon us. So I want to thank you as always. And this time for bringing to us the non-traditional conversation because usually a show about insurance is going to be about the nuts and bolts of insurance. Today we talked culture. What a different approach, and yet they’re intertwined very, very closely.

Intertwined, yeah.

You’ve been listening to Colin Rooke, the commercial risk reduction specialist at Butler Buyers commercial insurance. And as always, we encourage you to give Colin a call or one of his team members and if you have some questions as a business owner or you want to explore this a bit further, he’d be more than pleased to give you a free consultation. So Colin thank you again for joining us.

Thank you Paul.

You’ve been listening to Risky Business commercial insurance with Butler Buyers. This is Paul Martin. Talk to you next time.

Welcome to Risky Business Commercial Insurance with Butler Byers.

This is Paul Martin, the business commentator here on CKLM. Again, we’re talking with Colin Rooke, the commercial risk reduction specialist with Butler Byers Commercial Insurance.

As we always do in this time slot, we look at all things insurance. More appropriately I think Colin you would correct me, and we’ve been doing this for a couple of years now.

You’d probably wag your finger at me if I didn’t say risk management and your step by step risk assessment program that is available to any business owner, any commercial operation that is interested in digging in just a bit deeper to figure out, do I have the proper coverage, have all the right questions been asked, and can I save any money doing this?

One of the topics that we’ve talked about and we’ve touched on a few times, I want to get into a little bit deeper this week if you don’t mind. The issue of employee engagement.

Now you keep bringing this up and I must say, I scratched my head, and I wonder what does employee engagement have to do with buying insurance on my business? You assure me every time we talk about this, it’s actually a real thing.

So let’s dig into that today. Employee engagement, why would an insurance company care whether or not my employees are happy coming to work?

I guess the really easy answer is, engaged employees that love what they do, that love their job. In fact, they don’t look at their job as a job, it’s a career.

The most simplistic way I could sort of portray the effects of having an engaged workforce is, engaged employees make sure the coffee pot is turned off at the end of the night.

Why do we talk about engagement? Why does that matter? Why is Butler buyers… I’m an insurance broker, I’m not an HR consultant. Why do I bring it up every single time in every single workshop? Doesn’t matter what class of business, I’m going to ask you questions about engagement, because it’s so important to the culture of the business.

It’s so important to the profitability of the business. If you look at the flip side, the negative, it’s a ginormous risk to the business.

First and foremost, I’m in risk management, and I’ve always said insurance is only one of the tools we use. It’s one way of dealing with risk. So, if we’re not having these conversations, then we’re not truly protecting our clients against quite frankly, one of the more the costliest risks that they’re going to face on a day to day basis.

Last time when we were talking, we mentioned two things that triggered my thought process. One was the issue of a more engaged workforce leads to a more profitable company.

All of a sudden you’ve just created a linkage for me that I understand now, why insurance companies are more concerned about it. Or that this is a topic that they want to dig into, because it affects profitability, and profitability is a critical factor in risk assessment.

If your company is very profitable, it is a way different company than one less marginal. I’m starting to understand this, but we talked about it in the context as well of of mergers and acquisitions, and we see that increasingly. It’s becoming increasingly common.

I can think of probably a handful of companies in Saskatchewan in the last year that have changed hands, and not the least of which was one that created an awful lot of attention.

National headlines, a marijuana company that got taken over for north of a billion dollars. So, mergers and acquisitions is big things, and the corporate culture plays into that significantly.

We talked a lot about culture last time, and it really plays well into the discussion on employee engagement. Simply, culture is the way things work around here, which we talked about. When you look at engagement, it’s more how the employees feel about the way things work around here.

You can’t have a discussion on culture, and then ignore engagement. You’re going to have two businesses that are merging together and say okay, I now understand the culture. That’s only one part of the puzzle.

If you’re unaware of the levels of engagement, if you haven’t dug deep, if you haven’t thought about that, if a survey hasn’t been done, you really don’t know if things are working. You don’t know if you’re getting the productivity you think you’re getting.

You don’t know if you’re getting again, a happy workforce that will do anything to see this company grow. That’s why it’s so important that engagement, is part of every risk assessment that we do.

I’ve talked about-

Maybe just before you move onto that, and keep that thought because we’ll come back to you. You mentioned the word employee engagement survey, that’s interesting.

