This article was produced in partnership with Navacord
With an intensifying war on talent and 2021’s industry-wide “flight to quality,” building great talent and a strong culture will make up brokerages’ largest challenge in the New Year. With that in mind, Navacord has recommitted itself to investing in retaining, educating and enabling employees’ success — because a vibrant culture serves as a cornerstone of Navacord’s overall mission.
“We’re on a journey of building the great Canadian brokerage,” Kristin Coulombe, senior vice president, human resources at Navacord says on recent podcast Rethinking talent recruitment, retention, and culture.
“Navacord celebrates the achievement, passion and purpose of individuals, and particularly in a decentralized model it’s important to create and maintain a culture that brings people together.”
Navacord has experienced exponential growth over the past few years, but the organization has steered through this time of change — and kept its culture intact — by listening to its people through informal, open discussions as well as more formal regular employee engagement surveys. Most importantly, Navacord takes responses to heart and makes improvements based on feedback. It’s that communication that creates the foundation of the business, and sets the stage for the success of Navacord’s decentralized model because while it doesn’t “paint everyone across the country with the same brush, when I meet with partners across the country the same current of high performance team work, collaboration and accountability comes through,” says Patty McNeil vice president, commercial insurance at Jones DesLauriers, a Navacord broker partner.
“We allow each company to decide how that works for their individual employee groups and that’s what keeps us together,” she notes.
Ensuring effective collaboration amongst colleagues from different broker partners is key to a successful decentralized model, and separate doesn’t mean apart — there’s a constant thread of alignment and engagement connecting all brokerages under the Navacord umbrella. Leaders have been working on providing national infrastructure for standardized fundamentals such as programs, tools and resources, and there’s a national sales huddle every month as well as standards of excellence with respect to different sectors that’s disseminated across the organization as a whole.
One of the cool things about the decentralized model, says Chris Miller, chief operating officer at Lloyd Sadd, is that when you have 40+ business partners, you get 40+ different approaches to any challenge you encounter. There’s always someone you can reach out to, and “we lean on each other to find better and more efficient way of doing things, better ways of engaging people, different digital initiatives. It’s an interesting conglomeration of brain power, so to speak,” he says.
Employees are the most important part of the business because they’re looking after the client and Navacord works hard to attract high performing people, which in turn attracts others who are like-minded. Brokers can leverage producers and national relationships that address an array of sectors and grow and differentiate client portfolios through exclusive products. As owners serving owners, the model of having a national scope as well as a local touch has proven very attractive to talent as it relates to Navacord’s culture.
“It’s important to make sure people understand what we’re doing as an organization, how we’re improving, how we’re progressing,” says Chris Huebner, president and CEO of Lloyd Sadd, a Navacord broker partner. “I think people want to be part of a dynamic team and a growing business, and they recognize that presents opportunities not only for themselves but for new people coming into the industry.”
Culture is key to creating an environment people want to belong to, creating loyalty and longevity, and without it “people start to focus on workload and pay scales,” says Miller. The COVID-19 pandemic taught everyone the importance of being agile as well as evolving with employee needs. At the beginning of the pandemic, Lloyd Sadd held a social hour on Friday afternoons. For the first few months, there were over 100 attendees but then it slowly dwindled to almost nobody. They had to change it up, Miller says, and find other ways to make people feel included.
“We’ve done cool things like random reach outs where executives hand write cards and give a gift to people, and I do ‘small batch meetings’ where I take out account assistants or account managers who typically don’t be invited to other events and we go for beer and wings. It’s that inclusive factor that makes culture so important and you need to maintain it.”
Diversity and inclusion make up a large part of culture, and admittedly one of the challenges the industry faces is that the sector isn’t well known and that leads to tapping into the same networks to source talent. This was another area in which Navacord wanted to do things differently, and as an organization is thinking broader on how to attract people to insurance as a career. For example, Navacord is currently working with a community college that typically has a large influx of newer Canadians to build a program that introduces more — and more diverse — people to the industry. The goal is to see the next generation coming into the business reflecting the diversity of Canada’s population, and if that mission succeeds “the fabric of the industry is going to be absolutely phenomenal,” says Huebner.
Coulombe says Navacord wants to be a leader in diversity, equity, belonging and inclusion for its teams, its business but also for the industry at large. Navacord has a diversity counsel comprised of leaders in the business from different regions across Canada that focuses on delivering annual events and strategic priorities that drive that effort. The bottom line is that to meet the industry’s challenges in the foreseeable future, brokerage culture needs to go from good to great and it’s a team effort to get it there.
“Our culture is a reflection of everyone working together to build,” Coulombe says. “When you’re all aligned with that and bring in the right people that share that same vision and passion for building, it creates an incredible culture of inclusion, fun and passion — and it’s a culture we’re really proud of.”
To hear the discussion in full, tune in to the podcast here.
Navacord is a leading insurance and risk management brokerage firm dedicated to providing expert solutions to businesses across Canada. The preferred partner for insurance brokerages nationwide, Navacord supports them with long-term, strategic growth through our enhanced risk services, sector expertise, strategic capital, and access to carriers, while maintaining their unique identity. Together, we are building the great Canadian brokerage.
