Are Your Business Insurance & Employee Benefits Teams Talking? They Should Be

Build an effective insurance strategy with confidence

Ensuring the long-term success and safety of your business means regularly managing multiple priorities, such as remaining compliant, anticipating customers’ needs, overseeing vendor relationships, fostering a healthy corporate culture, and attracting top talent.

As you focus on sustained growth for your business, it’s vitally important to financially protect your business from the liabilities it faces and build a positive work environment to attract and retain top talent. Working in partnership with a cross-functional insurance advisory team will help you best leverage the available business insurance and employee benefits options to protect your bottom line and your people.

It’s important to remember that with business insurance, you can’t set it and forget it. Maintaining optimal alignment with changing business needs takes careful consideration, continuous fine tuning, and open communication.

Approach insurance as a team

Although business insurance and employee benefits teams manage different corporate risks, they do not operate in silos. Understanding how they intersect can better position you to maximize their value and build an integrated insurance strategy.

So, what’s the best way to align business goals, business insurance, and employee benefits? The answer is different for every enterprise, but working with a singular broker partner that has advisory teams with proven expertise in all areas of business insurance and employee benefits pays dividends for organizations in a variety of ways. The right teams working together will help deliver the most effective and streamlined solutions.

Working with one integrated team helps build an optimized approach to risk management that will:

Reduce communication silos

When advisory teams from a singular broker partner work with you on your business insurance and employee benefits offerings, it’s easier for your advisory teams to maintain open channels of communication. Through improved communication, the teams can develop a more comprehensive, continuous view of your changing business and workforce needs. This enables them to be nimbler and adapt your insurance portfolio in tandem with business changes as they arise versus being reactive.

If you’ve ever played a game of telephone, then you probably know how easily critical information can fall through the cracks as one person passes it on to another. The same thing can happen if you work with different broker partners for your insurance needs. When you have an integrated team of advisors working together on your full insurance portfolio, it’s easier for them to communicate about how your business insurance program and employee benefits offerings align with your overarching business goals. This is typically more challenging to do if you’re working with more than one broker partner, and you’ll likely have to spend more of your own valuable time coordinating communication between various parties.

With an integrated team under one partner, a call to one member of your team alerts every member of your team. Fewer communication silos amount to improved synergy, efficiency, and potential cost savings.

Maximize efficiency and collaboration

As part of the same broker partner, business insurance and employee benefits teams working with your company should establish a regular meeting cadence to discuss the challenges, changes, and concerns impacting your company. Think of these teams as air traffic controllers – providing oversight and coordination on your behalf. This empowers both teams to determine how they can improve your risk management strategy, while getting the best terms for coverage from insurance company partners.

By meeting regularly, client advisory teams build a deep knowledge base of the head and tailwinds your company faces, becoming deeply familiar with its operational DNA. It’s also their job to act as a relationship manager between you and insurance company partners, identify potential coverage gaps and overlaps, and collaborate with you to create a culture of risk management that best represents your risk to insurance company partners. When your business insurance and employee benefits live with different broker partners that don’t work collaboratively, your company may lose out on the benefits of those critical insights.

Improve outcomes through synchronicity

Sometimes information that nominally impacts a business insurance coverage can impact rates and provisions available from benefit insurance company partners and vice versa. For example, if you add work locations in different states, this affects both business insurance and employee benefits – your team will be able to advise you not just about statutory requirements impacting your health, disability, and absence, but also how to navigate workers’ compensation in those states.

As part of the same team, your business insurance and benefits advisors can regularly participate in conversations that more easily allow them to identify inflection points that might trigger changes in other coverages. Consider your renewals – by being involved in renewal conversations with one another, it’s easier for your advisory teams to glean insights that that they can leverage for other coverages to obtain better terms.

Access many solutions with one team

When your business insurance and employee benefits professionals are part of the same team, the benefits for you are multifaceted. Beyond helping you with compliance, renewal strategy, and risk management, working with one broker partner for all your needs can make it easier to identify coverage gaps and overlaps, resulting in potential savings. With the different areas of your organization’s insurance and loss controls aligned with one another, this can also help improve your claims resiliency.  

Additionally, you might find that when your business insurance and employee benefits strategies are in lockstep with one another, you’re able to create a meaningful culture of safety at your organization. Underwriters look favorably upon organizations that demonstrate that they’re making investments in safety and loss controls. And your workforce will also feel more valued and satisfied if you create a safe workplace with attractive benefits. Workplace safety plays a vital role in attracting, retaining, and enhancing the productivity of employees.

Select the right broker, with assurance

Consolidating your company’s insurance portfolio with one broker partner has proven to deliver effective results for our clients. The goal of maintaining one partner to oversee your risk management portfolio is to have a clear picture of the totality of your risk, so you can work together to be proactive managing it, identify areas of cost savings, and mitigate potential areas of loss. Because orchestrating your business insurance and employee benefits needs can get complicated quickly, doing your due diligence when choosing your advisory firm can help ensure that they have the necessary experience to deliver the desired results for your company.

Consider these important areas as you talk with advisory teams:

• Cost effectiveness
• Insurance partner relationships
• Industry expertise
• Client services
• Claims support
• Breadth and depth of resources
• Approach to renewals
• Employee benefits capabilities
• Business insurance strategies

Our advisory teams will work with you to understand your risk in its totality, determine how changes in your business impact your employee benefits offerings and overall ability to manage risk, and collaborate regularly as a team to ensure the best outcome for you. We value each client as a partner and strive to become an extension of your team.

Let’s create a partnership that benefits your company.