A Moment with Mary

Mary Malin is the PaperWise Insurance Industry Analyst and has 25 years of industry experience

As many of you know, I have spent the last year transitioning from the world of insurance to the world of a document management and workflow consulting company. Since this change, I am reminded daily how many roles and processes of our business can be directly compared to those of an insurance agency.

You have Producers; we have Territory Managers. Either way, they are our sales staff. Our "CSR's" are the backbone of our Support Department. Central Processing would include our exceptional Engineers from the Professional Services Group, as well as the amazingly talented group of guys in Research & Development. Our Q&A Team would be your Loss Control Division, and of course, both businesses have Marketing groups that work hard to allow us to put our best face (or submissions) forward.

Along with similar roles, we share similar business processes. Your customers request a quote; our customers request a scope. You adjust your customer's Liability or Workers Compensation premium based on the results of an audit; we adjust your AssuranceWise charge as you increase or decrease your number of licenses. You enhance your relationship with your customers by providing additional lines of coverage such as Earthquake or Flood Insurance; we build onto our relationship by providing additional software and/or hardware solutions.

Procedures, or as we call it, "repeatable processes," are important, yet at times difficult to implement successfully within our organizations. According to dictionary.com, procedures are "a sequence of actions or instructions to be followed in solving a problem or accomplishing a task." A key corporate driver at PaperWise is "Form Repeatable Processes" which is defined in our corporate handbook as "a repeatable series of actions that PaperWise can evaluate and tune to systematically improve our Service, our People, and our Products." In comparison to the definition of "procedure," it is apparent that both industries would naturally increase efficiencies when operating with a guide that provides a "sequence of actions" or "repeatable processes" also known as a Procedures Manual.

We have knowledgeable staff, are professional organizations, and want to do what is efficient and good for our customers. Perhaps sharing our ideas and thoughts will be a helpful guide on what can be done to move forward with this very important task.

Four elements go into creating effective procedures as a T-E-A-M:

Time

When our day is focused on sales and service to our customers, who has time to focus on outlining a single process, let alone a full procedure manual? Maybe we start by making a list of processes that are needed and put them in an order of importance. Next, set a schedule with manageable due dates and tackle the monumental task one process at a time.

Employees

Both of our industries have amazing and talented staff, but does anyone in either of our offices know absolutely everything about every department and every process? Probably not, and nor could we fairly assign such a monumental project to one person and expect them to be able to continue to provide quality service to customers. Why then not rely on the talent that is closest to the procedure being documented? Maybe it is the employee that has been with your establishment 20 years or maybe it is the employee who is new and while working with the current process has forward thinking ideas of how to make improvements. By looking at the talent in your office, you are also able to assign specific topics to specific people. If you have those timelines set and responsibilities assigned, you are spreading the workload and most importantly, the probable beginning of staff "buy-in" since they are helping outline the procedures.

Acceptance

I think this is probably the toughest part of the whole Procedure Manual process. You set aside the time to get it written, you embrace the knowledge and talent of your staff to share in the success of the monumental task, you roll it out to everyone, and then you don't get immediate or complete acceptance. That's probably ok. We are upsetting the "that's not the way we've always done it" crowd. If the procedures are quality and the employees get the benefits of repeatable processes that allow them to be more efficient, acceptance will come in time.

Management

The management team of your organizations plays a key role in implementing and enforcing new procedures. If we write them down and ask everyone to follow each step, have we allowed for the "out of the box" thinker, the creative mind, or the non-standard solution? This is probably more of an observation from our industry and less practical in yours; however, if you look at the definition of procedure, you will notice we don't see the words only or never. Absolutely a procedure is written with instructions to be followed, but that doesn't mean that when it makes sense and is documented (document, document, document…), you can use common sense and/or good judgment. Did we deviate from the procedure because "that's the way I've always done it" or did we make a solid and documented decision that benefits our client and did not compromise the position of our company and our contracts?

So we looked at Time, Employees, Acceptance and Management. Getting together in an insurance agency or a document management and workflow solutions company requires, if nothing else, T-E-A-M-work. We all benefit from "a repeatable series of actions that we can evaluate and tune to systematically improve our Service, our People and our products." Doesn't that sound so much nicer than Procedure Manual?