I heard from a friend last week in response to my last column, and the conversation was some version of the following:
“Fine, Bob. Great article. We tell them the noble story, they show up excited, and then what?”
It is a fair question, and it is asked in a tone I have come to recognize. It is the tone of someone who has actually hired a young person into a claims organization, watched the light go out of their eyes on approximately day ninety, and then read their resignation letter in month seven.
So let me complicate my own argument, which is a thing I try to do at least once a quarter to keep everyone honest. That’s what I do. No need to thank me.
You cannot recruit your way out of a culture problem. If you go out and tell the beautiful true story about restoring shattered lives, and a bright twenty-four-year-old believes you, and then she arrives and discovers that the job is a 200-file desk, a manager who measures her on closure ratios, and a phone that does not stop, you have not solved your recruiting problem. You have made it more expensive. You have taken a person who wanted to do good work and taught her, personally and permanently, that our industry lies in its job postings.
She will tell her friends. That is the part we never account for.
Before we get to what works, let us honor what we have built, because our industry has developed a rich and varied tradition of culture initiatives that accomplish nothing whatsoever.
There is the poster in the break room. It lists five values. One of them is Integrity. Nobody has read it since it was hung, including the person who approved the design, and it is currently partially obscured by a flyer for a blood drive that happened in March.
There is the pizza party, deployed in recognition of a quarter in which everyone worked considerably harder than they should have. The pizza arrives at 11:45. It is gone by 11:52 because everyone took a slice back to their desk to eat while working, which if you think about it for even a moment is a complete and devastating description of the actual culture, delivered in seven minutes, in the break room, under the poster, which remained unread.
There is the engagement survey, which asks whether you feel valued, and which everyone answers strategically because nobody in the history of American business has ever believed those things were anonymous.
And there is the phrase “we are like a family here,” which in my experience is spoken most often by organizations where it is least true, and which is almost always a prelude to being asked to do something on a weekend. Remember, Britain’s House of Windsor is also a family.
And of course, we cannot forget the mandatory mug.
None of this is culture. This is the decoration we hang on culture, and the reason it never works is that the people in your building are not reading the poster. They are reading their caseload count.
Here is the uncomfortable center of this whole thing, and I am going to say it plainly because dancing around it has not worked for anyone in thirty years.
Caseload is the culture. Everything else is commentary.
You cannot build a compassionate claims operation on a desk carrying 200 files. Not because your people lack compassion, but because compassion takes minutes and there are not enough of them in a day. The adjuster who wants to make the day-one phone call, the one where she says we’re sorry you’re hurt and here is my direct number, cannot make that call sixty times a week and also do the rest of the job. So she stops making it. Not because she stopped caring, but because the arithmetic beat her.
And here is what that costs you in the recruiting market we are actually in. She did not leave for money. She left because she came here to help people and the job would not let her, and there is no amount of pizza that fixes that.
Everything that follows is real, and none of it works if the number on the desk is wrong.
Change what you measure, because that is what you will get. If the scorecard is closure ratio and average cost, you will get closure ratio and average cost, and you will get them at the expense of the human being attached to the file. If you want a culture organized around recovery, then measure something that looks like recovery. Return to work outcomes. Time to first contact. Whether the injured worker could name their adjuster. These are all measurable, and the reason we do not measure them is not that we cannot. It is that we never got around to it.
Promote for leadership, not for technical skill. Our standard practice is to identify our single best adjuster and promote them into supervision, which removes our best adjuster from adjusting and installs a person with no management training in charge of eight careers. Sometimes this works beautifully. Frequently it produces a supervisor who is excellent at files and mystified by people, and then we spend three years wondering why that unit has turnover. People do not leave companies. They leave the person who conducts their one-on-ones.
That is not unique to our industry, by the way. Years ago, I worked in HR for a large software developer known for promoting good developers. Trust me, it did not mean they were good managers, and the turnover reflected that. And as a person responsible for recruiting at the time, I can tell you that trend extended outward, affecting the company’s reputation in the employment marketplace.
Give authority to the people doing the work. Nothing communicates “we do not trust you” faster than making a competent professional escalate a routine decision to someone two floors up who will spend ninety seconds on it and approve it. Every escalation threshold in your organization is a statement about how much judgment you believe your staff has. Your staff has read those statements.
Make it safe to have been wrong. The reserve that gets someone publicly flogged in a file review is the reserve that nobody flags early next time. Every organization that punishes surprises trains its people to hide them, and then discovers all of them at once, usually in the fourth quarter.
Pay for the teaching. I wrote a few weeks ago about Diane and what leaves the building with her. The corollary is this: if mentorship is a volunteer activity performed on top of a full desk, then mentorship will happen at the depth of “call me if you get stuck,” and your new hire will conclude, accurately, that nobody here has time for her.
I have saved the one that costs almost nothing, because it is the one I would do first.
Tell your people how the story ended.
Think about what we actually ask of a claims professional. They meet a person on the worst day of that person’s life. They manage the wreckage for eighteen months. And then the file closes, and it disappears into the system, and they never learn what happened. They handle three hundred tragedies a year and hear the ending to none of them.
That is an extraordinary way to structure a job. We recruit on purpose, we promise meaning, and then we build a workflow in which the meaning is systematically invisible to the person producing it. The roofer from my last article went back to work. Somebody made that happen. That somebody has no idea, because nobody told her.
So tell her. Put a slide at the start of the monthly meeting with two closed files and what became of the people in them. Forward the thank-you letters, all of them, and read them out loud. When a worker returns to full duty, say the name of the adjuster who got him there in a room with other people in it.
This costs you about eleven minutes a month. There is no line item for it. It requires no consultant, no platform, and no committee, and I promise you it will do more for retention than every mug your organization has ever purchased.
Culture is not what you say at the all-hands meeting. Culture is what happens at 4:45 on a Friday when a file blows up, and whether the person handling it has the time, the authority, and the backup to do the right thing.
Your recruits will figure out which one they walked into by about month four.
Build the building before you print the brochure.
