As a fully remote insurance agency, our core values are the foundation of our success. They guide our decisions, shape our culture, and ensure we provide the best experience for our team members and clients. By sharing our core values and the transformative impact they’ve had on our organization, we hope to inspire other agencies to define and embrace their own values. Here’s our core values (our 4 C’s), what they mean to us and how we use them to guide our agency to success.
Our Core Values
1. Compete
When our team members sign on, they know it’s time to compete by striving to improve daily and maintaining a proactive attitude to achieve success for the business and its clients. We emphasize a performance-driven culture where meeting KPIs is crucial. While we enjoy a relaxed atmosphere, our team understands the importance of giving their best effort. This value drives us to excellence, making it clear from the start that those needing motivation may not find this the right fit.
2. Compassion
Compassion drives our interactions with both clients and team members. We demonstrate compassion by actively listening, showing genuine interest, offering help and support, and being patient and appreciative. For clients, this is taking the time to guide them in making informed decisions to protect themselves, ensuring they understand all their options. For our team members, it’s prioritizing their growth and development, cultivating an environment of encouragement and support. By caring deeply for both our clients’ best interests and our team’s well-being, we foster a supportive (positive) and empathetic environment.
3. Clarity
We prioritize clarity in all our communications, ensuring both clients and team members understand expectations. Using the Traction EOS system, we run efficient meetings, track tasks, and hold everyone accountable. Clear KPIs and set expectations enable our team to perform effectively and efficiently.
4. Consistency
Consistency is crucial for success. With established processes and procedures, every client receives the same experience. We consistently advise and educate clients, knowing insurance provides essential protection, building trust and reliability in our agency. These practices also enable our team to come in each day and consistently achieve success, maintaining our high standards and ensuring client satisfaction.
Implementing Core Values
1. Choosing Your Values: Take the time to thoughtfully consider and select core values that resonate deeply with the owner(s) and the staff. These values should be intentionally chosen to reflect what you truly believe in, ensuring they are meaningful and authentic.
2. Introducing Values: We allocated an entire meeting to thoroughly discuss our core values, ensuring everyone understood their significance and what we expected from them. Through clear communication and consistent reinforcement, we successfully integrated these core values into our daily operations.
3. Overcoming Challenges: In a remote environment, clarity and repetition are essential. We emphasized that these values were fundamental to our operations, not merely lip service. This approach helped us dispel initial doubts and ensured that everyone embraced our values with seriousness and commitment.
4. Impact on Performance: Our core values provide a critical framework for addressing performance and attitude issues. By reminding team members of the principles they committed to, we can effectively realign their actions with our organizational goals.
Advice for Other Agencies
- Getting Started: Reflect on the type of business you want to run. What’s important to you? What do you want clients to think of when they think of your business? These considerations should guide the creation of your core values. If you already have core values, ensure they are meaningful to you and make sure they’re implemented.
- Reinforce Regularly: Highlight core values in weekly meetings, team members discussions and tie new processes or programs back to them. Consistent reinforcement helps integrate values into your organizational culture.
- Celebrate Successes: Share positive client reviews and link them back to your core values. This practice not only reinforces the values but also motivates the team by showcasing real-life examples of their impact.
Moving Forward
Since our merger, we’ve continuously refined and emphasized our core values, bringing clarity, enhancing performance, and strengthening our culture. Moving forward, we will continue to integrate these values as we move our business forward and strive for success.
Implementing core values has been pivotal for us, and we encourage other agencies to define and live by their own. In the coming weeks, we’ll share specific insights on how these values shape our operations and success. Stay tuned for detailed discussions on each value and its practical application.
If you’re needing help coming up with and implementing core values in your agency, download this free guide below.