I assume that if I did a survey, there’d be some database I could go and compare to, to see how my engagement levels stack up against other companies in my industry, or in my community?

Absolutely, we do a lot of benchmarking, for example. We also provide our clients with access to either the survey itself, or at least the framework that will allow them to complete the survey.

For example, if we have about 20 questions that we feel should be on any engagement survey, but of course the businesses are always allowed to say we’re going to move some things around, we’re going to add, we’re going to take away. But, the answers really provide telltale signs of where the company’s going.

It’s so important that on an annual basis that management is aware again, of how their employees feel about the way things work in the respective businesses. The other funny thing about employee engagement is, you often hear what are the effects of low engagement?

High turnover, feelings of fatigue, confusion, low performance, and customer service suffers. You can say, well that’s one of the main arguments for we need to dig deep and we need to have an employee engagement survey done. A really interesting study just came out from Yale that shows that engaged employees also struggle.

About one in five hyper engaged employees are also feeling overly stressed and burnt out at work. Amazingly enough, it’s the over engaged that are the most likely to leave your organization as a result, than the lease engaged.

That poses a couple of problems. One, you have your best working employees saying, I worked so hard, I’m so engaged, that I just need to leave. I’m stressed out. I don’t know why I’m confused, and I need a change. Which is a huge risk to any business.

But, then even more alarming, you would think the least engaged employees would be the most likely to leave. They look at it like a job, a means to an end, it’s just a paycheck to them, but they’re not leaving, which is worse.

The stars are leaving because they’re overly engaged or for a lack of better words, the duds are sticking around because they’re so disengaged, they actually can’t move on. Won’t move on. Yet the workplace is suffering as a result.

I’ve heard business people describe it as, my really good people, I’m worried that they will quit and leave. Another business person will say to them, you should be more worried about them quitting and staying.

Exactly. In fact, I’m going to use that.

I worry that they’re going to quit and stay, rather than quit and leave. There’s an argument behind this for why you would invest in training. For example, why would I train my employees, they’re just going to get better and leave. The worst case scenario is you don’t train them, and they stay.

These are the kinds of topics that you’re starting to ask business people about, and employers about, and they’re really filling out a form for insurance?

Exactly. We’ve really dug deep on the subject, and again, how does this ultimately affect my policy?

Well, we share this with the insurance markets, we share this with your insurance underwriter. We learn so much about where a company is going just based on their willingness to send out an engagement survey. At the end of the day, you have someone behind a desk that sees thousands of similar businesses every single year.

Our job is, the submissions that we send in, the clients that we work with, we want just a glimmer of light coming off that page, so that the underwriter is excited to work with you. The underwriter is excited to place your risk and the underwriter is confident that they’re working a plan. They’re trying to get better.

Exactly, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Working on, or understanding your level of engagement in your workplace is definitely going to affect the bottom line.

But, this is an insurance program. It’s a risk program. Again, if we can convince an underwriter that you’re in a different class of business, a different type of business, a business that works on their risk, a business that’s working a plan, you will see the savings. You will see the results.

Quite frankly, it makes sense. You’re investing into your business, you’re trying to make positive changes. It is our job to make sure the markets are aware of that. It’s our job to make sure that your pricing structure is based on the work you’re putting in.

You’ve had considerable success with some of your clients when you take them to market. Some of your clients have seen significant savings in their premiums.

The ones that save, when we’re talking deep discounts, and there’s always a lot of shocked faces in the room because this process, it’s not the norm.

The market isn’t used to hearing, well we’re gonna step back, we’re not going to quote this, we’re not going to fill out an application. We’re going to work on risk first. Until you’ve gone through it, until you’ve seen, it’s tough to realize the potential.

So, when we come back and we say, look, we’ve done a plan, we’ve worked a plan, we’ve presented the plan, we’ve shared the plan. Now, the market is confident that you should be in this category, this range. It’s really eye opening, but I always say you’re paying what you deserve to pay.

The problem has been lack of understanding, lack of awareness, lack of a process that will adequately portray your business to the insurance market. Again, you’re finally at the point where you should have always been.

When we discuss employee engagement again, and if anyone that’s listening now is thinking, geez that sounds like a lot of work. We make it easy for the client. So, I mentioned that we’ve developed the typical questions that could be asked. Nine Times out of 10, that’s all that’s required.

It’s as simple as sending it out, making the survey anonymous. Looking at the information, getting together as a management group, picking out key trends, and saying we have to do something about this.

