Quarterly Review | Fall 2024

Employees have been working remotely since as early as the 1990s’¹ but its benefits to employers and the workforce crystallized during the Covid-19 pandemic. As governments mandated distancing measures to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus, the opportunity to enable remote work meant that work productivity didn’t have to drop even when coming into the office was not an option. In Canada, remote work trends peaked in April 2020 with 40 per cent of paid employees working most of their hours from home and even though that trend has since declined, 20 per cent of the workforce remains remote as of 2023².

According to C.D. Howe Institute³ worker education level and age, and employer size all play a role in the desire and capability to work remote and hybrid. And in the insurance and finance industry, remote work arrangements remain popular with 65 per cent of employees having some work-from-home arrangement.

While the force that caused the shift from in-office to remote and hybrid work was mandatory, the practical benefits have become apparent to many. But employers are seeking ways to balance operational and business needs with employee expectations, including the flexibility that comes with not being required to work from an office full time.

This Fall 2024 Quarterly Review will explore attitudes, arrangements and requirements to successfully implement hybrid and remote work arrangements and why some employees are keen on returning to the office full-time. There are basic practices around providing resources and training but beyond that, remote and hybrid work requires establishing and growing a new kind of workplace culture in order to maximize employees’ skills and so that organizations, management and employees can all reap the benefits.

Carrie Bell, Head of Claims Operations at AEGIS London Managing Agency, said as a Lloyd’s of London syndicate, the company followed the marketplace’s protocol on remote work when the Covid-19 pandemic distancing measures came into effect. Despite the marketplace’s tendency towards office-based working, the pandemic enabled AEGIS London to set employees up to work from home. And the benefits were clear: work productivity increased.

In an effort to build cohesive teams and a strong work culture, AEGIS has since transitioned into a hybrid work environment where employees are required to come into the office 50 per cent of their work week and have the flexibility to decide when that is.

“The Lloyd’s marketplace was traditional before Covid, in that the majority of work was in office, some people didn’t have laptops or remote meeting resources, so the change was huge,” Bell said. “There was a natural uncertainty as to how people would work but it revealed some positives like a bigger focus on productivity versus hours of work. And productivity soared and absences were down.”

She said focusing on building a strong work culture means ensuring her staff are set up for career development and progression. In her experience, this has been challenging to manage remotely. She works primarily from AEGIS’ Canadian location and meets the claims team of 18 staff, in person, up to five times a year.

“For personal and professional progression, providing constructive feedback and clear goals is required, even when productivity is consistent,” Bell said. “This is more difficult when you don’t see your employees in action and, as a manager, you have to be aware of that and seek out that information and manage expectations of yourself and others.”

She added that managing a lean team means that everyone’s plate is full, which requires even more transparency, trust and communication so team members have each other’s backs.

“This takes self-awareness for employees and managers,” Bell said. “Making sure work culture stays alive is necessary in any work arrangement and it can be achieved remotely, but it needs extra effort.”

Neal Jardine is Global Director of Cyber Risk Intelligence and Claims at Boxx Insurance, a cyber risk insurer, which has a fully remote workforce of about 100 employees across Canada and the U.S.

He said regardless of whether workplaces are setting employees up for fully remote work or hybrid, providing physical resources and cyber training is important.

“We have to set people up to work effectively at home and look at ways to spend more money on them being comfortable there,” Jardine said, adding that cyber security training and having strong cyber practices are a must, for example ensuring people know how to respond to a suspicious email or link.

“Employees need to be trained on this, reminded to follow protocol, and rewarded for flagging suspicious items,” he said. “We have to encourage behaviour that works with cyber security, not just punish mistakes.”

He said another challenge with fully remote work is employees can find it hard to disconnect.

“It can cause issues with work-life balance because work is always available,” Jardine said. “It’s the responsibility of the company to communicate expectations around replying to emails and make it very clear when actions and responses are expected.”

Boxx Insurance was founded in 2018 and has had a physical office in Toronto since. But soon after the company became fully remote as leaders found that arrangement opened up a pool of skilled workers otherwise unavailable to them, giving them a competitive edge.

Jardine, who joined in 2022, said being limited to hiring in one urban area, for example, companies tend to hire from the same pool of employees as competitors in that specific location. Hiring remote employees allows the company to choose skill over location.

“This opens up our ability to work with different people who, under different circumstances, could not work for us, whether it be physical abilities, commute length and cost, or other reasons,” Jardine said.

Ernest Mashingaidze is Branch Manager at independent adjuster ClaimsPro at their London, Ont. offices. He manages a team of eight adjusters whose career stages range from entry level to experienced.

He said when it comes to working from the office, he has noticed a difference between what newer employees want compared to seasoned employees with two-year tenure at the company or longer. His office provides a hybrid work policy but offers flexibility in terms of which days the employee decides to come into the office.

“New hires — even when you offer them hybrid options — they come in 100 per cent of the time because they find more value being in the office from learning by osmosis,” Mashingaidze said. “That’s how they learn more and find more of a rich training experience. More seasoned adjusters use their desk time differently.”

Bell at AEGIS said employees can remain engaged through remote work but building company culture through remote work and retaining employees is top of mind for her. She sees benefits of in-office work for everyone but, like Mashingaidze, particularly for entry-level employees.

“There’s unconscious learning that happens in the office that develops key skills that are not just about business,” Bell said. “It fosters networking skills and builds relationships with colleagues internally and in other departments and allows for the development of technical and core skills and knowledge transfer between employees of retiring age and new entrants. These things are possible to achieve in a fully remote environment — it’s just harder.”

