The days leading up to the June 30 end of financial year (EOFY) in Australia is never a fun time. Imagine how much trickier it got when Simplex Insurance Solutions boss Kay Jackson (pictured) had to send everyone home in late May due to the circuit breaker lockdown in Victoria; she had shingles a week later; and last month’s storms in the Macedon Ranges saw the firm pick up more than 100 new claims in one day.
Last year, Jackson’s staff did not have to work remotely during the Victorian lockdowns. Simplex’s large premises in Ballarat enabled the business to comply with the one person per four square metres restriction. This time around, things were different.
“This year they changed the rule,” noted the director, whose camp also has a smaller office in Kyneton. “Because last year was such a long lockdown, they did have certain industries that could still be operating. And because we were regional and the issues then were in metropolitan Melbourne, we were OK.
“So, we got through that. Whereas these snap lockdowns now, they’re very short but it’s pretty much everybody unless you’re an essential worker. So, now we do fall in. Because they’re doing the quicker, sharp, short circuit breakers, it’s pretty much they want everybody.”
Jackson conceded that while they were able to function, things were less than optimal.
She told Insurance Business: “It is difficult, because a lot of processes and procedures are still quite manual-based. We have been slowly moving to more electronic means of doing things, but [the lockdown] has just highlighted to us that there’s probably a greater need than what we first felt.
“It’s a project that we’ve been working on, but it just highlights to us that we can work remotely when it’s just a couple of people out of the office. When it’s everybody out of the office and we’re all trying to get in through like secure VPN (virtual private network) channels, things can be quite slow. We were able to do it; it just slowed us down and we weren’t as efficient as we normally are if we’re on site.”
Then Jackson got shingles. In fact, she still has it but it’s now at the tail end, she said.
“It was the last day of lockdown that it started,” noted the broker. “It was really the worst timing that you could have had. I had one day off but then came back in because I had everything that I needed to bring back into the office and hand over and re-allocate.
“And I had no idea. I just thought that I must have injured my shoulder or done something, and then one Sunday I thought there has to be something going on. I probably would have been about a week into it when I went up to the hospital and they ran a heap of tests to see if I was having a heart attack or all sorts of other things, and it all came back fine and then the rash came out.”
Jackson added: “It is a very painful thing to have but it’s not contagious. You’re not on your A-game and it slows you down, but I kept going. I do tend to push through things a lot, so I did. I’ve never had it before and didn’t realise how long it was going to hang around for and how painful it was, and I think in hindsight I probably should have taken some time off but I just didn’t.”
As for the storms, which hit on June 10, the Simplex director said they were “intense”. The event mostly impacted the company’s Kyneton unit.
“We had two staff members from that office where they actually couldn’t get out of their driveways to get into work,” noted Jackson. “Luckily, we have the ability to transfer the phone calls from that office through to [the main] office with a click of a button. We can divert calls through to here, so that was enacted. We took their calls for them.
“Usually on average we’d have about maybe 120 claims that are active at any one time, and we had over 100 new claims in one day. It almost doubled our claims load in one night. And a lot of places were without power, so we had clients where they’d be in their car charging up their phone so that they could even talk to us. A lot of the roads were cut off with trees, and assessors couldn’t get in until that got cleared.”
Then there was the highly busy period known as EOFY, which turned out to be essentially seamless for Simplex despite last-minute calls from clients.
Jackson told Insurance Business: “We had a 12% increase in our business from the previous year. We’ve had a really, really good year. And everything went surprisingly well from a systems point of view and a back-office point of view. It’s probably the most efficient end of year that we’ve run. There were no problems that we needed to fix up that we found along the way.”
She believes the effects of working from home contributed to the above.
“When we come back from remote working, we’re doing more, I suppose, auditing of what happened when we’re outside of the office to make sure that everything’s come back in,” said Jackson. “We probably have done more compliance checks this year than we have done in previous years. We’ve been on top of compliance and double-checking things, just making sure that they have not been lost along the way or haven’t got unactioned.”
For Jackson – who thinks that the more adverse things that you can come across and beat and learn from, the better and stronger you become – there is a major takeaway from those crazy five weeks.
The director stated: “I think we’ve learned as a business to be very calm and resilient about change, and change that’s thrown on you at the drop of a hat. There’s no point getting upset over it or getting overwhelmed or stressed – you just take a deep breath and go, ‘OK, we can do this; how do we do this; what is the best way to do this?’
“And communication with the team has been a very big part of it as well, making sure that everyone fully understands any changes that are happening. I think that’s been our biggest learning, is just everything is possible and it’s just working out the best and most effective way to do it.”
When the pressure is on, Jackson is also reminded of the story of Captain Richard de Crespigny, who in 2010 managed to fly an Airbus A380 to safety despite an engine failure and all signs pointing to the Qantas flight’s demise.
“I took a lot out from that,” declared Jackson. “If ever there is a position you find yourself in where you’re thinking that you’re very stressed or whatever, don’t worry about what you can’t do but what you can do. I think that helps if you’re able to shift your mindset from what’s happening around you and what you’ve got no control of, to ‘What do I have control of and what can I do?’ That helps a lot.”
