Do you know where to find your agency procedures manual? Here's how to add this important resource into your agency workflow so all employees are on the same page.
Do you know where to find your agency procedures manual?
Agency procedures manuals and employee handbooks are two separate, yet compatible aspects of an agency’s operational foundation. Employee manuals have a staff organizational focus—what the agency expects from employees, and what the staff can expect from the agency. By contrast, an agency procedures manual strays away from the HR realm to address the business practices of the agency, including operational standards and methodology for differentiating business practices.
“Agencies spend a lot of time writing procedures that are old fashioned because that’s what they understand,” explains Big “I” Virtual University faculty member Virginia Bates, president of VMB Associates, Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in education, agency management and automation issues. “They write yesterday’s procedures, rather than the future’s procedures.”
So just what these manuals entail? And how can agencies best implement them in their workflow? With more than 20 years of consulting experience in the industry, Bates has a few ideas.
IA: What topics should an agency manual cover?
Bates: It should be detailed and general. It shouldn’t be specific to your agency management system because when your system gets upgraded, you have to change your whole manual. It should say how the agency wants to do business. The best way I know to do that is to have hyperlinks to your agency’s website link from your manual to the vendor’s training manual. That way, the back document stays up to date without having to change their operating rules every time their vendor gives them new functionality or changes the current functionality. Every time you change things, you give people the opportunity to act confused. If you want consistency from your staff, it’s important that as a management team you’re also consistent.
What steps should an agent take to write and implement a handbook or manual?
- Agree on the service standards.
- Look at staff structure to be moderate and not anachronistic.
- Assign someone accountability for making everyone comply with the workflows in place.
- Use a recognized manual that stays up to date with the needs of the industry.
- Run intelligent management reports to identity exceptions and non-compliance with standards.
If an agency does those five things, the benefit is not only E&O strength. There’s a lot more time in the day at the service desk to round accounts and more time to work with producers on new accounts. So E&O and growth go hand in hand in an agency.
How often should agencies update their manuals and handbooks?
They should be updating it when new functionalities are given to them from the great world of technology. They should not update it just because an insurance company has an unusual way of operating. They should try to figure out within their own agency practice to work productively with the carrier, but not change their business practice every time a carrier changes their mind, because the customer sees that as confusion. They should stick with it and make it work for them but always be mindful of new abilities.
How can agency owners make this information accessible for all employees?
When they introduce it, the management team should cover the manual every week until the whole manual is finished. This means running management reports between meetings to make sure that the messages conveyed in those meetings got accepted and are in place while working with individuals who did not get the whole story. Any time an employee is hired, the first thing they should have to do, even if they’re experienced, is read the manual and make notes in the margins, questioning “Why is this in here?” and “Why do we do it this way?” So they have not only an understanding of how we do things by why we do them that way—because “why” sticks with you a lot longer than just a mindless rule. I would also advise using the manual in every performance review and making sure compliance with the manual and the way we want to do business is part of everybody’s annual performance review.
What changes do you see happening within the next few years?
What I see is the insurance industry on the agency side getting far more business-like. We’re starting to see the value of having organized organizations instead of just trusting everybody to use their instincts and using free-form solutions. The payoff is they have fewer E&O claims, but also have far more time to risk manage their accounts, improve their current customer accounts and reinforce producer efforts to go out and get new clients for the agency. At the end of the day, we’re sales organizations, and we need to focus on that by making the processing side of the business easier and more straightforward.
Morgan Smith is IA assistant editor.
