In the field of insurance, employees are expected to work hard, sometimes staying at the office late into the night. However, people who do it too often don’t impress Jared Seyl. In fact, the Farmers Insurance Denver District manager believes that overtime is something to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. He also thinks that being busy for the sake of being busy doesn’t really add any value at all to one’s work.
Researchers at Columbia University recently found out that busy-ness is generally perceived as a status symbol. For many people, the busier they are, the closer they think they are to greatness. However, being busy by itself does nothing if the work doesn’t have a purpose. For example, when Jared Seyl joined Farmers Insurance, he noticed that people kept stacks of paper on their desks. When he asked one agent about the workload, the agent replied, “Oh, I’m actually done with all of them, but people here don’t like empty desks.” When he asked further, he found out that the agent was actually one of the most efficient in the district, but was afraid to let people know how easy the work seemed for him.
Stories like the one above aren’t unusual to Jared Seyl. Fortunately, Farmers Insurance is working on initiatives to reduce the amount of busy work that people do. Customer service representatives’ call queues have been reduced significantly thanks to chatbots that answer simple queries. This gives them the freedom to take on more complex calls. In addition, customers can now use Alexa to access their policies, among other things. As chatbots take in more calls, they learn more about their callers’ needs, such as the most frequently asked questions and most mentioned search terms.
However, for Jared Seyl and Farmers Insurance, these technologies are not out to take away jobs from humans. Instead, they are designed to make humans’ lives easier through the reduction of busy work.
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