Insurance underwriting problem solving. The goal is customer satisfaction. Business fundamentals such as measuring work, planning tasks, budgeting time, and decision-making techniques will improve the quality of employees’ performance.
INSURANCE SELLING and UNDERWRITING
TOOLS and TECHNIQUES
Leaders Should Facilitate Employees’ Success

Leaders’ Impact Upon Customer Satisfaction
Purpose of this paper
This paper was written to increase our understanding of a problem, propose a solution to the problem, and ask for feedback about our reasoning and proposed solution. The problem is found in many industries and organizations. Here is how we describe the problem: Too many customer-contact personnel are unable to successfully serve their customers because front-line workers are not being enabled by their supervisors, mid-level managers, and executives.

We use the terms “leader” and “leaders” to mean any person in an organization’s chain of command from frontline-supervisors up to chief executive officer. At times labels such as “supervisors”, “managers”, and “executives” are used when we believe it more appropriate to describe a specific type of leader.

All too often front-line employees are having to succeed in spite of poor leadership from their supervisors. Symptoms of poor leadership include little standardization of tasks, lack of coordination between functions and personnel, poor understanding caused by incomplete information, excessive workloads, and inconsistent decision making by employees and their leaders.

Fundamentals recommended
This paper suggests leaders should facilitate their teams’ success using basic principles. Business fundamentals such as measuring work, planning tasks, budgeting time, and decision-making techniques such as if/then tables and decision trees should be used whenever such efforts will improve the quality of employees’ performance. These basic fundamentals are important building blocks because:
An observation from the 1880’s
This problem has plagued generations of employees. The following excerpt is from page 225 of Frederick W. Taylor’s biography titled The One Best Way: Time and again (circa 1884) Taylor had seen “a workman shut down his machine and hunt up the foreman to inquire, perhaps, what work to put into his machine next, and then chase around the shop to find it or to have a special tool or template looked up or made.” Whose fault was that, the worker’s? Not at all. It was neither poor workmanship to blame, nor poor machinery, but poor management. Management’s duty was to keep tools in good condition, belts maintained, machines oiled, standards established, the right men assigned the right jobs, work flowing smoothly to each. When it failed, the shop failed, however modern its lathes or able its lathemen.

This statement indicates a critical duty of management is to enable workers to succeed. Such enabling leadership does not come automatically, easily, or naturally. Enabling leadership requires more work than guesswork, more self-discipline than employee discipline. The one best way to do work is hardly ever easily learned, planned, funded, or implemented. Too many decision makers rationalize that there is no one best way because it is so difficult to determine.

Learning from the past
This insight helps us understand what we’ve experienced in the past. We’ve had supervisors and executives who were like absentee landlords, unaware of our needs and responsive only when major complaints were made.

No supervised front-line service employee or factory-floor worker should ever have to manage his or her work environment and be productive too. Profits can be maximized when managing and producing are separate professional activities just as selling and servicing or manufacturing and repairing should be separated to enable efficiencies and creation of quality work consistently.

Therefore we offer a companion paper titled Learning New Assignments with this paper. Learning New Assignments has lists of questions with supporting logic to help followers ask their leaders for information before work is done incorrectly. Learning by trial and error is not a quality process. These lists are recommended for front-line workers to use to learn from their supervisors. These lists could be used by leaders to prepare for training their teams to perform new assignments.

Roles Leaders can play
Leaders should work as productively as their teams require so workers are enabled to avoid causing customer complaints. Unfortunately this quality paradigm frequently gets turned upside down and those in power (e.g., managers, supervisors, team leaders) require those without formal power (e.g., customer service reps, sales persons, clerks) to do their jobs and compensate for what leaders fail to do. We have made the following observations:
* Delegation to enabled employees is replaced by dumping on employees because they are not trained or equipped properly. Employees who are dumped on are expected to learn on the job without regard to their feelings of frustration and the disappointment of customers.

A simple solution
There is no silver bullet to use on poor leaders. This paper recommends use of basic principles expressed in mottoes such as: What gets measured gets managed. Things should add up, make sense, and work together.

Here’s our reasoning, in support of an equation or formula for use when planning and designing workload management efforts:
  1. Anything that happens during an employee’s workday should be managed constructively so that an employee’s work effort produces good results no matter what happens. When interruptions can’t be prevented, plans should allow for divergence from intended work. Workload scheduling should include time for disruptions if distractions are typical or predictable.
  2. Anything that happens during work time can be measured in terms of frequency and severity (using risk management terminology). Frequency can be measured by counting tic marks, inventorying items, etc. Severity can be measured by calculating amounts of time, dollar values, etc.
  3. In Keeping Score author Mark G. Brown explains efforts to create, track, and use measurements should be aligned* with the purpose of the group being organized.
  4. Management should follow measurement. Planning should prevent panic. Cognition should precede action. In other words, measurement of what work is needed should be followed by planning how work should be done best. Planning should be followed by implementation of better processes, tools, etc. Implementation of best processes, tools, and training should be supported by management efforts.
  5. No matter what work is done, things should add up logically. “Things just do not add up” when you are told four hours of selling plus six hours of servicing should be done in an eight-hour workday. However, such erroneous statements are not easily proven wrong if accurate measurements have not been made.
  6. Satisficing ("satisfying" plus "sufficing") by management should not supercede satisfying customers. Plans should result in customer satisfaction not compromises or work-a-rounds which frustrate or disappoint customers.

