D643 Task 1 Problem Analysis and Plan Example

Is Remote Work the Problem, or Is It Handoffs? A Complex Problem Analysis and Implementation Plan for a Composite Regional Insurance Agency

Student Name

School of Business, Western Governors University

D643: Navigating Complex Problems, Task 1

Course Instructor

Month Day, Year

Is Remote Work the Problem, or Is It Handoffs? A Complex Problem Analysis and Implementation Plan for a Composite Regional Insurance Agency

Defining the Problem With Data

Prairie Shield Insurance, a composite independent agency with 64 employees in four offices, moved to a structure in which most staff work from home three or four days a week. Two years later, the owners believe something has gone wrong. The data show what. The average time to respond to a client service request rose from 1.4 to 2.6 business days. Client satisfaction on the agency's survey fell from 88% to 79%. The share of new commercial policies that required rework because information was missing rose from 6% to 14%. Voluntary turnover among account managers in their first year rose to 33%. Meanwhile, productivity per producer, measured by premium written, was unchanged, and turnover among experienced staff actually fell.

Defining the problem precisely matters because the owners' first proposal was to require everyone back in the office five days a week. The data show that the problem is not general productivity, which held steady, but slower service to clients, more rework on complex policies and loss of new employees.

Short-Term and Long-Term Problems

The short-term problem is slow responses and rework that are hurting client satisfaction now and could cost renewals within a year. The long-term problem is that new account managers are not learning the job well enough to stay or to handle complex accounts, which threatens the agency's capacity as experienced staff retire. The two are related, but they need different timelines: the short-term problem needs changes within weeks, while the long-term problem requires rebuilding how new employees learn.

Root Cause Analysis

To find causes, I gathered three kinds of data: request logs showing where requests wait, a survey of all staff, and interviews with twelve employees, including four who joined in the past year and two recent departures.

The request logs show that most delays occur at handoffs between producers, who sell policies, and account managers, who service them. Before the change, handoffs happened informally by walking across the office. Now they happen by email, and requests often sit unread or lack information. The agency never replaced informal coordination with a defined process.

The interviews with new employees point to a second cause: they learned the job mostly by overhearing experienced colleagues and asking quick questions, and remote work removed both. New account managers described spending hours stuck on questions a colleague could answer in two minutes, but not wanting to interrupt people by calling. This matches research on remote work at a large technology company, which found that firm-wide remote work made collaboration networks more static and siloed, reduced connections across groups and shifted communication toward asynchronous channels (Yang et al., 2022).

Five whys applied to rework on commercial policies lead back to the same place: information is missing because the intake form is inconsistent and because producers and account managers no longer review complex policies together.

Biases and Other Perspectives

Complex problems invite bias. The owners work in the office every day and value in-person work, so they are inclined to see remote work as the cause. Confirmation bias, the tendency to seek and interpret evidence in ways that support existing beliefs, is widespread and often unconscious (Nickerson, 1998). I checked my own bias as well: I work remotely and prefer it. To counter both, I sought perspectives from every role and tenure, and I looked at evidence that could disconfirm each view. Experienced staff strongly prefer remote work and are staying longer, which is consistent with a randomized trial finding that hybrid work reduced quitting without harming performance (Bloom et al., 2024). New staff, however, describe isolation. Both perspectives are true, which suggests the solution is to fix coordination and learning, not to end remote work.

Strategy and Implementation Plan

Short-term actions, first 30 days: create a shared request queue with required fields replacing email handoffs, set a same-day acknowledgment standard, and hold a 15-minute daily video huddle for each service team to clear stuck requests.

Medium-term actions, 30 to 90 days: redesign the commercial intake form with producers and account managers, require a joint review call for commercial policies above a set premium, and designate a Tuesday and Thursday in-office anchor days for service teams.

Long-term actions, 90 days to a year: rebuild onboarding so that each account manager hired from now on works in the office four days a week for the first eight weeks with an assigned mentor, then moves to the standard schedule; create a searchable knowledge base of common questions.

Stakeholders and communication: the owners approve the plan; producers and account managers help design the queue and intake form; new employees join a feedback group; clients are told about improved service standards. Progress will be shared at a monthly all-staff meeting.

Key Performance Indicators

Average response time to client requests, with a target of 1.5 business days within three months; client satisfaction, with a target of 86% within six months; rework rate on commercial policies, target below 7%; first-year account manager turnover, target below 15% within a year; and experienced staff turnover, to ensure it does not rise as a result of the changes. KPIs will be reviewed monthly, and the plan will be adjusted if a measure does not move. Because the problem has more than one cause, the agency should expect some measures to improve faster than others: response times should respond to the new queue within weeks, while first-year turnover will take a full hiring cycle to show whether onboarding has improved. Reporting each measure separately keeps an early success in one area from hiding a lack of progress in another.

Conclusion

Prairie Shield's owners saw a remote work problem. The data show a coordination and learning problem that remote work exposed. By defining the problem precisely, separating short- and long-term issues, tracing causes with evidence, checking biases and building a plan with measurable KPIs, the agency can restore service and keep new employees without giving up the flexibility its experienced staff value.

References

Bloom, N., Han, R., & Liang, J. (2024). Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. Nature, 630(8018), 920-925. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2

Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175

Yang, L., Holtz, D., Jaffe, S., Suri, S., Sinha, S., Weston, J., Joyce, C., Shah, N., Sherman, K., Hecht, B., & Teevan, J. (2022). The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers. Nature Human Behaviour, 6(1), 43-54. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4