Leading in the Hybrid Workplace

Cynthia

Hello and welcome everyone to this episode of the Cultivate podcast. The podcast for leaders who want to cultivate healthier, happier, and more human workplaces and lives. And it’s become really obvious to me that the current state of our workplaces isn’t working for people and more and more people. I was chatting with a client today that was saying that for the last year she feels like she’s been running a marathon and all she wants to do is get to February when the current job that she’s in finishes and that’s all she’s got energy for. And then she knows she needs to take quite a lot of leave to recover from this marathon that she’s been running. But that’s just a year in her career. We can’t keep running marathons and then needing to take a lot of time off work to recover. We need to make workplaces more sustainable for the long game and make sure that our people can keep performing over time and that we are not needing them to run marathons and then recover.

Cynthia

So that’s a lot of what the work that I’m doing, uh, is about how do we create these more sustainable workplaces. And part of this podcast is interviewing wonderful leaders like my guest today, Anita Lane, on what it is that they do to help create these more sustainable, happier, healthier workplaces. I’d like to acknowledge that I’m recording on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the kulin nation and I pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. And I extend my respect to any First Nations people we might have listening today I would like to now introduce Anita. Anita Lane is the co-founder of Solution Underwriting Agency and she’ll tell us a little bit more about her wonderful business. She started it from scratch with a partner. They had no clients, no business, and they’ve built it up into what it is today.

Cynthia

So we’ll look forward to hearing about her journey in solution, but also what came before that and how she got to where she’s today. She’s a first generation migrant from South America who arrived in Australia with her family, with the hope of a better life, an opportunity for an education and a world field of greater opportunities that didn’t exist in her home country. And she was lucky enough to take full advantage of all the prospects that Australia offered her through her younger years. She started her insurance career as an insurance broker in Melbourne, in 1996. And she completed her bachelor of business degree at night school, all while working full time. She then promptly pursued her goal of working in the home of Insurance Lloyds of London, and she told her family she was just going on a vacation after her degree, but she’d secretly arranged a work visa for the UK and landed in London in May, 1997 with no contacts, little money and her strong desire to work and be successful in the insurance market in London.

Cynthia

And so she stayed there for six years and then returned to Australia. And so I’ll hand it over to Anita, talk a little bit more about what she does currently and then we’ll, we’ll unpack some of her journey. But the thing that I’ve really want to focus on today and I know is going to be of much interest to a lot of you is I’ve loved the way that Anita has managed the hybrid environment. So the way that she led her staff through Covid, but then in the aftermath, in this new phase that we’re in now, what she’s done to create a great culture, be flexible, respond to the needs of staff, and create an environment where people want to stay, they want to work. And that’s really important because as we’ve seen so many of our businesses are really struggling to attract and retain talent and that’s something that Anita has managed to do. So Anita, the first question. You are one of the founders of Solution Underwriting Agency. Can you tell us more about it and what you love about it?

Anita Lane

Thank you Cynthia. Yep. Solution Underwriting Agency is a specialist underwriting market. We wholesale business from the Australian market into Lloyds of London and to some insurers in Australia as well. We operate in a business to business market. We don’t sell, um, direct insurance to moms and dads, but to businesses professional indemnity, general liability. We have a specialist accent health, um, market as well that we operate in. So we’re very specialized. Um, my whole team of people are quite unique in what we do. Uh, last week we celebrated 12 years of solution underwriting from its very organic stages where we had just my business partner and I who had like as you say, new no business, no clients, two people that had uh, experience in in the insurance sector, but were setting up brand new and were creating a new brand, um, which was quite unique back 12 years ago. Mm.

Cynthia

And what made it unique Anita?

Anita Lane

Yeah, well we had this opportunity to be able to create an agency that we focused on the broker experience and the um, the service element to what we offered. There are many other markets that operate in the same space. We were very aware of our competition, however, we still felt that there was an element to the, the business cycle that we could add further value to. And we had the opportunity to create that environment and to build a team around that that say had the same service ethics that we did at the beginning and now almost 50 staff members and across different branches and states. We’re still able to offer the same level of service and expertise to our brokers that we think is unique in the market.

Cynthia

So your point of difference has always been around that customer experience and really looking after your customers, which I imagine would also need to be reflected in you looking after your staff as well.

Anita Lane

Exactly. We um, we train and we develop um, our team so that they have the confidence and the experience and the know-how on how to advise our broker customers. They rely on us for that expert knowledge. And so our responsibility is to make sure that the team feels confident and has the skill set and the experience to be able to manage those quite tricky situations that some of our clients find themselves in. We really are looking at people’s livelihoods, their businesses and we are protecting them so that they can continue to thrive and grow. Particularly in Australia where we have quite a high, people always take that outside of the us We have a very high um, rate of people wanting to sue each other here in Australia. It is that landscape that we operate in. So the level and the quality of the advice that we provide people are like to be able to call us and talk us through quite complex situations. And our job is to make sure that our team has the skill set to be able to manage those.

Cynthia

I love that. So your role as leader is really enabling your team to be their best.

