Empowering Our People

“Together, we bring the collective power of diverse ideas and skills. Everyone has the power to make a difference.”

Our people are our greatest asset and our corporate culture is the most important intangible value driver of our superior long-term risk-adjusted returns and growth in stockholder value. We empower our people to lead, to be accountable and to thrive. We work nimbly, energized by a business structure that brings proactive decision making to the local level — localized with global resources. We are focused on creating a respectful, rewarding, diverse and inclusive work environment that allows our employees to build meaningful careers. The success of these human capital management objectives is essential to our strategy, as it is our people who drive our success. We invest in their growth as individuals and professionals through training and engagement, as well as in their well-being through robust health and wellness programs and a commitment to diversity.

Engaging Our People Throughout Our Work-from-Home Journey

As it became apparent in the spring of 2020 that shutdowns and social distancing would become the status quo for the foreseeable future, we recognized that our current initiatives that focused on employee health, safety and productivity would not be enough to support our employees through these difficult and uncertain times and maintain our culture. In addition to providing access to emotional and mental well-being resources, we took further steps to keep our employees engaged and connected while maintaining our social distance. Among other things, the human resources team developed a monthly flip-book newsletter entitled Berkley’s Work from Home Journey, journaling some of the creative and entertaining ways individuals and their families are working, laughing, staying fit and getting closer to one another, all while continuing to physically distance. We celebrated holidays and milestones, recognized frontline workers, volunteers and the unsung heroes of IT who keep us all going, and promoted our Innovation Through People initiative. We shared the challenges of working from home, targeting those who were trying to balance work with caring for children who were experiencing new ways of learning, and soon learned that those living alone who may have relied on their workplace as a means of social interaction had their own unique issues. Engagement has been high, with scores of colleagues sharing their stories and the majority of our employees reading each issue of the newsletter. We are reminded that at Berkley, Everything Counts, Everyone Matters.®

Fostering an Innovative Mindset

We pursue innovation in a classically Berkley way — with an emphasis on the contribution of every individual employee. In 2017, we embarked on an ongoing innovation journey that engages all employees and has a foundation in the development of behaviors that foster an innovative mindset to build upon our entrepreneurial culture and roots. We have created a dedicated Innovation Through People brand for innovation at Berkley, along with an internal education and awareness campaign to deepen employee engagement in this important pillar of our organization. We have also built an online curriculum and resource library to ensure the framework’s sustainability and upgraded our tool for company-wide idea engagement. The program is championed and supported at the corporate level, while each operating unit has been tasked with building its own framework for supporting our innovation behaviors and building the processes necessary to sustain an innovative practice and culture using these tools. In 2021, we are focused on reframing our view of failure to see it as a learning experience. To date, we have tracked 13,139 innovative ideas, with 436 approved for experimentation, 416 approved for implementation and 739 implemented.

Nurturing Our Entrepreneurial Spirit

Berkley’s long-standing tradition of empowering our people and supporting them as they develop new ways to serve our customers is deeply rooted in our entrepreneurial culture and history. As an organization founded with a mere $2,500 that has grown to over $8 billion in annual revenue by founding 46 of our 53 operating units, we know that good ideas need to be nurtured. In 2020, the team at Berkley One piloted a new way to increase their new business hit ratio. They recognized that abandoned quote quality was high and that engaging with agents in real time to help them improve the quotes was key to success. So they set out to learn how to triage those abandoned quotes to find the ones with the best potential for conversion. An outstanding performer from its customer service team was moved to the sales team and provided the autonomy to work on this experiment full-time, using the powerful information in Berkley One’s database to target engagement with high precision. Berkley One’s agents began thinking of the sales team as “guardian angels” because of the speed and accuracy of their engagement, which enabled them to efficiently close on a greater percentage of new accounts. They then built a model that optimizes the process by informing sales associates which submissions they should engage on and the reason why they should call to proactively engage. The project team is now taking their show on the virtual road to share their learnings with other Berkley operating units.