5 Perks to Help Recruit & Retain Agents in Your Insurance Agency

With economic uncertainty and an ever-changing world, agencies may find it difficult to not only gather new talent but to retain that new talent. Most agents want to know that their place of work will work with them and create a welcoming environment for them to succeed. This requires the agencies to adapt to the workers’ needs to create this environment. We have identified five aspects that you will need to recruit and retain agents in 2023.

1. First, and most importantly, agencies must maintain adaptability with their work hours and locations. This perk became relevant after 2020 when a good chunk of workers moved to remote work. Three years later, there is still a sizable number of employees who prefer to work remotely for a better work-life balance. Adaptable hours can be of service to employees who may have other obligations, want more time with family, or don’t want to work the typical 40-hour work week. Both accommodations serve as a way to increase worker productivity, happiness, and retention and can be a great selling point when recruiting new employees. Read our blog post here on how your employees can support their team while working remotely.
2. Engagement with the community and providing meaningful work is becoming a very important aspect of employment for younger generations. Insurance agents are ultimately involved in creating a better and safer way of living for their customers. This typically bleeds over into the community through donations and volunteer work. Giving time off for volunteer opportunities is a great benefit to offer to new and existing employees and a great selling point when recruiting more agents. Creating meaningful work experiences is also vital to younger generations like millennials and Generation Z. Generating profit is the number one purpose of a for-profit business, but many potential employees may feel that profit is not the only thing a company should be aiming towards. Additional motives such as engaging with the community, giving back to employees, and strengthening employees’ knowledge can help motivate your current employees and help recruit the younger generations. These perks can also lead to less burnout and longer retention of employees.
3. Cycling back to the first perk given in this article, employees have many other obligations than just work. This is why flexibility in hours and work locations is important. You will also need to accommodate life events like childbirth and death. Parental and bereavement leave is not mandated by the US for employers. This means that agencies who do offer this leave will be ahead of the curve when it comes to recruitment perks. This may be a top priority for some women and men who value family and have plans to start their own in the coming years after getting employed with an agency. Offering such a perk as parental leave can have women feeling like such an important life event can remain just that and won’t interfere with their professional careers.
4. Stability may be one of the most important perks employees look for in 2023. Insurance agencies tend to provide more stability than other industries. This means that employees are staying longer at the same company they started with. With a lot of other industries being so unstable, providing stability can be a huge recruitment perk and can even be the main selling piece to employees in unstable industries who switch to employment in the insurance industry.
5. Career growth and education go hand in hand with each of the perks mentioned above. Without time away from work, not much can be done in creating enough balance where employees feel comfortable and confident enough to learn new skills and seek new opportunities. Providing growth and educational opportunities for your employees is a great way to create meaning for employees. These opportunities can be activities such as engagement with the community and access to educational material (like Agent Pipeline’s Agent Elevate courses) and events. Creating opportunities for professional growth often takes the form of a clear path to a leadership role within the agency. This opportunity is great recruitment material because the path to professional growth and success becomes apparent to potential employees. It is also a great tool for retaining these employees as they work towards these clear-cut goals.

Overall, these perks set out to create a welcoming and comfortable environment in the workplace. They will allow employees to feel welcomed as they get recruited and allow them to see a future within the insurance industry. Younger generations will rely on these perks when looking for potential employers to be a good vetting system for the company. If they view a company’s policies and they don’t include some variation of the five perks stated above, they could just skip the opportunity altogether as it does not look like a promising long-term opportunity. Matching employees’ wants, needs, and personal beliefs can allow for easy recruitment and easy worker retention.