Anita Lane

Yes, exactly.

Cynthia

And that’s your role of leadership that you see.

Anita Lane

Yep. And I like to be able to give everyone the resources they need to be able to do their jobs. I need them to feel confident and that they know we are highly specialized. And that was something that I chose early in my career in insurance that I really wanted to be in a specialized field and that required obviously, um, understanding the market and the dynamics within it quite intensely. And now we transfer that over to our team. We make sure that they truly understand the, the market, the wordings, the products, the implications so that we are giving the best advice and hand service that we can to our customers.

Cynthia

And what do you love about your business and your role in?

Anita Lane

I love that. Whilst it was very scary at the beginning and we both left our very good secure jobs, uh, to try and have a crack at doing it on our own and try and do it a little bit different, I love that we’ve been able to build our own environment. We deal with the brokers and the customers that we like to deal with and we’ve built an incredibly strong engaging underwriting team around that. We select our team and our staff and yeah, just to build that environment for us to work in every day means that we all get to enjoy it as well.

Cynthia

Mm. That is amazing. Yeah. Something to be really proud of that you’ve gone from nothing to 50 staff in different branches of Australia and in a really tough time, you’ve actually grown the business.

Anita Lane

Exactly. Particularly during lockdown. It is a very tough labor market at the moment. We know that we see lots of reports coming out from Deloitte that will indicate that the insurance sector in the next few years, one of its top five challenges will be attracting and retaining staff. So we know that and we’ve implemented um, lots of things so that we can actually keep our staff engaged and challenged and and motivated to do what we do. We have a very high staff retention rate and we know why, because we put things into place so that we can have that conversation with our staff and keep them engaged and challenged and enjoying working at solution underwriting.

Cynthia

I love what I’m hearing. I love enjoyment, <laugh> enjoyment. Like when I spoke to this coaching client this morning and you know, she was just exhausted and looked exhausted and was talking about the marathon and just how it’s been so stretching and so she’s enjoyed the stretch, but the actual operating environment hasn’t been easy. Things don’t have to be easy, but it’s like the rubber band, you know, you want to be able to stretch at times but then also come back and relax and not be stretched to breaking all the time. And that’s what I felt.

Anita Lane

Yeah.

Cynthia

This, this person was, and a lot of other people that I work with are at the moment. Yep. So that kind of care for staff and setting them up for long term success.

Anita Lane

That’s right. And just communicating and listening at the same time. So if you do have a staff, uh, you do have staff that are tired, that are exhausted, that are overworked, you need to be able to hear that and then be able to do something about it. And I think communication is the key to that. I have this expression where you don’t know what you don’t know, right. And is as simple as that. You don’t know that your workforce are struggling or that they don’t have the right resources or the right skills or the right backup or the right amount of leave. Then how is management expected to resolve those issues? Knowing and asking and having those difficult conversations. They might be awkward both to staff or to management, but they, they need to be had or else you can’t fix things. And I always say, if I can’t fix something, at least let me explain to you why I can’t address something or change something and, and explain to you perhaps the background of it and why we find ourselves in this position. And then if I can fix something, then yeah, give me the time and, and I will guarantee that we can put the resources in there to be able to fix something that we potentially didn’t even know was a problem until someone mentioned it.

Cynthia

Yeah. So a big part of your role is actually the work of listening and talking and having conversations with staff. That’s a key part of your role. Whereas some leaders that I speak to, they’re sort of so busy stuck in the technical, they still want to do their operational stuff, they can’t let go of that and that actually stops them from doing that really important leadership work that you are talking about, about keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s going on.

Anita Lane

Yeah. You can’t expect a business to grow at the way that we have grown over the last 12 years without those growing pains and those growing pains. You almost have to anticipate them before they happen and to have those conversations about additional resources, diversifying the workplace, going into different states like we have, we originally started in in Melbourne cause that’s where uh, Reese and I are from. This is our home base and we chose to start the business here, but now we have staff all over the country and that is, you know, our plan to be able to not only grow but to be able to adequately resource our workforce as well.

Cynthia

So Anita, I’m just really wanting to, because we’ve started to get into the how you lead at solution and so you were going along growing and then bang covid hit. How did you respond to that as a leader and as a business and what were the challenges that you faced and how did you deal with them?

Anita Lane

Yeah, very good question. And the reality was that it was something that happened to all of us. It wasn’t just apply your management leadership style to things that were happening to other people. It was happening to us at the same time. So I was living it and then I was expected to lead people through it at the same time. So the uncertainty of it was very tough at solution. We had always worked, had the ability to work remotely on an ad hoc basis. So from day one and that was pretty much because when we started solution, my youngest child was only very little and a baby. And I knew that I just needed that flexibility to be able to do what we could do. So we set ourselves from day one to work in a, in a remote environment if we needed to for all of us, not just for myself.

