Hard Market Hangover: Battling Burnout

The hard market isn’t just hitting premiums, it’s hitting people. Shane and Tonya discuss what burnout really looks like for overwhelmed frontline teams and exhausted agency owners. They share strategies for rebuilding capacity, keeping your best people, new perspectives, and practical ideas.

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Transcript

 Announcer: [00:00:00] This is IA Forward your Playbook for Success as an independent insurance agent. Here to help you knock it outta the ballpark are your hosts, Shane Tatum and Tonya Lied. 

Tonya: Welcome to IA Forward. Let's talk about culture and burnout and all of the results that we are having long term from this hard market that we have been in.

For the last 4,692 days. 

Shane: This is our equivalent in the insurance industry to long COVID. This is like long hard market type of stuff. It's a great topic because everybody's feeling it. We could call it hard market hangover Burnout is very real. I. Struggle with this a little bit because I enjoy my job and what we do every day.

I look forward to Monday and all of those kind of things that some people think I'm crazy about. When you think about what's transpired over the last [00:01:00] couple of years, people have done a lot more work and that extra work was not in their control. When you have extra work that was not part of your life for the preceding 10 years, some people had never felt a hard market, much less experienced.

The struggle of the hard market when it comes to the personal work that everyone's having to do that was extra. And so it's something that we should probably get out there. Talk about, have conversations about within our agencies 

Tonya: when premiums have been up the way they are. Clients are stressed. So are we within the industry from a personal perspective, looking at what our House note looks like every month because of this, it's incredible.

I can understand why over half of independent insurance agency [00:02:00] employees. Are feeling completely burned out. Looking at the Liberty Mutual agent for the future findings, I just wanna give you some hard factual percentages. We're looking at 87%. 87% have reported an increased workload over the past year. 51% of employees feel burned out.

65% of frontline employees report frequent stress. 57% feel mentally and physically exhausted. When you look at those statistics, it is no wonder that we do not feel the same within our agencies that we felt two years ago. 

Shane: I believe there's several different components to this. I'll start with. There's a large percentage of employees within the IE [00:03:00] channel who have never dealt with a hard market.

Okay, let's start there. It was relatively easy before the hard market hit, even through COVID, as tragic as that was and is, and our society changes, people were doing different things. They were getting remote work options. It was premiums, pricing models were contained. It was before that you could probably go.

Close to a decade, maybe longer, all the way back to the housing crisis of oh eight and the fallout from that. From today, you can probably go back a good 15 to 17 years from our last serious hard market, especially in the personal line space. Commercial lines would have a different feel to it. That's a lot of new people into the channel, into the industry.

Since our last hard market, we have a false sense of what this world's always going to be like. We always have this [00:04:00] mindset of the way it is today is the way it's always gonna be, and then we get surprised when that change happens. Just because it's great today in your life doesn't mean it's always gonna be great, and I don't wanna be pessimistic when I say that.

I'm just a realist when it comes to that. That's also a big perspective here, that we have to go back and think about many people on the survey. Don't know a hard market. They've never been through that cycle. On the flip side, there are an, some people in that survey probably reporting that I would guess this is the Shane opinion, by the way.

This is not anything statistical who are the 30 plus year crowd who are just mentally done. That's reasonable. Like this is the tail end. This was supposed to be. Ride off into the sunset phase of their career. They're super experienced, they're super knowledgeable. There's very little they have not seen before.

And then [00:05:00] lo and behold, here comes a once in a lifetime hard market type situation, and it's hitting them in their golden years, so to speak of their career. And so that will also cause mental. Exhaustion and burnout, and so I'll start there. I wanted to get that out there, right up front, that we have so many people within this study who just have never experienced anything like this before.

Tonya: I had never even heard of this idea of the hard market, and I've been with you eight years now. So we went into this a year and a half ago, and I believe that there were a lot of people that didn't even really know. That this was a thing. All of that said, I still believe this idea of increased workload and this burned out mentally and physically exhausted feeling is [00:06:00] valid.

Hard market. Soft market, whatever. It's still a valid feeling and affecting people's lives and how they feel at work 

Shane: and let's. Go ahead and jump in. Yes, I agree. A real feeling. I agree. There's no argument or debate for me that this is made up. This is real. Getting underneath the hood and understanding the cause of it, in addition to the hard market, there is the reality of now I've gotta do more, and my expectation is that I'm doing more, it's not necessarily more revenue, right?

