Reflection, Renewal & Checklists

Welcome to Risky Business, Commercial Insurance with Butler Byers. This is Paul Martin, your host and the business commentator on CKOM. And joining me, as always, Colin Rooke, the commercial risk reduction specialist with Butler Byers. Colin, as we put this program together, we’ve reached that time of the year when we conclude a calendar year, the beginning of another. And that is a time for pause, reflection, for renewal, for starting, for ending, all of those things. So I thought, well, kind of timely for us to take a look at what we’ve learned in the past year and what we’re expecting for the coming year.

And one of the things we talk about very frequently on this program, aside from the events of the day, is your checklists, the step-by-step guides that Butler Byers has prepared that any business can ask for. Whether they’re a client or not, you’ll let them have it. And I’m just wondering, when you come to the end of December, the beginning of January, what checklists go through your mind? What do you recommend to people and what do you say, “Hey, this is a really good time to take a look at ABC.” So what’s ABC in your mind right now?

It’s a great time of year for this type of conversation, and just looking back at the previous year, what you thought you wanted to accomplish, what you did accomplish, maybe what you want to work on for the next year. I think December, this time of year, it’s a good time to start thinking that way if you haven’t already. And depending on your organization, you may find yourself with some downtime to do that. And we do have a lot of different types of programs we can implement, checklists we can go through, whole manuals that we can work with our clients, work with them through it. And so it comes up this time of year, and depending on who we’re working with and what the need is, we’ll recommend different things. I have a couple today that I just wanted to highlight.

These would be, I guess, more mass appeal in nature, just to give an idea of these are the types of conversations we’re having. This is something that we can help you with. It’s something that should be top of mind. And it’s good timing to look at that. The first one is a checklist on how to develop an employee development program. The second that I want to talk about today is a checklist. And it’s similar to the employee development program, but it’s a skills gap analysis. So it’s a checklist that walks you through, what’s missing in my organization? What do I need to fill? So ways to identify that and then how to put that plan in place. No different than the employee development program I’ve referenced as well.

I’m just wondering, what is it that would prompt you as someone in the insurance business to even talk about that stuff? I mean, I guess one of the questions comes to this, why do insurers care about this, and why would you be bringing it forward? I get that employee development and skills analysis and these things are important for any business, but why is Colin focusing on that or bringing it up?

Yeah, really good question. I’m an insurance broker and risk manager, I’m not in operations, so why would I do this? Why should anyone listen to this? And then, what does this have to do with insurance? So if you think about our role as risk advisors, I mean, first and foremost, we want to improve overall performance. So that’s why we do the risk assessment. We want to figure out where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you’re going, and then ways we can help you along the way by way of proactive risk management and also discussing new and emerging risk.

So why would we do this? Well, one, if we’re talking about employee engagement, we’re talking about retention, we’re talking about productivity, we can then say something that you may want to consider is an employee development program. And not only can we talk about the risk, we can quantify that risk, talk about the potential cost of doing nothing. We can help you structure that program and implement it. So if we’ve identified together this is a true risk to the business we’re working with, and then we’re doing our part where we’re identifying that risk, we’re quantifying that risk and we’re prioritizing that risk, and as a result, the organization performance improves. Then what do we do with that? Well, the largest part of our role as broker really is storyteller.

It’s our job to sell our clients to the insurance market, because the underwriter has no way of differentiating your company from any other business in that same category. And so it’s our job to present our clients in the best light possible as top of stack or the best risk we can present, which ultimately opens more doors to more markets, coverages are more widely available, and we are able to take advantage of either discounts available through the current insurance markets or just take advantage of other insurers that want to competitively obtain your business because they have an actual reason to want it. They say to themselves, okay, I want to work with a business that’s working on itself. Colin Rooke the broker has explained they’ve identified a gap in employee development and they’re working on turnover, they’re working on engagement, they’re working on their culture.

Overall, this sounds like a great place to work, and great places to work as an example, are going to have less employment practices, liability lawsuits or claims. We’re going to have less issues with D&O coverage, excuse me, less errors that are going to take place. And right down to, and I use this all the time, engaged employees that care about the place they work are the ones that turn off the coffee pot late at night when they realize someone has left it on. The organizations that honestly couldn’t care if the business is still there in the morning don’t. And so it’s a really, really important part of our explanation of as to why the insurance market wants to work with you.

It’s been a while since we’ve had that conversation because we’ve had so many major events going on, from disasters to cyber activity and all those things. But maybe a year ago we were talking about how insurance companies, like anybody else, just want to work with best in class. I want the best customers I can get. So if you’re looking to buy insurance, how do I get to be the best customer of the insurance company? If I can achieve that, I’m probably going to get better coverage, better rates, better terms. And I guess that sort of answers the question of why would an insurance broker care about this topic.

Yeah, absolutely. Whatever industry you’re in, you’ll have the ideal customer. You’re a home builder and you say, “Well, if someone walks in and buys a spec home with absolutely no changes, that’s great for me.” Or, “If I’m going to do custom work, I want the customer that lays it all out once. We build it using their vision. They show up, they’re happy, they pay the bill.” And so when you think about that, your ideal customer, you have to think about our role. Our role is to present you or the business community as ideal of a customer as we can possibly get them.

And so the underwriting staff, they’re worried about risk, they’re worried about their exposure, they’re worried about claims. And our job is to have that conversation, to walk them through the work we’re doing, to explain or have the underwriter understand the way the business thinks. And so when we’ve done our job correctly, again, you stand out. You’re someone that they want to work with, you’re someone that they want to offer coverage to. And that’s how you allow yourself or allow us to place our clients with the best markets.

