The Future of Insurance Agency Work
There is no shortage of articles opining on the future of work after COVID-19, all seeming to believe that virtual work in one form or another is here to stay. I agree. But I also believe the issue is not whether we will continue to work virtually, return to our offices or move back and forth between the two work styles. I think we will do both simultaneously, and that includes agencies.
Agencies with highly professional, easily managed staff — coupled with the highly digitally adapted prospective employees that all agencies with a future must recruit — are ideally suited for the opportunities offered by blended work styles.
However, despite the general concurrence about the arrival of digital work, there has not been much thinking around how to maximize effectiveness in a mixed virtual and physical business climate. I’d like to offer some suggestions for that.
Proximity Becomes Irrelevant
Six years ago, I attended a cocktail reception of the Screen Actors Guild in Los Angeles. I wandered freely throughout the ballroom eavesdropping on the conversations of the famous, but I really was not there physically. I was in a hotel a half a mile down the street wearing a crude form of virtual reality goggles and observing and listening through the use of 360-degree cameras and microphones.
The next day I attended a conference with 300 entrepreneurs from all over the world. A dozen people were unable to make it to the west coast because of a massive blizzard which shut down east coast airports. But they came anyway using Beam™ telepresence robots. Very quickly, those of us attending in person became used to talking with the remote attendees at breaks, sitting with them at tables, and seeing them roll up to microphones to ask speakers questions. They even participated in the cocktail receptions.
These experiences led my company to buy our own telepresence robots which allowed remote employees to participate as fully in physical meetings as if they were in our office. Employees are able to move from office to office and meet with other employees just as if they were physically there. These robot devices also allow us to bring remote clients into our office for meetings and our salespeople to take the knowledge, expertise, and relationships of our office staff into the offices of prospects and clients for face-to-face meetings.
As we realized the irrelevance of physical proximity, we were free to hire a CPA firm 1,500 miles away that specialized in businesses like ours. We were emboldened to hire employees in five states where we did not have physical locations. And we began to seek and win clients throughout the country. Although this all happened years before COVID-19, I think it offers important clues about how many businesses will operate in the future. It showed that the two-dimensional virtual work the pandemic made commonplace in 2020 is just the beginning.
Virtual Reality Today
In early 2019 wearing a virtual reality headset, about the size of large sunglasses, I sat across a conference room table from someone and discussed the future of augmented virtual reality. Having followed this technology for several years, I was still amazed at how real, and lifelike, my conversation partner was. I also noticed that despite being in a noisy tradeshow environment, my brain almost immediately filtered out all of the distractions around me as it literally entered a different dimension.
Within the next 24 to 36 months, as 5G technology becomes more widespread, and the form factor of wireless VR headsets becomes available and inexpensive, the conversations that we are all having regularly now on Zoom are very likely to evolve and move into virtual reality. This virtual reality isn’t the clunky avatar laden world that exists today. Instead, it is incredibly lifelike and realistic.
Recently, I attended meetings and classes of a large national real estate brokerage, which has built an entire business campus with offices, training facilities and extensive meeting space all constructed in cyberspace. This company’s agents deal with clerical staff, accounting personnel and other routine business matters as well as attend continuing education classes in virtual reality. Currently, these agents use avatars, but within the next 24 to 36 months, these avatars will go away and be replaced by actual 360-degree virtual replicas of human beings.
These technologies seem a bit exotic to most people. But they are real and usable today. They also point to a future where work will blend seamlessly between virtual and physical space. Some of the technology I have described is relatively expensive when compared to the purchase of laptop computers for example. But they are not only rapidly developing in capability but also decreasing in cost.
For many businesses they will become commonplace over the next few years and, I believe, will be quickly and eagerly adopted by businesspeople who now have, because of COVID-19, become emotionally and intellectually untethered to their physical offices and their limited geographic relationships.
Insurance agencies are rapidly developing strategies for allowing their employees to continue to work from home on a part-time basis. Some are recognizing that talent can be hired, wherever it is found. A few are experimenting with expanding their geographical reach using Zoom and similar tools. And a cutting edge few are also experimenting with telepresence robots, virtual reality, and remote hiring.
This cutting edge is where most of us will be in five years. And like all new technological adaptation and adoption, typewriters followed by computers for example, those early adopters will have an enormous advantage in the marketplace and shift the very definition and idea of what it means to be a “community” insurance agency.