Do you have a formal work-at-home policy? Do you allow your employees to work from home at all? As Greg recently wrote about in our second quarter edition of Compass, the work-at-home debate is top of mind. An announcement from Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!, that employees would no longer be allowed to telecommute has drummed up significant media coverage. This provision to Yahoo!’s work culture won’t begin until June—and the business world is waiting with bated breath to see how it plays out.

As Greg posits in his article, the choice of whether to allow employees to work from home is unique to the organization and often situational. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that can be applied.

Our experience at Jacobson is that allowing a work-at-home option has helped us retain high-performing employees. We have tenured workers successfully reporting in from across the country! We’ve seen tremendous success doing this with our contract employees, as well. We deploy work-at-home project teams for our clients’ critical workload fluctuations. Besides providing cost savings to our clients, it also broadens the viable candidate pool considerably. Candidates with very specific software skills and targeted experience come together virtually to complete a project in a timely fashion. However, executing this type of work requires strong project management methodology and sophisticated technology. A lot of hard work and dedication goes into making it possible.

Where do you stand on the work-at-home debate? Share your thoughts in the comments.

What do males have to do with women’s leadership issues? In our industry, men are getting involved to harness the power of women at the executive table. Our industry has long been dubbed a “boys club,” and females are certainly underrepresented in the top ranks.

Margaret Resce Milkint, managing partner at Jacobson, and David Mendelsohn, partner at DLA Piper, formed the Women’s Insurance Networking Group (WING) to tackle these issues head on. If you ask WING members what males have to do with it, their answer is “a lot!” Their vision was to form a women’s networking group where men are part of the conversation.

“Male voice, perspective and participation are crucial to our success in advancing the female leadership initiative,” says Margaret. “We need and value their active support, sponsorship and healthy push back to move forward and change the game!”

WING defines enlightened males as “those who understand the importance of diversity and equality in leadership.” The events provide a platform for women and man to sound off on the issues that affect women in leadership.

At Jacobson, we are committed to diversity awareness and an inclusive workforce. Personally, I am proud of the work Margaret is doing and honored Jacobson has the opportunity to sponsor WING.

WING’s next event is May 9^th in Chicago. It is a free luncheon that is open to all industry members. Of course, enlightened males are encouraged to attend!

For more information, or to register, click here: http://www.jacobsononline.com/EventRegistration.aspx?idEvent=396

The Jacobson Group and Ward Group have completed another iteration of the Semi-Annual Insurance Labor Market Study and the results offer a telling picture of our industry’s current landscape. Eighty-six percent of companies polled expect to grow revenue in the next 12 months. Likewise, 56 percent of respondents intend to increase staff. Both of these figures are at the highest levels reported since the study’s inception in 2009.

The primary reason to grow staff during the next 12 months continues to be an increase in business volume, with 47 percent of companies listing this as a reason to hire. Coming in second, with 46 percent of respondents, is expansion. It seems there are some exciting developments coming down the pipeline at many organizations!

This return to hiring, along with a steadily decreasing unemployment rate, do promise a difficult recruiting climate. All functional disciplines were rated by respondents of the study as “moderately difficult to fill.” As demand increases, the difficulty-to-fill measure is expected to continue its incline. While insurers will continue to be faced with recruiting challenges ahead, the outlook is mostly positive for our industry.

I invite you to view the full results summary for a closer look at these projections. If you missed the webinar, you can view the webcast here. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like more information about the study.

I’ve taken on a new goal for 2013 for myself and for The Jacobson Group, as a whole: to simplify. In that spirit, I wanted to share the latest issue of Compass. Penned by Kirk Goeldner, managing director and senior vice president at Jacobson, this month’s article compares business plans to the infamous seasonal food—fruitcake. They come around once a year, tend to be filled with junk and no one wants to “eat” them. His article proposes that we can cut the complexity this year by keeping the focus on developing talent. Simple and effective!

I invite you to read Compass and Kirk’s article here. How do you intend to simplify this year?

At the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC) Operations Conference this year, our Managing Partner Margaret Resce Milkint had the pleasure of moderating a panel on a topic that we here at Jacobson hold close: succession planning. Margaret brought a dynamic panel of CEOs and a board chairman with her to share their personal insights gleaned from all stages of the succession process. The speakers provided valuable insights from their own succession journeys.

Perhaps one of the most interesting takeaways Margaret shared with me came from an audience member.  Lee Webster, Director of Human Resources Standards with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), brought up the ROI of succession planning—certainly an issue that deserves a deeper look.  The measurement of the ROI of a succession planning process is a vital component that allows organizations to evaluate and adjust.

As Webster said, “The succession planning dialogue must include a progressive and dynamic component on the effect of choosing the right leader, as well as the effect the leader has on the capital value of the enterprise. We must create the opportunity to look at risks from a human capital point of view. When we focus on the return, we can begin to account for how well we are doing.”

This is certainly interesting food for thought for the insurance industry as the industry faces up to the challenge of an aging workforce.  As the industry strengthens its talent pipeline, we must keep the end goal in sight by continuously measuring the value of our succession and engagement strategies.

This year, The Jacobson Group is celebrating a remarkable milestone: our 40th anniversary. My father founded the company in 1971 to provide the niche professional recruiting services that the insurance industry required. Through aggressive expansion in the following years, the company accommodated client needs and widened its scope of services to include executive search, recruitment process outsourcing, work-at-home and onsite project support, and temporary and consultant-level staffing. We look forward to many more years of success and innovation as we grow and transform to solve our clients’ business challenges through strategic human capital solutions and operational support.

In the spirit of our 40th anniversary, I wanted to share an infographic detailing 40 current stats for the insurance labor market. Below is just a preview; click it to view the full infographic.

At TJG we take a couple of different approaches to understanding the changes in the labor market within our industry.  Looking backwards is relatively easy as we can simply compile the monthly BLS data that focuses on the insurance industry and see what happened – in fact we do just that and release the summarized data to our clients shortly after the BLS releases their numbers.  Click here if you want to see the February data.

As always, the more difficult and more valuable part of the exercise is to determine what is likely to happen in the future.  Well, for the past three years TJG and Ward Group have been conducting a quarterly study of the industry’s labor market to better predict future trends (you can see the latest edition summarized by Insurance Journal).

The Japanese saga playing out before our eyes is first and foremost a human tragedy that reminds all of us of the fragility of our lives and livelihoods.  Here at Jacobson, we are praying for the best outcome for the survivors.

Early estimates of insured damages are notoriously rough and so must be taken as intended: with wide margins of error. We do know that the final numbers will be large. Coupled with the costs of other recent catastrophes (Christchurch most recently), most insiders are predicting a turn in reinsurance pricing in the near future. What does this mean for the rest of the industry?

While each market is independent, they are all connected to the overall industry currents. Clearly, the property market will be impacted most directly.  Aside from steep losses, the recent catastrophes may result in increased demand for property coverage. More broadly, at some point, either market or central bank induced, U.S. and other tier 1 sovereign interest rates will rise. When they do, the impacts on the cost and availability of capital could be significant. We may be seeing the seeds of the first broad-based hard market in quite a while.