Author: VU Faculty
A small agency has two support staff, one a 23 year veteran and the other a friend of that CSR's who was hired 4 years ago. The agency owner believes they have too much personal converstation and would like them to spend that time doing account development. How should this issue be addressed and should it be done individually or together?
"I own a small agency with two support staff that work very well together. One has been employed here for 23 years. She recommend the other CSR about four years ago when my CSR of 27 years wanted to retire. I expressed my concerns about hiring a friend, but they both thought it would work. For the most part it does, however it’s my opinion that they participate in too much personal conversations about their kids in school, PTA, and other non-insurance discussions. I would like them to do more proactive marketing with our current clients. Any suggestions on how to open a dialog with them, and should it be done separately or together?"
Your experience is not unique nor is it limited to small businesses. Creating a friendly, supportive and enjoyable atmosphere in the agency is important...to the extent that it does not distract significantly from the work at hand. How productive are these staff members? Have you compared their production to similar positions in similar agencies? We ran the human resources issues by some of the VU faculty and got the responses below.
Yes – talk to them and tell that what is your problem and ask them how they think it could be solved. If they are unwilling to change, you have to fire one or both of them. I am a terrible manager and had to fire everyone but me so that I could run my business the way I want so my advice is probably useless.
You are best qualified to determine if it should be an individual or joint question. Your office “culture” is likely pretty closely knit with so few staff so it would probably be better to bring everyone (three) together to have a constructive conversation. Their social talking would be best left off as not part of the conversation. The more important part of the conversation is where the agency needs to be pointed to be successful as a business enterprise and the maximize income e from current customers and get more customer. Run a report of monoline accounts and assign them the responsibility to “round out” those accounts by calling and asking to quote the “other” line(s).
You can establish a reward for certain levels of achievement as an incentive. If the staff would like to see salary increases and have steady employment into the future, the agency needs more customers and that is where their cooperation comes in.
The kind of a problem you have occurs over time and they have received the impression that it is OK to spend the amount of time they spend socializing so you are now in a backing-up mode, which is more difficult. It might be easy to take a disarming approach of indicating you have been a little weak in conveying the expectation of balance between agency work attention and socializing. Socializing is good as long as it doesn’t take priority over the work needed to move the agency forward. You will ultimately need to be willing to define the expectation very clearly. Written job descriptions are helpful here and if you do not have them, starting now provides a non confrontational way to chart the course for a new beginning.
You will need to tailor your approach based upon how long you have allowed this to continue because a sudden pull-back from a culture that has been allowed to exist for several years can make it appear you woke up on the wrong side of the bed today and decided to attack. With the “new” person being their four years and a 23 year person, it is impossible to tell how long this has occurred…but it could have been going on for four years.
My agency began thirty years ago with one person and we are now eight people. While some cultural closeness and familiarity is always good, you need for everyone to understand that you are foremost running a business, not a family unit and not a nursery school. We have maintained a caring culture through the continuum but always maintained only the best people get on our bus…and when we find out we let the wrong person on the bus, we admitted it was OUR fault and got them off the bus with a termination.
Performance standards allow people to fire themselves and being too nice a person yourself is not in the best interest for the health of your agency and that is your responsibility. Some people don’t want to do more than the minimum and hang on in a place where they can get away with the minimum performance. If you have that situation, time to stop the bus and push somebody off. Problem is with only two people on the bus, you need to make sure one doesn’t drag the other off at the same time!
This long-winded reply indicates that even after 30 years of experience, there is no cookie-cutter answer to your question which is not all that unusual. It’s because you and your agency have a unique individual culture just like so many other different independent agents. The solution has to fit with your own character and personality and yield the change in direction you want to achieve. Consultants who allege that there IS a cookie-cutter answer fail to recognize you are a person and not a machine. The strategies must be acceptable to your profile and you may need to be motivated enough to get out of your own comfort zone to really fix the problem. I hope this helps.
I am not an HR person, however, I have worked with small business for my entire career and heres how I would handle your situation. I would write out a plan of what proactive marketing means, e.g., contact 20 accounts a week and perform an account review (preferably not around the expiration), keep a log of what changes/gaps in coverage are found, what new opportunities are found, and how they were handled. After you write this down, call them both in together and lay the plan on them. Explain your goals and exactly how they fit in and what you want done.
1. Definitely together as a group meeting, preferably over a breakfast or sodas after work in a "neutral" place. Keep it low key and more a group solution than a "chastisement." Be understanding about how easy it is to lapse into personal talk and ask them to understand your need to have work done and to help weather this tough economy.