Anita Lane

And we continued all the way through, but we had never really tested the ability for all of us to actually go home and work remotely. And so those first few days in, um, early March, 2020, um, we actually saw it as an, as an opportunity to test our systems and our capabilities to actually all work remotely. So remember we uh, grabbed a hold of that and thought, send everyone home. And I remember saying, we’ll just go home for three days and we’ll just check all our systems that we can uphold itself in the event of us all working from home at the same time. And then we’ll just come back to the office and life will go back to normal. Right? And we couldn’t be more wrong at that time and we all know what happened after that. So I think it was that ability to quickly have to think on our feet and to be able to problem solve and think about what we could do to be able to facilitate our business continuing and and have none of those hiccups.

Anita Lane

We were hearing from our customers and our brokers that larger insurers found it very difficult to mobilize their staff from the office back home. No one had the right equipment or even a keyboard or or anything to be able to work from home. But we had all that ready. We had lots of uh, days where we were putting keyboards and computers and people’s chairs into Ubers and sending them home because of the uncertainty of how long it was going to go for. We wanted to make sure people were, had the right tools at home to, to work from effectively. So we did that and then we sort of just started to see how it would work and the longer it went for, we almost had to adapt the mentality that we weren’t going to go back to the office and life was never going to be the same again.

Anita Lane

So then how do we create our new normal from there? How do we keep connected? We’re an incredibly social industry where we are very into, it’s a people management related business. We transact with individuals, we sell it in tangible product, right? We deal with our very small group of clients. So we were missing that people side of it and we were missing each other as a team. You know when you go in every day and see the same people and all of a sudden we were stuck at home. The novelty wore off very quickly, I have to tell you from working from home. So then we started to think about what can we do to stay connected? And that was the the key thing. How do I make everyone feel that they haven’t lost their solution team? Yes, they were logging on every morning, but how did they feel still part of the team whilst we were still at home.

Anita Lane

So we started doing social activities on a Friday night. We did lots of bingo and lots of trivia and lots of game nights and everyone contributed to that. And I have to say I probably learned more about some of my team members than I’d ever, even if I had been in the office because people were very generous and shared a lot of their time and their energy with us. We had virtual Friday night drinks, wherever we sent drinks home to people and made up little margaritas and stuff, which was quite nice. We organized a stretching yoga session once a week virtually, um, through a contact of mine. And so every Wednesday for half an hour we would all stretch together and that was quite a good way to feel connected. We surveyed a lot of our staff, we actually asked them how were they going?

Anita Lane

And the reality was that every day it was a bit different. People had good days and bad days and so it was just an ability to navigate that. And I was going through the same thing as well. I had some great days and I had some low days. I was homeschooling my children that was difficult and still trying to work and trying to keep the business and everyone’s morale as high as we could. We had sessions with you Cynthia. We identified that we needed someone from externally to be able to tell us that it was okay to feel all the things that we were feeling. Um, I needed to hear at Cynthia that it was okay that um, we were all going through this really interesting time. We created something out of lockdown called a you do you day, which is where we gave our staff one day that you got to do whatever it was within the lockdown constraints of course that made you feel happy.

Anita Lane

There was only a couple of rules. One was, you know, communicated you don’t all take it at the same time. So you had to communicate when you wanted to take it with your team leaders. And then the second rule was you needed to share it with the wider group on what you did on that particular day. So we had people, everything from playing video games to going for a walk to just it being able to express themselves some artworks and craft. So again, it was another opportunity to learn more about our team members outside of our normal work environment. We’ve continued our um, our you do you day. It’ll be an annual thing now where everyone will be able to take the day and just do whatever it is that makes them happy, which was quite good.

Cynthia

Anita, there was a lot of work for you as a leader to be leading yourself through this, keeping up the morale and the connection and then also thinking of all these initiatives to help keep the culture going when you were all away from each other. Because, because I’ve worked with you, I know you are a very social workplace and there’s a lot of connections, lunches, so that was such a different environment than you were needing to navigate. Again, you know, my thing is about cultivating leadership. It’s about a leader that helps grow others that is about that supporting others to be great And it just sounds like there was so much care there. And so did you get feedback from people that they did feel cared for in that time?

Anita Lane

Yeah, uh, like I said, we, we um, constantly were asking people and just connecting. And even when I was doing my, you know, allocated walk time, uh, like I said, I’m in Victoria so we, we all know how restricted that was. I made sure I jumped on the phone and while I was walking I would ring each one of my team members, you know, throughout the time and just say, Hey I’m, I’m walking, I’m out. I’m just touching base with you. How are you going? And just, they had a bit of a chat and some of those chats were short and sweet and I’m good, we’re getting through this. And some of them just needed a little bit more time and care and consideration and yeah, we just tried to do everything that we could to be able to, to listen and to understand and help people navigate through it whilst still, like I said, going through it at the same time ourselves.

Anita Lane

It was a very difficult time but we did learn a lot from it. And then just coming back to the workplace and like you say, we are an incredibly social group of people so there was no doubt that our productivity was very high during lockdown. People really worked a lot and we got through everything and so people felt very efficient being at home cause there was no commute time or or anything else. And no, not a lot of meetings and not a lot of lunches. So things people were really on top of their work, which is great.

