The Happiest Office in Insurance?

Are we really that good? Or is the industry just that grim?

I suspect the honest answer is: both, probably.

Insurance broking isn’t exactly famous for its electric office culture. The industry has a reputation, earned in many cases, for being transactional, pressurised, and fairly soulless. High targets. High churn. People who grind through renewals year after year, serving clients they barely know, working for companies that treat them like a quota figure rather than a human being.

That takes a toll. You can feel it in the energy of a place within about thirty seconds of walking through the door.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe: the clients feel it too. Maybe not consciously. But they feel it.

Our research into what New Zealand business owners actually want from an insurance partner keeps returning to the same emotional core: they want to feel genuinely looked after. They want to sense that the person on the other end of the phone, or across the desk, actually cares. That this isn’t just a transaction to them either.

You can’t fake that. And you definitely can’t manufacture it with a culture strategy document or a Friday afternoon team-building exercise.

Culture isn’t a programme. It’s a consequence.

I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters: the energy at Gerrards is not something I created. It’s not the result of a management initiative, an HR framework, or a motivational speaker we brought in. I can’t take credit for it, and frankly, it would be a little insulting to our team to suggest otherwise.

The people at Gerrards drive the culture. Full stop.

Culture is a consequence of who you hire, how they treat each other, what they choose to care about, and whether they actually give a damn about the people they’re serving. No leader builds that unilaterally. At best, you create conditions where good people can do what good people naturally want to do.

What I can do, what any leader can do, is refuse to tolerate the things that corrode it. The cynicism. The shortcuts. The treating of clients as policy numbers rather than people with real fears and real businesses at stake. The moment you let those things slide, you’ve started building a different kind of office. One where people clock in, go through the motions, and drain a little bit of life out of themselves every day.

That’s not the place we’re trying to build. And I think our team knows that, not because I’ve told them, but because they’ve chosen it.

Why this matters for the clients we serve

The business owners we work with are, in many cases, carrying real weight. They lie awake wondering whether they’ve covered the right risks. They sign contracts and feel a knot in their stomach because they’re not entirely sure their insurance will hold up if something goes wrong. They’ve often been burnt before, by a claim that got denied, a broker who disappeared after the sale, or a policy that turned out to mean something very different to the insurer than it did to them.

When someone like that walks into our office, or calls us, or sits across from one of our brokers, they are not just looking for the right product. They are looking for a reason to trust. They are reading the energy of the room. They are asking themselves, unconsciously, whether the person in front of them actually cares.

A happy team, genuinely happy, not performatively so, gives people permission to exhale. It signals that this is a place where things are done properly. Where people show up because they want to. Where the work matters to the people doing it.

That’s not a soft, feel-good observation. That’s a commercial reality. Trust is the entire game in insurance broking. And trust starts with whether someone feels, on a gut level, that the people they’re dealing with are genuinely invested.

The standard I’m actually aiming for

I said earlier that I have high standards, and that we still have a long way to go by my measure. I mean that genuinely, it’s not false modesty.

But I’ve been thinking about what that standard actually looks like when you articulate it. And I think it comes down to this: I want every single person who works at Gerrards to feel that this is genuinely one of the best places they’ve ever worked. Not because the perks are great or the office is nice. But because the work means something. Because they’re surrounded by people who give a damn. Because when a client calls stressed and worried, they get to be the person who actually helps.

That’s a high bar. We’re not there yet. But hearing that we’re already the standout in the industry, by the assessment of someone who’s seen the landscape broadly, tells me the foundations are real.

Which means the question isn’t whether we can get there. It’s just how far we’re willing to push.

To the Gerrards team

This one’s for you. Not me.

You’re the reason someone walks into our office and feels the difference. You’re the reason a client hangs up the phone feeling a little less anxious than when they called. You’re the reason an industry veteran, someone who has seen hundreds of offices, stops and notices.

No manager builds that. No process creates it. You did.

Now let’s keep going.

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