F E AT U R E
How to determine if you are properly staffed By Al Diamond, Agency Consulting Group
Do I have enough, too few or too many people? Is my workload actually growing or are my employees just complaining more? Why do we always seem to have a backlog? I believe that some of my people are much more efficient than others. How can I prove it? It seems like every time the carrier changes procedures, it adds work to our workload. Is there a way of proving that? We are constantly asked how much a CSR or other employee should be able to handle in an insurance agency. Agents would love to be given a premium amount, a commission amount, or at least the number of clients or policies an efficient service representative SHOULD be able to handle. Most agents would use that information to determine if the constant harangue by their employees that they are overworked is true. Some agents would use the information as a ‘hammer’ to get their employees to work to expected competency when the manager feels that the employee is not working hard enough. The reality is that there can be NO POSSIBLE general statement of proper workload in terms of premiums or commissions. It doesn’t take an engineer to understand that a single client generating tens of thousands of dollars in premium and commission that is property-heavy and service-light takes much less time in service than a casualty client (that may generate much less premium and commission) with a service-heavy load, like a busy contractor
or a large fleet operation. The contractor may have several transactions and interactions a week while the property account has a few transactions a year. Multiply that by all of the clients and you begin to see the problem with our telling you that, in general, commercial lines CSR can handle 500 customers and a PL CSR can handle 1000. Personal Lines has an advantage of having a more stable number of transactions per customer in a normal book of business. But even there, transaction counts can easily depend on how much is E&S vs. standard, DB vs. AB, rural vs. urban, etc. But there actually IS a way of identifying and calculating whether you are properly staffed or whether your staff is overworked or underutilized. The real measure is TIME USE. The average workday is 7.5 hours and the average work year is 240 days (52, 5 day weeks less 10 days each for holidays and average vacation). That’s 1800 average work hours in a year. Taking average downtime of 15 minutes/hour, we can net to an average 1,350 productive hours in a common work year for one of our employees. But knowing how many man-hours of time you have available in a given day, week, month or year doesn’t tell you how your staff is managing. What WILL tell you the golden secrets in your agency is an analysis of the transactions that each and every person handles within your agency. When we were all paper-driven, it was almost impossible to identify how many times employees spoke to clients, carriers, each other and processed transactions. The best we could do was measure how many policies and clients each handled
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