Cynthia

Just to interrupt there, so, so like a lot of businesses productivity actually went up from the working at home and were there any kind of negative effects on the business?

Anita Lane

So I did a um, some strategic analysis and it’s part of where we identified that we were at a competitive disadvantage, Cynthia. And the fact that we had originally just a Melbourne, Sydney office and then some of our competitors that had branch offices in regional areas and in other states that didn’t go through such severe lockdowns, they continued to network and to transact and socialize with their customers that were in our space as well. But because we had such long and restricted lockdowns we would disadvantage and strategically that’s where the idea of let’s go to Perth and Queensland started from and we may never go into another lockdown but we needed to neutralize that threat that the fact that we didn’t have people on the ground there during that time was a disadvantage to us, uh, where our competitors were continuing to socialize. When you look at a business and you think, well what made you decide to go into other states where we operated very effectively from the two states and lockdown and was a result of that, we saw that as the disadvantage and we’ve now taken steps to, to protect ourselves in the event of it ever happening again.

Anita Lane

And it’s turned out to be one of the best things we’ve ever done <laugh>.

Cynthia

I love it. So you are wearing yellow and one of my great colors of optimism and you’ve always struck me as a very optimistic person that sees opportunity and how can we actually take this situation and turn it into an opportunity and isn’t it amazing that yeah this risk that you’ve identified actually so you’ve taken another risk, you’ve made lemonade, other lemons.

Anita Lane

Absolutely. And like I said, it turned out to be one of the best business decisions we’ve ever done. So

Cynthia

Why is that?

Anita Lane

Just because um, we’ve always believed in having the local market deal with local brokers and boots on ground sort of philosophy. Yeah, we’ve just been so busy doing what we do, we sort of kind of never got around to it and like I said, we managed it well and it was always part of the long term plan but I think just with Covid it sort of accelerated that initiative just to go out and do it and we have done it, which is great. But then getting back to work, it was about how do we not lose all the good things that we got and the flexible environment and as you say, our productivity was very high so we certainly weren’t complaining as a business, but I still felt that people socially weren’t reconnecting. There was a little bit of anxiety uh, to be able to come back into the office and like I said, particularly we Melbourne Sydney scenario where even you know, Melbourne C B D has completely changed, you know, uh, even when we did start to come back just to see beautiful old coffee shops and everything that we are known for just bought it up and just, you know, up for lease again.

Anita Lane

And so we wanted to make sure that people kept working and, and so the idea was that we would let our teams, I really believe that teams work best when they’re in a team collectively and that as individuals, there’s no doubt that if you are just got a day where you are working through your inbox, definitely stay home and do that because you will be more effective. We know that I do that myself if I’ve just got need a day just to punch out some work, the office is not the best place for me cuz I like a good chat and I like to go and see each of people. I’ve been known to go into days and at two o’clock so I’ve actually got to go home and do some work because I’ve just spent my whole day just engaging with people. So the idea was that each team themselves and, and I say this thing where you know, if Susie from accounts and Bill from the general liability team came in apart from good morning and goodnight, they really wouldn’t have a lot of interaction with each other so they might as well stay home and work.

Anita Lane

So it was about getting teams back into the office together at the same time within the requirements that we were set out by our, our government at Boris. The, the distancing rules we had to move furniture around when we first went back and we literally had the measuring tape out to make sure that people were okay and socially distanced. We took over some more office space. Uh, Cynthia were probably the only uh, company in Australia that during lockdown and took advantage of getting more space. And it’s not because we had more people, but we probably did realize hell yeah we probably do sit all on top of each other and we didn’t know that. And so we all came back and realized that we needed a bit more space. So we now have a beautiful loft area. We’ve converted our corporate office more into a home office feel with a lot of soft furniture and a lot of, we’ve changed our interior design to make it feel a little bit more like you are at home.

Anita Lane

So that transition back from home to the office didn’t feel so hard on people. So we got teams back in, we allowed them to pick the days at work for them as a team and then we told them that on those days, if you’re just going to work through your inbox, don’t even bother coming in. Make sure those days are filled with coffee and lunch appointments and training and one-on-ones. I want people engaging and in each other’s space during those days in the office, I don’t want to see just people seeing at their computer working because that can be done very effectively from home. I want there to come in and for them to feel socially so exhausted and then go home and do what they need to do. So how

Cynthia

Many days are the teams coming in out of generally?

Anita Lane

Yep. So our rule is that the office is open every day, right? So you need to go in five days, you go in five days and everyone makes their own decisions about that. But then, uh, as a minimum we decided that two days per team was the requirement that we wanted to, but then we’ve always tried to be flexible within our flexibility, which we continue to be. Some of our other people in our industry are now pushing to go more. Uh, there is a 50%, 60 40 um, is probably where the industry is heading. We’ve decided that the way we are doing it works for us and we’ll continue to do that until it doesn’t work kind of thing. So we are going to just be play it by ear and see how that works out.