It’s that simple. But, to even further simplify the process, let’s say our initial meeting is with one or two members of the management team, and there’s several other members, or maybe there’s several other layers of management.

We’ve even developed a presentation that you can give to the management group, to your staff, to the board, to an advisory board that explains what it is, what the problem is, how you’re going to address it. We’ve even taken that step to say, we’ve made the explanation as to the why, easy.

Because, we really believe in the subject and we say okay, if we’re going to dig deep, if we’re going to sell this, we need to make it easy for our clients to understand and follow through, because if it’s a lot of work, it’s not going to happen. The results are so impactful to our clients.

Now, when you talk this topic of employee engagement, the need to do a survey, and all that sort of stuff, what are the kinds of things that you’re trying to identify in the survey? What does an engaged employee look like, and what are the characteristics of an engaged employee, and maybe that helps business people understand this just a little bit more clearly.

Really good question, and there’s no magic formula and it’s funny when we go through this process and often we share the questions on the survey, they seem like common sense. They see my questions you should always be asking.

Companies are surprised that they don’t already have the answers, but we’re asking things of the employees like, do you know what is truly expected of you at work? You’d be amazed at how often the answer is no.

You say, well, this is crazy. The average employee tenure here would be 13 years, how could they say they don’t understand what’s expected of me at work. But that comes down to communication and clarity.

Questions like, do you trust your immediate supervisor? Do you receive consistent feedback on your work?

There’s a beautiful topic. This notion of a performance reviews. I remember I spent some time with a fellow who was an expert in this, and he would ask employers, how many of you do performance reviews? About half the hands would go up.

And, They say how many of you liked doing them? Half, of those would drop their hand. Because, it’s the thing that people try to avoid, but it’s very simplistic, very simple basic feedback. And you say that’s on a high priority for an employee.

Yeah, and if any of these questions that I’m asking have sparked interest, or if you’re thinking geez, I don’t know the answer to that.

Here’s another one that it’s my favorite. At work, do your opinions seem to count? If you don’t know those answers, and what I mean is I’m not suggesting that you think you know the answers, but if you haven’t seen those answers on paper, your employees putting pen to paper saying yes, I believe my opinions do count at work. If you haven’t done that, that’s why you need to sit down with us and have a risk assessment done.

We’ll discuss engagement, we’ll prep you, we’ll give you everything you need to know and to do, and we’ll find those answers, and we will help boost productivity retention.

Collin as always, the time just slides by. Thank you. This has been a most interesting and insightful conversation.

You’ve been listening to Collin Rooke, the Commercial Risk Reduction Specialist with Butler Byers Commercial Insurance.

I’m Paul Martin, you’ve been listening to Risky Business Commercial Insurance with Butler Byers.

Yeah.

We talked corporate culture, and you’ve just described it as the way things work around here. How do you scratch that surface to be able to figure out how things work around here? What kinds of questions are you looking at?

Yeah, so I’ll sort of I guess reference some of what’s in one of our culture assessment tools. But the biggest thing is how does the organization think? Now this is for both sides. Consider each are being asked this because they’re merging. So how does the organization think? And what do we value? And it’s one thing to say it, those values have to be proven by actions. Butler Buyers could say insurance made easy, but if we’re not making insurance easy, then we’re not really insurance made easy.

So again, it has to be something that’s tangible, that you can articulate how we do it. So that’s one of the major topics. We also talk about okay, why are we in business? What do we do? And again, let’s say it’s a sheet metal manufacturer. So the answer really isn’t when we say, what do we do? We’re not trying to say well sheet metal. It’s what do we do that keeps us in business. Why are we in business? What do we do different? What’s great about us? So we have that talk as part of the assessment. We get into leadership quite a bit.

How clear are expectations between the two cultures? How are people evaluated for performance? How do they motivate people on each side? And what’s the style of leadership exist in each company because again, if there’s differences there … If the one group is used to something entirely different, there’s going to be challenges. We talk about strategies, what useful strategies are being used today in the company? Skipping just, we talk about the clients. How are the clients treated? You could have two different businesses doing the exact same thing that have a completely different approach to customer retention. They could have a completely different approach to the acquisition of new customers.

Is it your experience that … This is kind of a foreign topic for a lot of business owners. They just … They’re too busy being busy. they don’t have enough time to get into this stuff.