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Open it up

Insurance premium finance company finds office redesign opens more than just eyes

By John Chivvis

Late last year, Kansas City-based UPAC—a nationwide insurance premium finance company—completed the construction of the company’s new office. Just imagine what a 53-year-old company that deals with insurance and finance must have built.

Now imagine the exact opposite, and you have UPAC’s new headquarters. According to Kurt Huffman, UPAC president and CEO, the facilities are a reminder and a reinforcement of who the company is. In a word, it’s all about being “open.”

Open areas

“In a nutshell, we were at a point where we needed more space,” begins Huffman. “We pride ourselves on offering old-fashioned service and leading-edge technology, so we decided that our new space needed to reflect that.”

Throughout the construction of the new workspace environment, Huffman embraced the notion that “our space should conform to us, and not us conform to the space.”

But what did that mean? Huffman, along with business partner Tim O’Neil and UPAC associates, began evaluating their mission and realized that they could use their office space to reinforce their identity and their core values. “We’re kind of like the E&S of premium finance, so our job is to fit in our clients’ [insurance agencies] ‘boxes’ and not try to force them into one of ours,” says Huffman.

“Old-fashioned service also means working directly with clients,” continues Huffman, “and if you want to foster creativity, you can’t have a traditional workplace environment.”

From an organizational model, Huffman saw hypocrisy. Where UPAC was striving to think outside of the box, they were working in boxes—offices, cubicles, and closed conference rooms. While they were striving to offer old-fashioned service, an outdated organizational environment was inhibiting their ability to work with their colleagues and their clients.

Now the UPAC headquarters can claim to be completely out of the box.

Why? Simply because there are no boxes—no offices, no cubicles, no conference rooms.

What you see is every opportunity for people to work with people, whether it is extra movable seating for ad hoc meetings, bistro tables for close communication, open conference areas, or extra computers in common gathering areas for collaboration.

Openness extends to innovative lighting that includes skylights and light reflecting surfaces to bring in more outside light. UPAC even had the contractors knock out part of a wall for a patio with grill, umbrellas, and heaters for year-round, associate use. On a weekly basis, Huffman (who includes “coffee maker” and “supplies buyer” as part of his CEO duties) stocks a full commercial kitchen with healthful snacks for associates, and there is even a fitness/stress relief equipment area.

The shift to the open model now reflects the organizational culture. Huffman explains that most hierarchical office models put the CEO in the big corner office, management and middle management in offices around the perimeter, and everyone else in cubicles in the middle.

“When you have multiple layers in an organization, the culture of the organization tends to get lost in translation,” says Huffman. “We compressed our organizational chart down to where I have more managers who are specialized at what they and their respective teams do. There’s only one layer between everybody, so we have a lot more direct contact with each other.”

With no offices or cubicles, each associate workspace is part of four-person areas called “pods.” Using a mixture of low walls (four feet high or lower) and wider pod placement, each associate still has the feeling of privacy, but yet is still part of the whole UPAC team.

When UPAC moved into its new space, associates also agreed to random seating. A deck of playing cards was dealt—one card per chair/workspace. Then a second deck was shuffled and one card was dealt out to each associate. Their workspace was wherever the matching card was.

This included Huffman who now shares a pod with “a credit guy, a training person, and a marketing assistant.” Admits Huffman, “We’ve always had an open door policy, so now we’re living it.”

Open communication

One of the main reasons for the random seating was to create a more cohesive work environment not based on departments or job specialty. The open area fosters open communication that Huffman calls “accidental communication” and “cross-group awareness.”

“We learned about accidental communication before our move, when we were tight on space and we had to put an operations associate in right next to the IT department,” explains Huffman. “It turns out the IT people learned more about what we do in those two months than they had in two years, picking up the lingo and the things that went on from the operations person.”

Huffman says that even though the workspaces are open, the facility employs a mixture of music studio sound baffling and ambient white noise that lets associates talk and take phone calls without disturbing others.