Cynthia  

So Anita, so again what really strikes me is you’ve put so much thought into the transition, you haven’t just sort of let it happen and you were very aware of the way that people, you know, their anxieties around returning, making it feel more homely. So reflecting the environment, operating environments that people got used to and making them feel safe and comfortable. And I’m just wondering, so have you noticed a change in what employees are expecting or wanting now compared to pre covid c o?

Anita Lane

Yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever go back to five days in the office again. I think that is just ruled out. I don’t think that will be on the table. I don’t think any of my staff would want that and I’m okay with that. But what I do want actually is consistency in the days that the teams allocate their days. So to me flexibility is a two way street. So I’m, we’re happy to be flexible to our staff but then they’ve got to commit to the days that they have volunteered to come into the office. I do as a leader want to know that a particular team who has picked a Wednesday to be their days in that when I do go into the office, I expect to see the majority of that team in there. Of course if someone’s done well or there’s something outside, um, circumstances that don’t prevent them to, but just waking up on that day that you’re supposed to go in and just deciding you can’t be bothered is not actually good enough.

Anita Lane

And I communicate that because to me you are letting your team members down and in the early days that did happen a bit and the feedback was from some people saying, oh I expected so and so I was really looking forward to so and so coming in, but they didn’t make it in today and it happened to me and I felt really let down and a little bit disappointed and a bit sad that I made the effort to get ready and commute and come in today. I felt that everyone else should have made that same effort so that collectively we could be, um, a team on those particular days. So if you’re going to set that expectation of when you are going to be in, then I think that everyone, we are really pushing for people not to let anyone else down and that’s worked very well. Um, so far every now, now and now we’ve got to remind people <laugh>.

Cynthia

So there have been some honest conversations yes. Around and providing feedback about what’s okay and what’s not okay and making it very clear about those sort of above the line behaviors that

Anita Lane

Exactly, yeah.

Cynthia

And that mutual accountability as well.

Anita Lane

Exactly. So above the line behavior is committing to your days and sticking to them below the line. Behavior would be saying you’re going to come in and then deciding on that morning that you can’t be bothered to come in is how we define it and we communicate that the way that we discuss that is how it affects the team when you do that. So again, it’s that expectation that someone will be in and, and if they’re not, it can be very disappointing because you’ve waited either a whole week to see someone, uh, and whether that’s just to have a coffee or just to tell them about your weekend, right? <laugh>. So we keep reinforcing the benefit of being our team and to being in the office as a team. I compare it a little bit to exercise, right? No one ever says, oh my God, I really want to go and exercise now and putting on, you know, the hardest thing is putting on your runners and actually starting, but I equally don’t know anyone that after they’ve had a really good workout or a walk or done something physically where they actually regretted going. No one regrets the days they come into the office because they socially feel full and engaged and inspired and motivated. But sometimes that putting your runners on, getting on the train coming in can be a little bit of an obstacle. So reminding people how they’re going to feel at the end of the day and how important it is to feel connected is what motivates people to keep to their commitment of coming in when, when they say they’re going to come in <laugh>.

Cynthia

And so Anisha again, the, so the productivity wounded up, I mean I’m sure people were spending more hours so it went up. What have you noticed now about the business and how it’s been affected, the KPIs, I guess now that people have doing some work from home that have come in and, and are spending the two days a week really with the connection stuff?

Anita Lane

Yeah, it took a bit of adjusting too because yeah, you would spend two hours connecting and then you’d go back to your desk and you’d have 40 new emails, right? That if you hadn’t left your desk you would be all over it. But that’s how we worked before and again, it just took a little bit of a time to adjust and it’s just time management and it’s still understanding that they’re both equally important and as a leader, I don’t expect them to have an inbox that’s empty <laugh>, you know, I, it is not part of the real world. So it is about them managing their time more efficiently but then seeing the value that they get out of it, uh, from it. And also, um, we find that a lot of our customers are doing the same as well. So you don’t get that high demand as what there was during lockdown.

Anita Lane

So we were probably getting more bombarded with emails and inquiries when everyone else was at home. Again, at the way our industry works, if you are networking, you are doing it with a whole group of other people that probably aren’t emailing you while you are at this networking function <laugh>. So it does sort of pan itself out, but that’s how life was before and it’s sort of the good and the bad and you can’t be expected to go on conference and travel and do some really cool fun things without there being, and it’s about communicating back to your team as well and just that normal time management that we had to use before lockdown as well.

Cynthia

Anita, how has your leadership changed or grown or over these last couple of intense years?

Anita Lane

Um, so I decided to do my MBA during lockdown, which yeah, crazy. Uh, but I did, I’ve always wanted to do it and it’s this thing about, you know, finding the time and, and when I was, we first went into lockdown, I realized I did have a lot more time and I was, I actually was working a lot more and that wasn’t sort of healthy, so I decided to do a lifetime sort of goal and ambition than I had. So doing an MBA in lockdown is a lot easier than, than not because as you’ve got more time <laugh>. But my motivation really was, I had been in what I call the solution bubble at that time for 10 years and we were just building the business and growing the team and doing what we needed to do, but I felt that I hadn’t, I needed to look up and to see what other industries were doing.