Because we don't make more money. In the independent agency channel by rewriting business that we already have on our books. That is the most costly thing. And so as that cycled through, we have seen over the last couple of years a ton of remarket requests, carriers all over the [00:07:00] place trying to get their pricing models right, and agents just trying to hang on to clients.

Retention of clients. Struggling with retention within the carrier, trying to keep good partnerships. These are all part of the symptoms causing some of this burnout because you're doing more for the same revenue. That is not a good combination for profitability. Agency owners are naturally like, we gotta stay through this.

We can't just add more people to add more people. Then we throw in. The thing that has blown up on us during this exact same cycle over the last two years, and that is the AI race agencies are pouring into this idea of, oh my gosh, I don't wanna be left behind. We need to invest in ai. We need to understand what's going on.

Frontline people, some of which have been doing it a certain way for a long [00:08:00] time, 20, 25 plus years. Change. What are we gonna do? You want me to change in the middle of all this extra work? That is a huge component of the burnout as well. You have people on either end of this spectrum. Let's automate more.

I love it. Why are we doing it this way? We can do it better. We can do it more efficient. We can embrace ai. Then you've got the other end of the spectrum, which is, that's dumb. That won't work. I've always done it this way. This is better for me. And then you've got agency ownership saying, I need it to be more efficient.

I want to honor you, and your tenure with us and your tenure in the industry and your knowledge and your experience is so important to our organization. We can't just keep beating the dead horse here. We've got to get better. We've got to get more efficient. We've got to be able to do these things because the [00:09:00] dollars aren't necessarily more, in some cases, the commission rates are less, and the dollars at best are even.

We're looking at this as an agency owner level and going, okay. What's our path? What's our answer? How do we get the experienced people to embrace the technology and the efficiencies? How do we get the newer people to understand that this is a cycle and we've got to bulldoze our way through it? And there's another cycle, probably from a softening standpoint, or at least a stabilization.

Coming and we can already start to see that happening. And so that's where I think the challenge for agency ownership in principles is navigating all this 

Tonya: in the real world. We are seeing some of our high performers. Just trying to survive. I always called it zombie mode when things would get overwhelming with my [00:10:00] sales team, you had your frustrated salespeople.

You had your overwhelmed salespeople, but then you had the really great ones, and at the point that those people go into zombie mode, that becomes the challenge I see. Burnout as a capacity problem, not a character flaw. And I've seen sales managers that see burnout as a character flaw, and I've never seen it that way.

It really is a capacity problem. So how do we as agency owners help our teams that have been so stressed for two years, recover. From this zombie mode. Survival, 

Shane: we throw around culture a lot in our world today. I don't want to just throw that word around. It's very difficult to come in on the backside and implement the culture.

You have to be [00:11:00] there through the tough times. You have to be empathetic. You also have to explain, and this is not something that I love, I'll be open about this publicly, this constant why I am a big start with why Simon Sinek. I'm a big, this is my why for making this decision. I am big on that, and I have explained that to our leadership team.

I talk about that to our agency network. I use phrases like that and I truly mean that. I get burnout on that particular thing. The why conversation, because I hear you. I get frustrated too. I wanna take the dad tone and that's never gonna fly really well when you're running an organization or building a business.

But sometimes you kind of have to do that. It's not like you're sitting here going, I think I want to intentionally make a bad decision. Nobody does that. No one does [00:12:00] that. It's easy to make fun of Cracker Barrel. I am a huge fan of Southwest Airlines and I'm super frustrated with Southwest Airlines direction over the last year and where they're headed over the next year or two because I think their leader culture behind, I think they're abandoning some of the things that made them great.

In pursuit of something new that isn't necessarily better, they're going to waken and frustrate their core in order to pursue something new. No one sits there in leadership and says, let's make a bad decision. Nobody does that. No leader does that. No one that's in a successful place of running a successful business does that, and so it does get exhausting.

From a leadership position to have your people constantly questioning you, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? That doesn't make sense. So you have to put on [00:13:00] that new title that a friend of mine made me understand years ago, and that is you gotta put on your chief translation officer title. You gotta put your CEO title to the side for a minute.

You gotta be the chief translator for your organization, for your people, and you do have to explain the why behind your decision. Sometimes I enjoy it. Sometimes I'm like, I don't really want to explain it this time. I just know this is the right decision and this is what we're going to do. The problem is that companies are made up of people and without the people.

