Room to grow: isn’t that what you want in your insurance jobs? Your employees want that too. If your employees feel like they’re undervalued, they may look elsewhere for a job. If they feel like you value their contributions and they have room to expand their horizons at your insurance business, you and your employees will both benefit.
Why Growth Is Important to Your Employees
No one wants to work at a dead-end job. That job is a place where ideas wither and employees do the same. Luckily, any job can be invigorating and offer opportunities for growth. The key is finding an environment that embraces employee growth in its culture and offers employees a chance to extend their skills and try out new ideas. When employees feel supported in their development at work, they’ll be happier and more innovative on the job.
Why Growth Is Important to Your Insurance Business
When your employees grow, they add new energy and ideas to your company and help solve problems that are bogging your company down. They use their in-depth knowledge of your company to move it forward, creating new opportunities for not only staff growth but business growth as well. When your employees are happy, innovative, and energized, they create a pleasant and dynamic work environment.
Creating Growth Opportunities for Employees
Your employees want to know that you’re interested in both their development and the development of your business. How can you develop a growth environment at your insurance workplace?
- Work to understand each of your employees. Why are they working at your insurance agency? What motivates them and gets them excited? By checking in regularly and creating a plan for each employee’s growth, you’ll not only create a better connection with your employees, you’ll use and develop all of their talents.
- Create opportunities for employees to flex new skills, and give them permission to fail. Allow your employees to try out their new skills during classes or on minor projects so that any failures don’t adversely impact your company.
- If your company has ample opportunities for promotion, highlight these and the pathway to achieving them in your company culture, so that people can decide if they’d like to reach for these promotions.
- Provide time to support innovation. Give your employees a little time above and beyond the day-to-day demands of their job, and encourage them to use it to innovate.
- Talk with employees about the areas where you see that they could grow. According to Andi Gray, business growth consultant, “If you see that they have untapped talent, tell them.” Sometimes people don’t realize that they have skills in a certain area until others let them know.
- Have discussions about growth. If your employees aren’t taking on new challenges, check to see what’s going on at work or at home and see how you can support them in trying new things.
The Power of the Incentive
Will your employees go above and beyond, even if you don’t ask? Should you depend on giving financial incentives or promotions to encourage your families to grow?
The way you handle promotions varies depending on the size of your company and the mobility of your employees. If there are just a few top jobs and many people would like to have them, you can’t rely on the incentive of a promotion to keep your employees working hard. According to Kellogg Insight, “since workers are not as likely to get promoted, the firm has to dangle a more appealing carrot—in this case, a much larger salary—to keep them working hard and hoping to move up.” In this case, having a higher base salary can keep employees happy, working hard, and growing right where they are. Incentives can be a powerful motivator for growth, but they’re not the only reason employees choose to grow.
At American Agents Alliance, we want to help you support your business growth. Whether you’re new to developing insurance jobs or you’ve been in this business for a long time, we can help your business grow with our many membership benefits for independent insurance agencies. Contact us today to learn more.