Anita Lane

And in fact, lockdown and covid was quite a good time because I, during my MBA, which was all done online, I got to meet people and leaders from other industries and I was listening to their stories on how they dealt with um, people going home. And then there was essential workers and a whole range of things that I would never have ever been exposed to if I hadn’t done that. I found it very refreshing and very interesting just to, to hear how other people in other industries were actually dealing with it at that time. And it really motivated me to realize that, you know, some people were doing it a little bit better than what we did and a lot of people were doing it way worse than what we were somewhere in the middle. So my leadership style has probably changed for being more, uh, open and understanding and, and trying to, you know, will try anything new. Uh, if it works, it’s great and if it doesn’t we just retweet it and then we just keep building from there. So I like to think that I’m quite open to new things and I love change. I love hearing from the diversity of our workforce as well as to how we can make our environment better.

Cynthia

Yeah, and there’s a lot of research around which we’ve talked about in previous episodes of the podcast, but that leaders often think that they’re checking in with staff really regularly, but the perception of their staff is that they’re not doing it often enough. So the message to leaders is that you can’t check in with your staff and ask them how they are and show that care. You can’t do it too often. You might think you’re doing it too often, but you’re actually not. So it sounds like that’s a really big driver for you, Anita, which is a natural strength that you’ve got that a lot of other leaders, you know, really have to work at.

Anita Lane

Yep. And like I said, you don’t know what you don’t know, so you know, asking the question and being prepared for the answer as well and how you’re going to respond and react, you have to have that accountability and then you have to actually do something about it. I think, um, your team looked for you to not just say things and that sound very good at town halls and at meetings, but then you’ve actually got to do what it is that you say you’re going to do. And, and like I said earlier, either just explain why things can’t change or why we find ourselves in a certain, um, position and so that people understand the origin of it and then they have the empathy back to realize, oh well this really is a tough situation and my management team are actually dealing with it the best they can based on the circumstances.

Anita Lane

But then if you can implement some change and you can add some value, why not have a go at doing it and research and find out how it can be done and extend externally. Like I said, we’ve used use Cynthia, I have external mentors that I connect my leadership team to as well. They don’t need to hear it from me all the time. They need to be, it needs to be reinforced from people outside of our industry and within our industry that, you know, what we’re our path is where we’re at and that we’re actually doing quite well and just to keep connecting and reconnecting as often as we can.

Cynthia

And you said something to me when we were chatting about this interview in preparation that you wanted solution to be, you know, even if people got better financial offers from other competitors that why would you want perhaps a bit more money when you were, when you were working in such an awesome place? Yeah. Can you just tell me a bit more about that?

Anita Lane

So I believe in, in we’re in a market now in a labor market where, uh, we’ve had to transition from, uh, instead of sort of people queuing up to come and work at solution, I have the other perspective where I think, let me give you a value proposition as why I think you would, you would want to work or stay at solution. And so we, we literally list the things that we think that we add value to. Everything from our performance development program, which is our excellence program that I was sharing with you Cynthia, that a very big chunk of our bonus structure isn’t only about your numbers and how you perform uh, with solution. I’m looking for evidence of people and how they contribute to the fabric of who we are as an organization. So we add that into people’s bonuses and their performance development programs so that they can throughout the year document how and they contribute towards who we are culturally as an organization Earlier on in the business and you think we’re in financial services, we didn’t even give our original team budgets and numbers to strive for.

Anita Lane

What we said is that that is our job as your leaders to be able to keep ahold of that. What we wanted is for them to be brilliant and to be knowledgeable and to do their jobs the best that they could every day and then the numbers would follow and the business would follow. And that’s what we did from day one. We set up a very simple business plan and structure and we stuck to it. We’ve always stuck to our knitting. As I say, we’ve never deviated outside of our core values and our core business and we’ve just built on that. And so if you have all those fundamentals, right, if you have a good culture, if you have a good brand, if you have a good reputation and people trust you in what we do because we’re experts in our field, the business will follow.

Anita Lane

Yeah. So I agree that a value, um, proposition for employees is, is a big deal. You know, particularly we are looking at creating a pipeline of graduates in our organization as well. Diversification of people from outside the industry coming into insurance. There’s no point of just poaching people from the same industry. Um, you sort of just get the same environment. So we’ve bought in people from different backgrounds that has been incredibly successful for us and bringing in new skill sets and in new lens of people to be able to transact and interact with the wider group that we have at the moment. And that was during lockdown as well actually Cynthia, we were able to find staff that had, were outside of the industry. We were able to retrain them in the insurance sector and the skills that they bought with them and the diversity of a different perspective has been so beneficial to the business.

Cynthia

So it’s more about culture fit and those transferable skills rather than the deep knowledge of the, of the industry itself. That’s more important.

