Top Performing Staff are Tricky...
December 7, 2022 Jason Sabo, TRAWe all have ‘em, shining stars employees, top performers, the employee who consistently goes above and beyond and is constantly hitting their goal. In today's hiring market, sometimes it’s scary to have these superstar employees! You want to keep them happy, satisfied, and challenged, so they don’t look for opportunities outside of your agency.
While this can seem daunting, there are easy steps that you can take as an agency owner to make sure that all your employees are happy. Not only will this help your agency's culture, but it also helps drive your employees to want to work harder and meet their goals.
Identifying Your Shining Star
If you don’t already have a top-performing employee identified, don’t sweat! Setting goals that are measurable for your staff allows you to visually see their performance in the data and will keep them motivated to work hard. Some examples of goals you could set for your employees are:
A CSR’s goals should revolve around:
cross-selling
account rounding
client retention
A Producer’s goals should revolve around:
Number of accounts written
Revenue
Call-to-appointment ratio
Appointment to proposal ratio
Proposal to buying ratio
Average revenue for accounts
3–6-month pipeline
Prospecting/ networking activities
Some of my clients also center their goals around agency work standards like not dropping calls, answering emails and voicemails in a timely manner, and doing things that make them good teammates to your other employees. When setting these goals, keep in mind that your expectations for your top-performing employees should be different than those for someone who just started or has less experience. They should also be relative to their previous year’s benchmarks.
Incentivize
Now that your top employees have goals to strive for, make it a big deal to meet the goal! One of the easiest ways is public recognition. Send out an all-staff email, make a social post, or give them a shoutout! Another idea is to do something where they are encouraged to celebrate themselves; an extra bonus is a good idea but can often just get put into their savings and not touched. A specific gift card, extra PTO, or a staff outing are great ways to ensure that the reward will go towards celebrating their latest achievement!
Make sure that your team has a clear understanding of what they get when they achieve their goal, and then follow through on it! Approach it with the mindset that you WANT to give them this reward.
Challenge & Motivate
Once your employees have met their goals, it’s time to push ahead and think bigger and better in the future. To keep your top employees engaged you should always be challenging them to be better. The Independent Insurance Agents of North Carolina (IIANC) has some great professional programs that you should point them towards like:
I encourage you to take advantage of these great professional development opportunities for your staff to help push them forward and make your agency better!
Keeping your top-performing employees happy is not difficult with the right processes in place! Be sure that you have your agency’s plan identified so you can set goals, incentivize, and challenge them! There’s no better way to keep them working for your agency long-term! Let me know if you have any questions on goal setting, setting up an incentive program, or our IIANC programs. Feel free to shoot me an email at jsabo@iianc.com or set up a meeting with me!
Cowritten by Jason Sabo and Lindsay Wallace
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Jason Sabo, TRA