How to promote diversity in your insurance agency

Boost your insurance agency's success by focusing on diversifying it.

Across all lines of business, diversity is a key area of focus. It is critical to a workplace's success to ensure that employee gender and racial composition accurately reflect the overall population and to know how to manage diverse teams effectively. 

Having a properly-diversified team could help your agency: 

• Increase its financial standings
• Select employees from a larger pool of qualified candidates
• Work with a larger portion of prospects
• Boost employee retention rates and save on turnover costs as workers are shown to be happier in diverse environments
• Foster greater understanding across a broad variety of audiences (which is key for agencies who place an importance on specialization!)
• Increase innovation, creativity and adaptation skills

Diversity isn't just a great business (or purely human) practice, it's also sorely needed. 

According to builtin.com, recent eye-opening stats on workplace diversity include:

• Groups previously seen as “minority” status will reach majority status by 2044
• Millennials are predicted to encompass about 75% of the workforce by 2025
• 43% of companies that have diverse boards also noticed higher profits
• 35% of racially & ethnically diverse companies are likely to perform better

How can you help cultivate diversity within your insurance agency?

First, recognize that it's going to take time and commitment. You'll need to work on welcoming new perspectives and ideas from other cultures, lifestyles and experience, and focus on increasing your cultural competency by educating yourself on various cultural work traditions and practices.

You can get started by looking into educational seminars and trainings on diversity, learning from people of other races and ethnicities and working each day to foster an environment where different people and perspectives are deeply valued. 

5 Diversity resources available immediately online: 

• Test your implicit biases and learn how you can become more inclusivity-minded with Project Implicit from Harvard. 
• Use this toolkit from the University of Southern California to tackle diversity head-on as a team. 
• Unsure how to bring diversity and inclusion training to your agency? This article from Medium will help.
• Employ these 52 strategies from Lever to  start a diversity conversation in your agency. 

As all companies, including us at Glatfelter, strive to reach ever-increasing success—it's important to recognize the critical role that diversity and inclusion play in that journey. We hope to continue to diversify our team and inspire you to do the same.