Huffman likens it to a restaurant. “With a cube or an office with high walls, people have a sense that it is more private so their normal voice level is louder; but when you are in a restaurant, your voice is a little bit lower because the walls are lower,” he explains. “Also like a restaurant, you are able to pick up bits and pieces of a conversation or some words here and there.”

Cross-group awareness is what occurs from accidental communication and random seating. Using the example of the operations person and the IT department, Huffman says that the flip side of the story was that the operations associate developed greater empathy for what the IT folks had to deal with.

“What makes this so effective is that you learn more about each other because you are not in your cliques (personal or departmental),” says Huffman. “You see people pull together as co-workers, not as departments—with all of the competition and selfishness.”

Open minds

A creative environment means creative thinking, and creative thinking means creative solutions. Huffman should know, as he is able to recount numerous times when vendors, architects, contractors, and even associates said, “It can’t be done.”

This was the answer to knocking out a wall of a commercial “white-box” office building for a patio. This was the answer to requests for skylights. This was the answer to dealing with the noise potential from mailing machines. This was the answer to even spreading people out randomly.

However, instead of seeing it as the end, each time Huffman and O’Neil would reply with the question, “I know we can’t, but if we could, how would we do it?” This simple question, Huffman says, opened the door to a new round of discussion. “Almost every time that someone said it couldn’t be done,” adds Huffman, “we were able to find a solution.”

Open minds are key to creativity, and that also gives each associate a greater sense of empowerment to seek his or her own solution. “When you had departments all together in one area, the tendency was to say, ‘Let me go check with my manager’ and let the manager handle it,” says Huffman. “The manager was too busy handling the hot potatoes to manage—to plan, direct, and review.”

Now when a call comes in, the associate can perhaps see the manager somewhere else in the workplace but is empowered to make a decision right then and there and then go over it later with the manager. Each associate now has the opportunity to find ways to “raise the bar.”

“Raising the bar” has enabled UPAC associates to become more effective in providing old-fashioned service and solutions. “We chose effectiveness over efficiency because what we’ve done with our facilities may not be the most efficient, but we get the best work done,” confesses Huffman. “It’s not inexpensive in the short term, but we’ve never been focused on the short term.”

By building a space that represents the UPAC values, Huffman says that they have seen less turnover, greater work levels from their associates, and are experiencing greater camaraderie and trust. “And when people are more respected, they are more effective,” adds Huffman.

Huffman says that UPAC is now able to recruit top-notch associates, by creating an open and inviting environment. “We compete for clients, but we also compete for talent,” says Huffman, “You know how they say that if you win business on rate, you’ll lose it on rate, well it is the same with associates—if you win on salary, you’ll lose on salary, so I better have better resources.”

Huffman points out that some UPAC associates came from larger brokerages. They were burned out and wanted to work someplace where they could “use their gift.” Others didn’t fit in with their prior employer’s system for a variety of reasons but UPAC saw value in them. It was UPAC’s atmosphere that was the selling point. “We’re more about building relationships—we want people to retire from here,” says Huffman.

Open talk

Basically, Huffman brings it all back to the company “walking the talk” on all levels, and the space is just a reminder or reaffirmation. While Huffman notes that UPAC’s design is not for everyone, his point is that “your office and your organization should match your culture and your values.”

Huffman realizes that for UPAC to offer “old-fashioned service using leading edge technology,” it means more than “white walls, grey carpet, and grey cubes” and the mindset behind it. And the strategy has UPAC associates embracing a new and “open” way of doing business.

“It’s not perfect, but we’re on the right path,” reflects Huffman. “I kind of feel like we’ve pushed the envelope a bit.” *

The author
John Chivvis is a Texas-based writer who specializes in topics of technology implementation. His work has appeared in a number of national and regional publications.

For more information:
UPAC
Web site: www.upac.com

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