Executive Outlook 2022: Warren Griffiths, FCA Insurance Brokers

Warren Griffiths, president, FCA Insurance Brokers

Talent was a big part of what we were doing in 2021. Finding talent, coaching, mentoring and trying to bring in new people. We don’t have high turn over but we do have some retirements. Just replacing people in this environment was difficult and I’ve heard that from other brokers as well. It’s the most challenging market to hire people in that I have seen in over 20 years.

We’re going to have the ability to attract the best and brightest talent because we have a different culture and a different offering. We’re employee-owned and maintaining that is important for us. It’s definitely a benefit for the employee. There’s a potential opportunity for people to participate in ownership at some point in their careers, which is unique. And the focus of the brokerage is on the long term and the clients, rather than metrics.

Company culture is also key. You really have to work hard at building it in a virtual world. There’s a lot of talent out there, but everybody’s striving for the same people.

The challenges in 2022 are going to stem from all the lessons we learned from 2021: maintaining a culture in this virtual or hybrid world is important for employee retention, employee engagement and finding new talent. We’ve always cared about it, but now there is renewed focus.

From an on-the-ground perspective, we have a feeling from talking to insurance companies that the market is going to be shifting. The market softening. We just have to watch our retention at that point, because it’s one thing when we’re in the hard market and every insurance company was putting through increases. But we suspect in 2022 that everybody won’t be doing it at the exact same time.

See all the 2022 Outlooks here.