Employee Engagement Jumpstart
How can we engage employees more effectively and improve upon what we’re already doing? While there is no single or perfect answer that fits every situation, let me share an experience with you. I developed a 10-week program that elevated employee engagement within a competitive, service-sensitive environment. This program successfully engaged my Company’s employees during a time of unprecedented growth, new initiatives, and increased competition.
I worked for a large insurance company for more than 10 years. I started as a Business Manager in an independent agent’s office, then progressed to the district office, and finally to the regional office. My experience provided me with a unique view of our customers and their needs. I made it a point to look for ways to make each interaction faster, easier, more understandable, and efficient.
After being promoted to a Billing and Payments management role at the regional office, I attended a week-long Supervisor School at the Company’s corporate headquarters. It was a great learning experience. Upon my return to the office, I realized how a little time away can give you a fresh perspective. It it seemed that the workload, customer complaints, and employee stress levels had grown considerably during my short absence. I knew I had to do something, so I approached my Manager with a plan to use some information I learned in my training – The 10 Tenets of Customer Service. Although skeptical, she allowed me to move forward.
About the Company
At the time, my Company was an industry leader in automobile and home insurance. In addition to the significant market share it held in those areas, there were new opportunities to pursue. Some of these key initiatives significantly impacted our region in terms of new policies and billing accounts.
- The Company advertised aggressively in response to competitors’ attempts to gain market share in automobile insurance.
- Sales of Life Insurance policies were encouraged due to their profitability.
- Mutual Funds were introduced as a means of broadening our portfolio and furthering the company’s goal of becoming a full-service financial services company.
- The company opened a bank to provide its customers with additional financial options.
As these important new initiatives rolled out, there was an effort to keep employees informed. Employees were constantly being bombarded with facts and figures about them via email, posters around the office, and articles in the regional office’s monthly magazine. Unfortunately, few if any employees had time to read, let alone absorb much of the information. Our region was the fastest growing and second-largest in the nation, supporting over 550 Agents and more than 2.5 million individual policies. These new initiatives added an even larger burden to an already overloaded team.
About the Billing and Payments Department
Due to the higher volume of work associated with key initiatives mentioned above, the Billing and Payments Department (my department) quadrupled in headcount and more than doubled in management staff in less than 6 months. While growth was good, our accelerated growth began to cause challenges. For one, Billing and Payments roles were not easily or quickly learned. It took up to two years to fully train employees on all the systems and processes. In addition to working with our internal customers in the Company’s other departments (Auto, Fire, Life, Health, Accounting), our department was the most likely to speak directly with our policyholders. Each day our people fielded hundreds of calls from Agent and their staffs as well as policyholders. Our area was basically a call center environment even though it was not formally designated as one.
The combination of higher call volumes, the complexity of utilizing multiple systems, and the Company’s inability to provide comprehensive training led to a sharp rise in customer complaints, growing employee stress, and increasingly, employee turnover.
I prepared my 10-week plan with the expectation that it would help address the challenges we were facing.
So what happened? Stay tuned for my upcoming post: Better Engaged Employees – Part 2: Following Through
Let’s Engage!
I’m Agent in Engagement Simpson…Gregory F Simpson.
Employee engagement is a critical mission. I hope I can count on your help! Subscribe to the RSS Feed to receive the latest intelligence/insights and/or register to make entries in the comments log.
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P.S. First contact? Welcome to the Agent In Engagement community. Explore and join fellow employee engagement operatives in targeting a known thief – alias: Disengagement. Together we can bring this thief to justice and make the world a better place for all companies and their employees.
