Employee Retention: It’s Not Always About Money

At any gathering of insurance professionals in the country — at any time, anywhere — a common refrain of agents and company representatives alike is: There’s scarcity of good employees out there.

In a soft insurance market, with recessionary pressures shaking up the general economy, attracting and retaining great employees requires no small amount of creativity. It can’t all be about money and it doesn’t have to be, according to one independent insurance agency consultant.

“Most business owners initially think money is the key issue,” says Bill Schoeffler, of Glen Ellen, Calif.-based Oak & Associates. However, by itself, Schoeffler says, money won’t get the job done. “High performing employees are searching for something more than just a high salary,” he says. “The typical employee compensation plan should include a total package of rewards, recognition and environment.”

An Equalizing Environment

Sometimes it just takes a little office space.

When Greensboro, N.C.-based Senn Dunn built a new office building eight years ago the company decided that not only would each employee have an office, all offices would be equal in size.

“We ended up creating offices for everybody and they’re all the same size,” said Executive Vice President Tim Ward. “We felt like everybody would want a window. For the staff we gave them all the window offices, and the producers and owners took all of the interior offices in the building. What we said was: Everybody got a window. For the staff it’s the window of your office. And for the producers it’s the windshield of your car — so get out and call on somebody. We felt like that was fair.”

The experiment went over well, he said. “We still do it that way.”

Time Is On Your Side

Whether it’s a little or a lot, paid time off is hard to beat.

The Dallas-based independent agency Swingle Collins & Associates recently switched from offering vacation, personal and sick leave to a strictly paid time off policy, a change that has been well received by the staff, according to agency principal Frank Swingle. “It’s been a huge deal for morale,” Swingle said during a discussion of soft market strategies at a conference held by the Independent Insurance Agents of Texas (IIAT). “It’s huge because the people that don’t get sick now have more vacation days. The net effect was nothing but … it’s great, they love it.”

For Senn Dunn and the firm’s 140 employees, Fridays are Free. Ward explained the Free Friday program — in which under certain conditions employees can take off every other Friday afternoon — is not a guarantee but “a permission slip.”

He said all employees in the agency have partners. If an employee is caught up with work and t partner is going to be in the office on the Free Friday, that employee can take the afternoon off. “Everybody doesn’t get off every other Friday but they get off most of them,” Ward said. “That has been very popular with the staff.”

Fridays are also popular at Gillis, Ellis & Baker Inc. in New Orleans, according to Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Doug Mills. He explained that until recently the company’s 7.5 hour work day went from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. At the beginning of the summer the firm switched to a flexible schedule, in which employees now work one-half hour longer each day and have options as to when they start and finish their work days. The new schedule enables each employee to take every third Friday off in addition to regular vacation and other types of paid time off.

“We broke the office up into groups of threes and tried to spread it out so that everybody’s job function was covered. … With 40 people we don’t have a lot of redundancy in some functions so we had to play with that,” Miller said.

“I’ve jokingly said we could have doubled everybody’s salary and not have gotten as big a positive response as we have doing this,” he added. “People have loved it.”

Healthy and Fun

San Antonio-based SWBC walks the walk — literally — when it comes to the health and happiness of their employees.

As part of a comprehensive wellness program that includes a paid health club membership, the company has partnered with Virgin Life Care to offer a program called HealthMiles. Employees are outfitted with a pedometer to keep track of the steps they take each day. At an onsite health measurement kiosk — which Mystel Duke, SWBC’s senior vice president, Human Resources, calls the “big red machine” — employees download their steps, take their blood pressure, and monitor their weight and body mass index. The final component is an online fitness tracking system to help participants follow their progress.

“We have looked at wellness as a much more important part of SWBC for the last two years,” Duke said. But making sure employees are actually participating was a challenge.

With HealthMiles, as the miles add up, so do points toward rewards in the form of gift cards, Duke said. The program is voluntary but 74 percent of the company’s 1,100 employees signed up for it, a far greater number than was expected.

Now, Duke said, the program has been so successful, “we’re doing our first challenge,” which runs for a month. The 174 participating employees compete in teams and individually, and have the opportunity to earn rewards in both categories.

“We have employees that are doing over 30,000 steps a day,” Duke said.

Bolton & Co., a large employee-owned insurance brokerage and employee benefits consulting firm based in Pasadena, Calif., also takes the health of its employees seriously, while keeping the fun factor high.

“Annually we have a very elaborate health fair for our employees,” Bolton CEO Steve Brockmeyer said. “We have providers and health vendors talking about numerous solutions and programs, from weight loss and stop smoking programs to conducting cholesterol and bone density testing.

“To wind up the event we hire the In-N-Out Burger truck to feed the employees, where we usually go through 200-plus greasy burgers, chips, sodas, etc. … We like to start living healthier — but have you ever had an In-N-Out burger?”

Money’s Not Everything, But …

“It [money] still has a lot of clout,” consultant Schoeffler says. “Firms that establish a bonus plan based on the business profitability will have employees that strive to increase sales and cut expenses.”

Senn Dunn’s Ward said his company is in the midst of a year-long sales contest in which “if we stay on our sales target, each one of the employees is going to get a bonus. … A significant bonus,” Ward said. “They’re all pretty excited about that.” The prize is a big incentive for staff to find referrals for producers, he added, and to do whatever they need to do “to help hang on to that account.”

Bolton & Co. is 65 percent employee owned. At quarterly meetings the company shares financial results so that employees know, as owners of the company, that Bolton’s success benefits them financially. In addition, “we have quarterly bonuses for employees based on profitability and retention standards.”

Brad Berrong of Berrong Insurance Agency in Weatherford, Okla., says in addition to a bonus program, “we’re paying our staff probably 60 percent more than what they could be making [elsewhere]. … And, oh, by the way they by golly, have earned it.”