You got nothing. You just got yourself. And you don't need to be that if you are growing. So you kind of just have to suck it up and explain it and put a smile on your face and say, this is my why, this is why I'm doing that now. I hear you. I, that frustrates me sometimes and I'm, you know, being transparent on that.

But I do it anyway and we continue to do it because that's [00:14:00] what leadership, that's what agency ownership does. You get up. You go to work, you put in the effort and be the example through action, not just words. And that's part of making sure that you're helping your frontline people, digging in with them, getting your hands dirty.

And yes, that means you're having to do something that you didn't plan on doing 10 years into your business. You planned on relaxing a little more. The problem is you don't control the marketplace, so you've got to get in, roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. The, the horizon is coming where you're going to be able to relax a little bit more, get back to this place you hoped you would be, but you have to see this through.

I love these leadership memes, and you gotta lead from the front. You can't lead from the back. You can't lead with a whip. [00:15:00] You've got to lead by pulling your people along with you. You've got to communicate. And that is how I, I feel like you help people see that you are gonna go through the burnout with them, because what you don't want, and there's going to be casualties I hope.

That there's less casualties than we hope, right? I think that where we want to end up is that we work our way through this burnout. We come out the other side stronger, but markets like this weed out. The weak players. It happened in the housing crisis in 2008. It happened in the.com bust post 2000. It happens in every market cycle where.

Weaker organizations, weaker businesses get weeded out and stronger businesses rise. Then spaces created and new businesses start again. That is the cycle of my 30 [00:16:00] years. That's the cycle that I've seen. And so we're going to see a better place. So we do have to get through it, and the way I know to get through it is to get side by side your people and work with them.

Tonya: This is also very generational. The idea of narrative leadership, telling your team why things matter is so incredibly important. If you have millennial and Gen Z employees, they want purpose and boundaries and to feel respected. They don't have that hustle worship mentality that we as Gen Xers or our boomers have.

And if you do not show narrative leadership to the millennials, to the Gen Zs that are working with you, it can cause problems and exacerbate this idea of burnout. 

Shane: Yeah, I think that's right. You don't have to [00:17:00] do that. You know you can do the 'cause. I said, so why do I have to clean my room? Why can't I stay out?

Later when my friends are staying out later, most of the time the answer was very short, sweet, and clear. Because I said so, because I said so. Makes sense. I recently had a conversation with a partner, agent of ours, and it was a question about something he was asking for, something that was beyond the scope of what we could do, and I just had to say, Hey, I'm gonna have to say no on this.

We just can't do it. I loved his response. His response was, Hey, I get it. It's your business. You gotta run it how you gotta run it? He did not ask me to give him the nth degree of why he just said, Hey, I get it. You may have some of those employees, and if you do. Be extremely thankful that you have that.

There's a lot [00:18:00] of current employees within any business across America. The insurance business is not different. There's a lot of those employees from the millennial generation, gen Z now that they just wanna understand why, like Tonya's saying, you've gotta explain it, that they weren't parented the same way that a lot of older millennials and, and if you really want to understand why.

Things are the way they are and why employees are responding to you the way they're responding to you. It's the way they were parented. It's the way they went through school and they were taught. And there was a shift. There was a shift whether you agree with it or not. And that means that either you constantly fight and you're constantly at a place of friction or you adapt.

Now, does that mean you compromise? No, I don't think compromising is the same as adapt. I think adapting [00:19:00] is adapting. You understand your surroundings, you understand what you're dealing with. That's a leadership trait. I love having an adaptation mindset and understanding that there's a way to do that without compromising your core values, compromising your beliefs, and so that is just an area that we can create friction in.

Or we can adapt. 

Tonya: Let's talk things that are really working and trying to fix burnout with a pizza party is not working. I see agencies that are doing this. They've tried all of the things like that, you know, doing donut Fridays or whatever. One of the best things I believe as a leader that you can do is clarify your expectations and if you are clear about expectations that [00:20:00] reduces anxiety.

It's the idea of listening rather than reacting. And Shane talks about this all the time. Sometimes you listen, you don't react. I love Chip, McLean and company. In Dallas, he and his wife Tiffany have a phrase that they use that we have somewhat adapted in our household. When the cute boy and I come to discuss something, it is the idea of is it a bucket or is it a toolkit?