Bell hires mostly for entry level positions and is focused on staff retention and their career progression. Not just on her team but within the company. She questions what happens to culture if care isn’t taken to build and retain it in a hybrid work environment.

“Some of our most junior staff understand how to work remotely but one thing they are struggling with is that a collective collaboration is missing and fostering that in a hybrid environment can be hit and miss,” Bell said. “If an employee doesn't feel they belong to a team, there are problems that need immediate attention. We want to retain the right people within the organization even if they move into another department and my goal is to foster a place where people want to work.”

Mashingaidze said there are shifts happening now both from the perspective of employee expectations and demographic changes in the industry. This underscores the imperative of finding a balance between what employees want and need, maintaining successful business operations and ensuring customer satisfaction.

“As baby boomers retire, there’s going to be a vacuum in leadership, and at the same time consumer, employer and employee expectations are changing and we want to retain and motivate staff so that they stay at one organization,” he said. “As employers we have to set our staff for success to manage productivity.”

He said maximizing new employee success requires communicating performance expectations and indicators and showing them a path forward to reap the benefits of remote work, which requires high trust between employer and employee.

Jardine at Boxx Insurance said setting up new employees up for success in a remote work environment starts during the hiring process. Perhaps counterintuitively, part of that is meeting them in person. This is both to get a deeper sense of how they will fit in with the team and also to build trust.

“Vetting people remotely is different because we are relying on a virtual presence so after initial interview stages, we make sure we meet them in person,” Jardine said. “Hiring is a major undertaking; we are adding a person to the team and have to make sure they fit in. And this goes beyond skills and expertise, we have to make sure they are engaged and interested in insurance and specifically cyber risk. We don’t always hire people who have insurance experience but have skills that are transferable and valuable.”

To establish confidence and comfortability of being fully remote, new employee onboarding has evolved over time at Boxx Insurance. An adapted onboarding process that prioritizes getting to know people and explaining business objectives and expectations can relieve complications down the road.

“Onboarding is about setting expectations around productivity and goals and for the employee to understand the role,” Jardine said. “How they work is up to them but how they fit into the company is our responsibility and onboarding is a guide to that.”

He said remote workers are generally happier working in an environment where they’re comfortable and they can work at their own pace. People have better work-life balance and can get more value out of the eight-hour workday because they are not beholden to office hours or dreading a commute. Jardine suggested this stress can impede professionals’ ability to do a good job.

The onus, however, is on the company to build a cohesive work culture where employees feel included, empowered and confident in how to get the work done.

“Retaining remote employees is different,” Jardine said. “In office, employees have the added incentive to stay because of the people they work with and location. In a remote work environment there’s fear that there is a diminished social aspect tying employees to the company, making it even more important to create a digital culture and work environment.”

He said what works at Boxx Insurance is building trust and transparency around expectations, having fewer meetings where only staff directly involved in projects are required to attend, and to schedule social meetings held purely so colleagues can get to know each other.

In this new reality that blends remote and in-office work, employers’ hiring criteria goes beyond the technical ability, while still screening for the best talent. When hiring for remote and hybrid roles, core skills like effective communication, time management, and confidence are highly weighted. In fact, the ability to work effectively as part of a team outside a traditional office could be considered a new type of skill in itself.

At AEGIS, Bell said setting up new employees for hybrid work has been easier when hiring younger staff who are new to their careers.

“A lot of new people in the workforce just went through university in the period of remote learning because of the pandemic, so they know how to be productive remotely,” she said. “For that level of work experience, I’m hiring more based on character and aptitude and a capacity to learn and be independent, and they’re success at university speaks for itself.”

Jardine at Boxx Insurance explained he pays attention to different types of skills he didn’t give as much weight to before.

“Working remotely requires a different skill set, our employees have to be more outgoing and comfortable reaching out to others remotely, which is different from running into someone and striking up a conversation in the office,” he said. “But the company has to set it up so that new employees feel comfortable — it’s completely different from the ‘water cooler conversations’.”

Boxx Insurance has set up specific processes to foster these skills. They hire for that trait but make sure that meetings and projects are set up specifically so that employees can use their skills effectively and understand at the outset who they can reach out to and when.

Mashingaidze said hybrid policies tailored to make sure employees’ skills are maximized are important but the imperative for independent adjusters to balance in office and remote work is not new — hybrid work has been part of their job requirements long before new policies and procedures were put in place to comply with social distancing measures. Responding to claims often requires being in the field and working away from the office. Essentially, hybrid work is built into the nature of being an independent adjuster.

“Adjusters are challenged with balancing workload and unpredictability of responding to a claim, sometimes frequently,” he said. “And they need desk time to manage their work and be productive.”

And under the current policy of coming into the office a specific number of days, Mashingaidze makes an effort to ensure face-to-face time is well spent for both management and employees.

“Our in-office days are strategic, and we try to focus on tasks where there is a need for a lot of people to come together and collaborate,” Mashingaidze said. “We reserve remote time for focused, individual work and that can create a nice balance.”

He added that no day is ever the same for an adjuster. Claims are urgent and can come up at any time, sometimes requiring staff to reschedule a whole day. This underscores the importance of providing flexibility for in-office work.

“Independent adjusters have to manage their priorities and time,” Mashingaidze said. “We are dealing with real people who have real problems — as hard as the job is on an employee, it’s harder on the person we are helping.”