2. I am betting you don't have written job descriptions, so mention that you will meet again in a week to go over those. (Available if you need them in an E&O carrier-approved manual that is available. Please contact me at vmbinc@aol.com for more details on getting that.)
3. Also tell them that you are interested in setting up a growth bonus pool so that increased revenue will be shared with them as a bonus.
EXPLAIN it to them. This is a job not a picnic. Shape up or the "door swings both ways."
Anything is a shot in the dark because the problems could be tied to the culture of the agency, educational backgrounds, compensation programs, career goals, etc.
GENERALLY, it is good to have performance goals that are measurable and that lead directly to organizational goals. Performance goals can be activity goals or accomplishment goals. Activity can be measured as the amount of “output” of task-oriented work, such as the number of letters written, or telephone calls made. Accomplishment goals are measured in clients acquired, dollars of revenue generated, or dollars of costs reduced, for example. In my experience, it is best to have a set of activity goals that support performance goals, and it is important to measure on a regular basis the progress towards both kinds of goals.
It is hard to know how much personal conversation is too much conversation. I understand for an agency owner that it is disconcerting to see and hear activity that doesn’t appear to do much towards furthering agency goals. Job design, however, and management of employees, is multi-dimensional. There is no input to the equation that does not affect some other part of the system, and that input can help in some areas and hurt in other areas. There is no simple solution. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything that can be done; it just means that the entire dynamic of the office environment needs to be assessed, and corrective changes need to consider the full range of variables that affect employee performance.
Now, as to “opening the dialog” with them, the approach I’d take would be to have the three of you sit around a table, maybe with coffee or soft drinks, and you can open up the discussion by stating what you would like the agency to achieve in the next year. Indicate that the gains in the agency’s revenues would benefit all three of you. Ask them for their ideas, in terms of what could be done, and how it could be done. This is a time to be very supportive of their ideas, and not critical of their thoughts.
You may see problems with their ideas, but it is important to let them work through the thought process. Rather than saying, “That won’t work because…..”, you might say, “That’s an interesting idea. It could work. I wonder, though, how would you deal with……” Even that question might be too pointed. It might be better to wait a few days to ask the “what if this happened” questions, so it doesn’t appear that you had immediate concerns with the idea. This isn’t slowing the process – it is preserving the lines of communication. Some people withdraw completely when their ideas are shot down, and some withdraw when they run into a problem they can’t solve. Either way, you lose if your people withdraw, because even the smartest manager benefits from input from the people who do the work, and who experience the problems on a daily basis.
With just 8,000 more pages, I’d have a complete answer for you. Good luck!
There are several potential problems but I’ll position this as a time management/goal setting problem. You need agency production goals and they need to be communicated to your staff and their performance evaluations based on their component of these goals. Have you considered changing your compensation plan to encourage time being spent on account development and cross selling? Implementing an incentive program that encourages cooperation, rather than competition, among your staff would put you in the right direction. Your staff would find that they could still “socialize” but in a productive way. It would also tend to redirect their social skills towards your customers and not each other.
Check out this survey. It's somewhat dated but should give you some indication of the time management issues:
2005 Salary.com survey of 10,000+ office workers:
Workers admitted to wasting 2.09 hours per day
Insurance workers were the worst at 2.5 hours per day
Worst states were Missouri (3.2 hrs) and Kentucky (2.8 hrs)
Workers in their 20s & 30s wasted over three times as much time as those in their 50s & 60s
33% of those wasting time said it was because they didn’t have enough to do
23% said they wasted time because they were underpaid
15% blamed wasted time on distracting co-workers
44% said their #1 time waster was personal internet use
Some more time facts:
An employee who “wastes” 1 ½ hours a day costs an employer 47 days in a year (i.e., over 2 work months).
On the expense side, if that lost time could be recovered, it would take only 5 employees to do the work of 6 today.
On the revenue side, for most businesses, a 20% increase in productivity will TRIPLE pre-tax profits.
If employees are operating at only 80% of capacity, for each $75,000 in sales income, the organization is spending about $10,000 too much or losing at least $20,000 in revenue.
According to national studies, employees can increase their productivity by 15% - 100% through effective implementation of personal management skills such as goal setting, planning, prioritizing, scheduling, and eliminating “time bandits.”
I think one of the biggest mistakes with CE laws is that they almost all forbid credit for time management seminars. From the standpoint of agency performance and E&O loss prevention, few things are more effective than a good time management and goal setting course. From the standpoint of customer service, being more productive enables improved customer support. Contact your state association or your local board about perhaps scheduling such a workshop then have someone man the phones while the entire staff attend as a unit.