Welcome back to Risky Business, Commercial Insurance with Butler Byers. Paul Martin here, and joining me as always, Colin Rooke, the commercial risk reduction specialist with Butler Byers. And just before the break, Colin, we were talking about what kind of checklists, maybe, what would be contained in these checklists you were talking about? The one more specifically about looking at employee development. I mean, as an employer, how much do I have to budget for these kinds of things? I mean, how big an undertaking is this kind of an initiative?

Yeah, so the nice thing about these checklists that we have, it walks you through all that. I mentioned the skills gap analysis. So if you’re working on an employee development program, you’re going to want to take a step back and say, okay, ultimately what would I like to solve? Or what areas do I need to tighten up on? So part of this checklist is there’s an exercise going through that, what am I trying to achieve, and what areas in the company? So you could say, okay, technology. But is it technology overall? Is it technology with leadership, support staff, just management?

So it allows you to walk through that. And then there’s measurement methods built in that will allow you to say, okay, well, where are we now? And where do I need to get? And then what would the impact be, should we close that gap? So before you even work on the whole development program, it’s a great tool just to say, okay, what are the future needs of the company? What skill gaps exist? What do I need to put in the effort into today to get to where we want? And then thinking of the future, what do we value as a company? What do we want to promote? What skills do our employees need today, but then we want them to harvest for the future?

And so like I said, the skills gap checklist is great for that because it allows you to build out that program and then jump back into an overall development plan that allows you to map out, okay, how are we going to do this? What it’ll cost us? How long will it take? How are we going to divide it up, split it up amongst different departments? And it really is a step-by-step way of getting you to the finish line, asking very good questions that are designed around deep thought around the subject.

In your experience, have you seen it where this is done for an individual who you consider to be high potential? Is it for a department or is it for all the employees of an organization? I mean, what are your thoughts on that? What have you seen? What’s the experience that you’ve seen and how it works?

The nice thing about this is I would say all of the above. You could say, you know what? I just have one star or one person where I want to develop and implement a program just for that person. Maybe this person could be senior management. You’re just not sure how to organize your thoughts or how to develop that person. So this would walk you through that. You could do this for a department. The questions are arranged in a way where you could say, well, this would be applicable to a group of people. Or you could just say, you know what? At Butler Byers Insurance, we really don’t have an overall employee development policy.

And so we’re going to use this method to help develop just an overall policy that would be applicable to most people or all people and build that out. And then from there, you could separate people in different groups. But it walks you through everything that you would have to think about: timelines, deadlines, how you would offer opportunities to people within the organization, how to measure competency, how often, right down to how to build out a policy, like an actual policy itself, what would need to be in there, to how to measure it later on.

How to ask for feedback, how to improve it. And so it’s an all-encompassing tool that just gets you to an organization that’s really thinking about, okay, if I want to keep people happy, engaged and working for me, I got to invest in them, but I don’t really know how to do it. And it sounds like a mouthful, but we’ve done all the work for you. Really, at this point you just have to think through it and answer yes or no, give it some thought and really roll with it. And so we’ve made it easy to put in the work for today to improve the business for tomorrow.

I’m guessing that at this time, where some of the headlines around hiring relate to unfilled jobs, job vacancies, competition for staff, there simply aren’t enough workers to go around, and what you’re talking about, this tool that’s available, yes, we’re talking insurance, but it really is an HR tool. And it may help an employer figure out how to become better at hiring, better at retention, which I think is probably the critical element these days. And I’m guessing that if I can pull those off, it makes it easier for you to sell my story to an insurance company.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s designed to help internal performance. And as you know, Paul, I’m armed with stats. And so we talk about engagement, we talk about those that will leave an organization. Almost 90% of the time, management will assume it’s about money, and it’s actually less than 30% of the time where that’s actually the case. It’s usually about feeling that the career is stalled, I’m not getting noticed, I’m not being developed. And so this is an HR tool, this is an operations tool. But then we take all of that information and we use it. We use it to say, “This is a great company and we expect the insurance market to do more to obtain their business.”

They’re working on it. They’re not going to have the claims that you think as evidenced by the effort they put in versus the unknown, versus no effort, versus very little effort.” Or maybe you’re putting in a ton of effort, but your broker isn’t asking the right questions to tell your story effectively. They’re just sticking to the insurance application. We dive deeper, and we actually learn. So then we can tell the story as good as you might if you were marketing your own company.

I’m guessing, and we’ve only got about a minute left before we’re finished here, but I’m guessing that while we talk about programs designed to develop the talent sets of your employees, probably the same rules apply for the leadership of the organization too. Insurance companies like to see where leaders are actually trying to get better at what they do as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Again, even from a coverage perspective, you’re talking about if there’s directors and officers policy, so you’ve got a board or any board involvement at all, you want to learn they’re working on or they’re aware of what’s being worked on. Errors and omissions, again, a lot of the claims are avoidable and a lot of the claims have to do with culture and the way work flows and really what’s being said and how business is being conducted. So if we have a client that’s aware of that, that’s working on it, that says, okay, I understand the widespread impact of having an errors and omissions claim, then I’m going to avoid it and I’m going to work on this company because I want it to grow, I want it to improve, I want it to last, those are the better risks and it’s an easy sell for us.

Colin, as always, the time goes by so quickly, I’m always amazed that it’s all of a sudden the end of the show. Thank you again for these insights. And very timely, given that we’re in that transition of calendar years again and time to step back sometimes and reflect. So thank you for that. You’ve been listening to Colin Rooke, the commercial risk reduction specialist with Butler Byers. I’m Paul Martin, thanks for listening. This is Risky Business, Commercial Insurance with Butler Byers.

Colin, we’ve got to take a little break, so thanks for that. But keep in mind, when we come back, I want to talk about just a little bit more detail about this tool that you’re talking about and how it can be applied, not just for insurance purposes, but for general making your business better.