Startups are no longer the little brothers of big corporations. They’re not only competing, but in some cases, they’re winning the battle for market share. Many are following the lean startup model, which incorporates a “work smarter, not harder” mentality to eliminate bureaucratic headaches and constantly improve.
Just like agile startups, insurance agencies must constantly learn and iterate to improve their base products. Becoming a lean organization begins with addressing inefficiencies and ensuring that constant improvement is the status quo.
These four strategies can help agencies stay lean and keep improving:
1. Build a culture of introspection
Inertia is one of the most challenging barriers to process innovation. If you don’t regularly take a step back and examine whether a process is necessary or optimized, you run the risk of continuing to do what you do because that’s how you’ve always done it. Benefits are too important to people to keep things stagnant, so if something doesn’t work, change it. Never get attached to a sunk cost.
2. Automate inefficiencies and manual processes
Paper-based businesses should not exist in 2016. Agencies must find ways to cut the paper out of their workflows and bring their records and communications into the digital age. Not only does automation make processes faster and less labor-intensive, it also makes everything more accurate — and that’s a big deal in benefits.
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