Anita Lane

Yes, because we can train and we can educate and I can mentor people on the technical side of things all day. What we look for is that beautiful nature of someone who just is naturally very curious, who wants to do better, who understands how important it is to be part of a wider group and that cultural fit. I still meet and interview everyone that joins solution and I’m not looking to see how smart they are. I’m looking to see are they going to be a good cultural fit for us. And like I said, with a 97% staff retention rate, uh, we don’t get it wrong too often. <laugh>

Cynthia

That is amazing, our amazing figures and I love because I do a lot of work with people on behaviors and how teams work together, not just what they work on because I know that if you don’t attend to the how do we all work together and who we are, then the people stuff then gets in the way of you actually being able to do the work. And I also know that still a lot of businesses don’t have the, how you are contributing as a key part of their performance. It might be like a 5% or a 10%, but it’s not like a really, this is super important. How you show up here is actually just as is not more important than the numbers that you deliver. So I love that you’ve actually really embedded that in your system right from the start.

Anita Lane

We also add into our performance development programs. We’ve done a lot of work on our brand and our values and our mission and we use that same language into our plans because it’s about reinforcing what that means to us. And so as an organization, how do you, you need to evidence that, that you contribute that back to us because this is fundamentally who we stand as a business in our identity. And I really challenge people to, like I said, I know they’re all brilliant and they’re all very smart at what they do, but I equally if not more value a great working environment so that we can continue doing what it is that we do and to keep growing and to keep adding value not just to us internally, but that solution experience that we talk about. You know, we give our brokers a solution experience and that’s about people who aren’t know-it-alls aren’t arrogant, don’t think that, you know, they don’t put people down. We’re here to facilitate and we are here to, to just do a good day’s work and feel good about ourselves at the end of the day as well.

Cynthia

So that’s a really great example Anita of the, again, so many businesses and organizations do the values work and the mission and the vision and they just become documents that sit on the shelf. They’re not, they’re not lived.

Anita Lane

Yeah. Yeah.

Cynthia

And I just love the way that you are providing such a great example of how, cuz I believe that work, the work that you do on the values and behaviors actually if you implement that and use that to guide you, it’s so powerful

Anita Lane

And we reward people by it. So each, at our town halls, I get my leaders to nominate someone in their team that has lived our values for that quarter and then we give out two gold cast tickets to go and see a movie, right? So we’re not giving people a bazillion dollars. What we’re saying is that as a team and as a team member, you have been recognized for living our values this quarter and we are just gonna give you a little gift and we announce it at the town hall and, and I get the leaders to explain how and why these people were nominated and why they’ve won and the award for it. And it goes a long way to reinforcing that, you know, that was me. I’d wanna be that next person at the next town hall cuz I’ve done something this quarter that has demonstrated that I have lived solutions values in what I do in my normal day to day job, right? And then my peer group are actually acknowledging that I am living solutions values. Um, so we do things like, like that a lot <laugh>

Cynthia

That is just so wonderful. And I think today there’s been a lot of really practical tips for helping people navigate this new hybrid workplace that we’re operating in. But also just how for leaders, if you are fed income like Anita, you, you believe it, right? You’re not all talk, no action. So I just really believe if you’ve got a leader in your organization that takes this stuff really seriously then that is just such a powerful because unless the leader’s betting income about it, it won’t, it doesn’t matter. It’s all words.

Anita Lane

Yeah. Like you say, it’s just words on the paper. You can spend lots of time, money, energy, creating a new brand, a new vision, a new mission. And we got to 10 years in our evolution of our business And it, in fact, Cynthia was with a session with you that you said to us, you know, we sat down and we went through our missions and statement. Then you said, well you’ve already done all that. It’s now time to create new ones. And based on that we have gone through a whole series of new, um, marketing and new investigation into what our new brand represents for us. And what we discovered was that we now had a mature brand. So we came from a very humble, small, um, existence. It was just the two of us. We had no business, all those things. And we kind of kept that language going all the way through that no we’re small, no we shouldn’t.

Anita Lane

And now we’ve evolved and we realize that we are, you know, we’ve been here for the long haul. We have this incredible brand and reputation and our brand has matured even I have to change my language when I speak about solution that we have achieved all these great things and that we should now take it to that next level that we weren’t ready for before. Cuz we still in our mindset, we were still small and we were still, you know, trying to play with the big boys but not really wanting to go there. And now all of a sudden we have got to this place where we now need to embrace who we are for the next five to 10 years. And that’s all comes through having these conversations about who we are as an entity and who we are as a business and how, how do we continue living that our past and our history is very well documented and we know and people love the story of how we started, but now we have an opportunity to create a new future for ourselves. And that has been a shift in our language and our culture and the people that we have with us now. No longer is it just two people writing business and building a brand? It is 50 of us building a business and right and creating a new brand for us.

