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The Once and Future C&F - C&F Now
C &F was well on its way to becoming a great place to work. As we channeled that great-place-to-work energy externally, we were becoming a great company to do business with. We were growing and the underwriting results kept getting better. Then the pandemic hit. As happened with most people, the pandemic shutdown took me by surprise. Overnight, we went from 52 offices to over 3,000. Fortunately, our infrastructure and decentralized organization were well suited for the transition. Even so, by the Friday of the first work-from-home week, I realized that people were anxious to know how we were going to navigate the situation, so I thought it would be a good idea to check in on how everyone was doing. In the early going, I wrote weekly check-ins to keep everyone informed of what was going on as the pandemic unfolded. Many people were having a tough time adjusting, and the check-in notes gave them a direct connection to me. As we settled into the work-from-home rhythm, I took on a wider range of topics — personal anecdotes, career advice, entertaining pictures, book recommendations, technical topics. I even included our comprehensive quarterly President’s Report (which previously only went to Fairfax) - giving our people a new level of transparency into the company’s operations. The notes turned out to be a great way for me to communicate with people throughout the company. People seem to enjoy them — even now, a couple hundred check-ins later. If there was a silver lining to COVID-19, it is that I was forced to look at many aspects of our business from a fresh perspective. In particular, I realized we had optimized our culture around our large offices. For those people in the smaller field offices (or the several hundred employees who
were already working remotely), the culture could be very different — and the big events in the home office were not particularly impactful if you were 1,000 miles away. The check-ins did a lot to cut down that distance. I wish I had started writing them years earlier. The C&F culture embraces change and evolution. When the pandemic shutdown stretched indefinitely ahead of us, we decided that maybe the hybrid work world could be better than what came before — if we worked at it. Where some companies were trying to get back to a culture that might only have existed in the minds of senior management, we looked to optimize our culture for the new hybrid world. We moved to a more event-driven approach to employee bonding, where some of our big events bring together people who never would have met in person in the pre-pandemic world. I feel that our approach is working well for us — especially in giving us a hiring advantage. However, in retrospect, I do wish I had not invested so much in the physical office space! In our annual employee survey we ask, “Would you recommend C&F as a great place to work.” A remarkable 95% of our employees say, “Yes.” Crum & Forster is truly a great place to work. J ust like the founding fathers of Crum & Forster, I have a Dream Team. I have worked with most of my senior management team for a long time. We may only be part of the way to the 50 years that Lester Parsons’ Dream Team stayed together — since most of us squandered our teen years in school, instead of heading right into insurance — but I feel that some of the years in the trenches should count twice. While I would love to profile everyone here, it would probably get a little corny. I will embarrass a few people to complete the story of the acorns that grew into mighty oaks.
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