In other words, do you just need me to listen or do you need me to fix it? And a lot of times we as leaders, just like in our relationships. We just need to listen. It's not that our team members really need us to fix it. They just need to be heard. 

Shane: Men, you need to hear that a lot more probably than women.

My tendency is to fix things, [00:21:00] especially my wife. If she's telling me something, I feel automatically like I need to go fix it, like there's a problem, something for me to address. I think it's just the innate nature. Of people. A lot of times we do just need to listen. A lot of independent agencies across the country are worked in many cases, ran within the middle management standpoint, not necessarily at the ownership level still today, but the ownership level today is still heavily dominated male ownership, but the majority of.

Of of agencies are operated by women. We're about 75. I don't know what the number is. Probably 75% or 80% women as far as total number of employees. So if you're a male owner, you need to do exactly what Tonya's talking about. You need to put on your listening cap. You need to understand. [00:22:00] That sometimes it's not about fixing it, and this can apply to put women owned agencies as well, because I know a lot of women owned agencies that are very type A personalities.

It's not necessarily a listening type mindset. This is just where our industry is. And it's not necessarily good or bad, it's just the way it is. Understanding those personalities, and I know there's differences, right? I know there's men that are great listeners, and I know there's women that are terrible listeners, but the norm is that men are not great listeners and women are great listeners.

That is just the way God made us. And so that is just where we are and when we get down into this. We start thinking about our employees and leading our organizations. I just think this matters. You really need to understand how people were raised, how [00:23:00] people, you know, were taught and generations, whole generations were raised different and taught different than other generations.

Tonya: What can we do for our people? We can ask, how are you really doing? We can say, is there something in your workload? Or in your process that is weighing on you right now, see how you can lighten your people's mental load? Sometimes it's just an ask, what is the hardest part, and then turning it around and saying, what is your idea of the best solution?

Shane: Yeah. I would also add to that, what do you need? Is there something you feel you need that you're not getting? Is there a tool? The low hanging fruit is going to be that I need help. Okay, so what does that mean? And then you have to break that down. That's where we [00:24:00] have been for about six months, is I need help.

That's been something that's come from our frontline and the way we decided to go about providing that help looked differently. Then what the expectation of, I'm getting help in the frontline person's mind looked like. So those two things didn't look the same. So we've had to have some conversations.

We've had to have some sit down conversations. We've had to explain the why we are hiring people, but we're hiring people in a different way. Let's just break this down and be very granular with it. An account manager or customer service rep, CSR, they're the same by this definition. They say, I need help because they're in this remarketing cycle because they're in this constant customer's complaining about their price increase, et cetera.

So their request that they need help, their [00:25:00] expectation is, is that you're gonna hire another CSR and account manager and you're going to give them some workload relief. Because you're gonna hire another person. You may not be at a place where you can do that. You may not be at a place because you're seeing the financials.

You understand that there's no extra margin within the dollar right now. You have to sit down and explain where every dollar of revenue goes. I've seen agency owners do that very well, and I've done that before. It's a good tool to start with the dollar, and this much of the dollar goes to taxes. This much of the dollar goes to payroll, this much of the dollar goes to utilities and operational cost, e and O, et cetera.

And then you get down to this is my target profit. And you explain all that. That's one way to do it. The other thing, and this is what we did, is we decided to approach capacity [00:26:00] with an alternative strategy training tools, automations. And an entirely different department that we've labeled currently a service center, because we have long-term picture in our mind that that did not make sense to the account manager on the surface.

We are hiring people over here. I don't see how that's gonna help me. We had to sit down, we had to explain it. We had to dig into how it was gonna help them. And the help was probably not gonna be 30 days out. The help was gonna be six months out. Okay. And that wasn't necessarily like warm and fuzzies for the account manager, and I understand why that wasn't warm and fuzzies, but then I had to go deeper.

Why don't I just hire one more account manager instead of going [00:27:00] all this alternative path to providing this capacity? And the answer was very simple from my vantage point that the existing account manager could not see. We have some account managers in our retail agency who have significant experience, like they know how to do their job with their eyes closed.

Hiring someone with experience in rural east Texas is very difficult. So hiring someone that's in their peer group, unless you're gonna steal 'em from another agency, steal 'em from the captive side. You're not going to find someone in rural east Texas that is going to match that. Our decision, and it's the right decision, is we hired entry level and we're gonna grow our own.