We hope to encourage leaders to “do the math” whenever making decisions about workload distribution.

* Measuring the number of published articles and presentations made by a R&D facility adds little value to the quality of the facility’s research and development of new technologies that lead to new products and allow for enhancements to products and processes.

Putting 2 and 2 together
Things (workload assignments) should add up logically. Individual employees’ workloads should add up just like: 4 + 6 = 10. Tasks should not require more time or effort that what is budgeted. Managers should not try to get their employees to do 4 + 6 = 8, as in overworked situations. Use of such poor logic violates the following workload management guidelines:

Helping Leaders Lead More Effectively

How things should measure up
Therefore, we are trying to create an equation that shows how things add up for individual workers. We hope to enable workers to inform and encourage their supervisors to either reward workers more accurately or increase staffing to reduce excessive workloads. Authorization of overtime should not be a repeated quick fix.
If we really want to serve insurance clients promptly, our workload equation should look something like this:

Beginning workload + incoming phone & papers - work completed = work remaining.
(work remaining: this should be very low, low enough to get it done in the first 2 or 3 days of next week)

Beginning workload, in this example, is paper mail, work diaries, and email.

Do you agree with the logic in this equation? We believe logic suggests the rate at which work is being done must meet or exceed the rate at which work comes in for customers to be serviced well. This is what is meant by “things have to add up” for work to be done successfully. Is there a smarter way of arranging/writing a workload equation?

Application of suggested equation
Here’s how the formula described above was applied to a front-line underwriter’s workload. Please notice progress appears to be made because workload waiting to be done (51 items) is less than workload that remained undone (72 items) at the end of the week. However, 51 items will take approximately two (51 / 28 = 1.8) days to be done at the rate items were worked during this week. Therefore, it would not take much to cause a major backlog of work at this person’s desk. This type of work requires more than superficial analysis.

Types of work

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Efficiency experts could argue that the backlog of work is appropriate because the employee will not have idle time. Effectiveness experts (quality-minded professionals) could argue the quality of the employee’s work is suffering or will be suffering frequently because:
  1. There’s no time for experimentation to improve the employee’s work.
  2. Quality decreases when employees are pressured to catch up repeatedly.
  3. Pressured employees and their customers (workers are too busy doing work to care about customers’ feelings) do not build relationships of trust, reciprocity, loyalty, and profitability.

Effectiveness is often sacrificed for the sake of efficiency. Satisficing sacrifices quality for quantity, customer satisfaction for what management thinks will suffice customers, and employee satisfaction for just getting the work done.

If the completion rate (28 items per day in the example above) for an employee or team falls below the rate at which work comes in:

If left to her own devices, the employee who averages doing less work than what is needed can take any of the following actions to relieve the bottleneck being created at her desk:


Being aware of this high number of sub-optimal alternatives available to employees encourages some leaders to participate more often than they would if they were ignorant of how many alternatives employees have to “manage” their desks.

Solutions that do not work
Workflow problems should not be invitations to do guesswork. The following management styles and responses have not produced quality results:


Real solutions
Workflow problems should encourage supervisors to step forward with creative applications of basic business principles. Market supply problems should encourage business leaders to step forward with profitable solutions to customer needs. Unfortunately history often repeats itself and we see more failure than success. Page 225 of The One Best Way also states: The point man for any managerial innovation was always the foreman, forever hunkering down on the battle-tortured front line between worker and boss. “There are more bad skillful workers than good ones,” wrote Chordal, referring to those lacking in judgment or common sense, “and the thing must be equalized by supervision.” But how? Left virtually on his own by higher management, he was hopelessly overworked, perennially distracted. He had to parcel out the work, discipline the men, fire them up, keep track of their hours, resolve conflicts, solve technical problems, see to the maintenance of machinery – and always keep production rolling. No one could possibly do it all.

Supervisors can’t lead effectively if they are given widow-maker assignments. Their operations may appear efficient (under budget) but their customers will receive much less than total quality.

Solving workload problems
Does the following diagram illustrate how managing a group must be preceded by knowing the group’s work and knowing the work to be done is a function of answering the questions on the left of the diagram? Or can supervisors really take a “We’ll see how things work out.” attitude?
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