Cynthia

Mm. Yeah. That’s so fascinating because again, in coaching I work with lots of leaders and one of the biggest shifts that they’ve got to make is, is actually transitioning in their identity. So letting go of who they thought they needed to be or were in the past and embracing actually this is who I am now. And so some of those old beliefs that I had, I don’t need them anymore, they’re holding me back actually. And I always quote that Marshall Goldsmith, he says, what got us here won’t get us there. So we need to constantly be really on our toes looking at the new opportunities but also not resting on our laurels because we’ve come so far. But that’s got us here and if you want to go to the next level or actually just not go backwards either, I think because I think if you stay stagnant you just end up going backwards because the world passes you by

Anita Lane

And it’s about being brave enough to take that next step as well. Like I said, we, we could have stayed in our happy place and in our comfort zone and, and that worked for us for 10 years and it would’ve been the easy thing in the world was just to stay there because it felt good <laugh>, it felt familiar and it felt safe. The challenge is now how do we challenge ourselves to take it to that next level? And that’s the phase that the business is going through now. And that takes more than just a true people’s desire to be successful. It takes the village to be able to get us to where we need to go and everyone on board, we’re also too small where people who aren’t on board is very obvious and they stand out a lot. So at the beginning it was nimble enough for us to change course very quickly. Uh, it’s now too big for us to do that as quickly as what we used to. So we all need to be heading in the same direction at the same time.

Cynthia

Uh, so exciting. <laugh> you, I can’t wait to hear what the next 10 years will reveal

Anita Lane

Exactly. And our challenge for us now is to get our leadership team. So we’ve created a leadership team again during lockdown, which is one of the other positive things that came out. A lot of people were reporting sort of straight into me. I couldn’t get a feel of the room when I wasn’t physically there of how people were. And so we implemented a leadership, um, team that has just been again a really great thing that we again we’re going to get to doing, but we didn’t do it. And then lockdown sort of made us do that, um, and get them the skills to be able to do it. They’re brilliant underwriters but that, as you know, that doesn’t always translate into great management style. So we spent a lot of time on on not only the technical side, but how do you become good people leaders. And I’m very interested as you know, on the um, emotional intelligence side of how we manage, again, something that I wasn’t aware of until I did my MBA and it’s just so intuitive, but you’ve almost got to allow yourself to be open to it and to understand how we communicate and we hear things and how we translate. So that is the next stage for us to make our team more emotionally intelligent in their work day to day environment.

Cynthia

Yeah, yeah. So important. And as I said earlier, often it’s just such a barrier for, for leaders who have made that they get often promoted because they’re good technically. And when you’re a people leader, that’s not the work. But again, because of that identity stuff, a lot of people find it really hard because they, their whole self-worth is based on being a really good underwriter. And if they’re not doing that, and some people don’t regard the people stuff as real

Anita Lane

Work, no <laugh>,

Cynthia

But actually, that’s the work.

Anita Lane

That’s the work, yeah,

Cynthia

That’s the work when you’re at that level. So I just, kudos to you for supporting all your people no matter at what level to have the resources and the skills they need just to be able to get out there and do their jobs in an enjoyable environment. Now Anita, just one question I’m slipping in at the end that I just thought of. Anita, do you think the culture of solution is different to the rest of the insurance industry? My uninformed just stereotyping the insurance industry would be more around where about the KPIs?

Anita Lane

Yes, is the answer and it’s just because we built it that way from the beginning. And like I said, it was about knowing that our people and our culture was known to be what led to our success more than our technical ability overall. And it’s still a relationship driven market, um, because it’s an intermediary space. So the price is the price in terms of when you sell insurance and the products, the product. But how do you have a team that engages with, um, your customer base to make them engage us more than anybody else? And we do that by creating the culture, by dealing with people that aren’t assholes and aren’t difficult to deal with and are problem solvers. We train our team to, let’s find two ways how we can do something as opposed to 10 ways why we wouldn’t want to write a piece of business, right?

Anita Lane

So with facilitators, and it’s just our mindset, which I think is what sets us aside from our competitors and the rest of the bigger insurance space where everything can be a little bit doom and gloom. Um, we’ve proven that you can have a little fun along the way. You can be incredibly creative even within the insurance market. It’s an incredible industry. I think that more people should get into it. I, I think that people don’t understand how important it is to our infrastructure as a society really, but then just how interesting the industry can be if you had, there’s so many

Cynthia

Elements to it as well. I love it Anita. And it’s just so wonderful always to talk to you because you’re so passionate, positive, creative, and caring, lot of quite a few Cs there. You’re very caring and I just love that whole leadership attitude of my job is to make my staff have a great experience and reach their potential and be their best and the rest will follow. So thank you so much Anita for being my guest today and I’m sure that a lot of people listening have just got so much around how to lead and create a great culture from our conversation today. So thank you very much. Thank you very much Cynthia. So that’s it for today’s episode of the Cultivate Podcast. If you’d like to keep the conversation going and connect with other like-minded people, please hop on over to the Cultivate podcast Facebook group.

Cynthia

Just search for the Cultivate podcast where you can ask questions, share information, carry on the conversation, and stay tuned to what the next episode will be. You can also go to my website, www.cynthiamarney.com.au to listen to other episodes of the podcast. You can subscribe to my blog, check out my leadership team and coaching programs, and you can even buy my book. It’s a great book. Cultivate How Neuroscience and Wellbeing Support Rural Leaders to Thrive. But it’s actually a book for everyone, not just rural leaders. So thank you everyone for tuning in. Remember to stay happy, healthy, and human, and I’ll look forward to our next conversation on the Cultivate Podcast. See you next time.