It's a long-term strategy. It's not a short-term band-aid fix. We had to get down in the weeds with our [00:28:00] translation, our clarity, our why, and once we finally figured out the expectation from our people was missing what our expectation was from an ownership and a leadership standpoint, we were able to build a bridge and say.

Here's how we're going to help you short term. We changed some processes. We told them to stop doing some things that we didn't think were necessary any longer. We got a lift in capacity increase within about 30 days. Quick bandaid, lift of capacity. Then we have a long-term strategy of building this bridge to further help them with their capacity in the end.

What's gonna happen is our account managers are gonna shift long term into two primary functions. Coverage experts, [00:29:00] retention specialist. That's what their goal's gonna be, and we're gonna get them out of, I lost my ID card. What's my bill? Add a vehicle, change my mortgage. We're gonna get them out of a lot of transactional stuff.

There's multiple ways to do that within an agency. You can go with self-service apps, entry level CSRs that you get licensed that require a little less experience that can do some of that frontline. You can go with virtual assistance, you can go with a lot of different pathways. To solve this problem for your people, understand that your employee saying I need help may have an expectation of how that help is coming, that you may need to translate and make them understand.

That help's gonna come in a different way. 

Tonya: If you have a team member that actually says, I need help, that is [00:30:00] fantastic. But also keep in mind that burnout. Doesn't always look like somebody curled up in a ball under their desk. It's not gonna be the person that comes to you and says, I need help. A lot of time burnout is, is the person that gets really quiet or they're just trying to give what don't have.

How do we as leaders pay attention and respond to our best people that are going through burnout? Our people that are loud are always gonna be loud. Our people that are loud are gonna complain when they're feeling burned out. It's when your very best people that don't complain start to have challenges that really cause problems in our agencies, 

Shane: this is the silent majority.

Most of your people are not gonna be the loud complainer or even the loud feedback. When some people are asking for help, [00:31:00] they're not complaining. They're just vocal. They're just willing to tell you. A large percentage of your people aren't willing to tell you, right? They don't want you to think that they can't do it, but they might be struggling with something, or you might see that in performance issues.

You might see that in different ways. They're telling you quietly, they're telling you silently. You've gotta pay attention, be aware of what's going on, and have some metrics. My dad grew up around cattle. His dad was a, was a cowman, east Texas, cowman. And so think about livestock auction barns, working cows.

If you're really young, think Yellowstone without all the drama. Mobster ties. Just working the ranch, getting on a horse. And my dad used to tell this story. About, he called it the fat horse theory. And you know, every day cowboys would go out early in the morning, pick their horse, [00:32:00] catch their horse, saddle up their horse, and then they would go out and they would work the cows.

They would move the cows, they would pin the cows. They would do everything that needed to run the cattle business, work the fences, and just be a rancher. And that horse you call. Was with you all day, and you worked hard as a cowman and the horse worked hard. If you're a cowboy working on a ranch, the last thing you want is a bad horse.

A bad horse, A lazy horse is going to make your day miserable. So every day the cowboy would go out and catch their horse, and they always went back to the same horse. They always went back to the same horse because they could trust that horse. There might be some horses left in the pen that were less desirable, less reliable.

In many ways, those horses got to graze all day in the pen, [00:33:00] be cut out into the Holden Pasture, and it would not be selected because the cowboy wanted the trusted horse every day. That's what we do as agency owners. We keep going back to the trusted person. We unintentionally burn them out because we keep going back to them.

That's the place that I have worked a lot on over the last 10 years, and that is areas of responsibility as our organization has grown. I need help as a leader, as an agency owner. If I keep going to the one person or the two people. Then I've got fat horses over here that I'm paying that aren't doing anything, or at least they're not pulling the same workload.

And that's where the silent burnout comes into play. The silent burnout is gonna come into play because you're going back to your workhorses and your pile piling more on your [00:34:00] workhorses. And sometimes you've gotta say, whoa. I need to back up. Sometimes I need help from a different place. I love the virtual assistant industry, what's happened for our agencies.

This is a good place for agency owners to help you with some things so that you don't keep going back to your workhorse and that your workhorse can be given that capacity back to do the things that you really need them doing. Right, growing the business, maintaining the business, not necessarily being your assistant.

Tonya: I'm gonna leave us today with this quote from LeBron James. You have to be able to accept failure to get better, and sometimes your best effort is rest, 

Shane: attitude to choice. Make a great one. 

Tonya: Bye y'all. 

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