Focused more on commercial department: Like most of the brokerages, commercial department are often prioritized in comparison to personal lines. The ever changing personal lines world with narrow underwriting guidelines is not addressed due to lack of resources makes day to day work extremely difficult. Lack of organization and communication: There’s no streamlined workflow when it comes to implementing standard procedures. There’s no internal auditing to ensure that proper processes are followed. Resources are often provided to sub departments, day to day duties overlap when it comes to job description. Workflows are only trained to the new hires that seasoned employees are at lost on new processes. Senior leadership mostly came from commercial backgrounds: Key decision makers often don’t understand the day to day operations of the department and decisions are made with no knowledge when it comes to the how to and the resources required for implementation. We often hear the word “I don’t know personal lines” from senior leaders. Lack of Advancement: Because leadership consists of commercially trained brokers, it feels like opportunity can only be attained in transferring to commercial department and talent in personal lines department are not retained due to this. Compensation is not the greatest: Salary is not the greatest as well as compensation. The standard inflationary increases are not to be expected. A very stressful work environment: Because of the lack of resources, employees are often extremely stressed. With ever changing personal underwriting rules and insurance markets are become more and more complexed. The resource allocation is on the levels prior to the market being hard. The change of insurance consumer behaviour also does reflect the employees need to perform their duties.
