When people think about a healthy culture in most insurance organizations, they usually say the same things: People follow the process, leaders avoid trouble, and long-tenured employees are promoted. Leaders track metrics like compliance, regrettable attrition and engagement scores to determine success.
But this definition is incomplete because it hides what's beneath the surface: behavioral norms fragmenting across business units and new hires leaving within 18 months because the operating environment is significantly different from what was described during recruitment. The people who stay do so because of inertia, not because the work feels meaningful.
Behavior design matters now more than ever. Cultures built on adherence and compliance are based on a set of rules that are assumed to stay static. But when disruptions occur, the organization is not prepared, and confusion and bad decisions are made.
Culture Redefined as Adherence
In high-compliance industries, culture and process compliance tend to conflate. When regulatory requirements, audit cycles, and procedural accuracy define how work gets evaluated, organizations start measuring culture through proxies like tenure, compliance rates, and survey scores. These operational measures are important, but they describe stability rather than resiliency.
The result is a culture that performs well on paper and fragments in times of instability. This distinction is becoming costly in ways that are hard to ignore. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work (the lowest scores ever), with disengagement costing the global economy an estimated $8.9 trillion annually in lost productivity.
AI Is Making the Problem Visible
When AI shifts what the work actually requires, carriers that have spent years measuring culture through stability metrics cannot answer basic questions: what does good behavior look like to support and sustain change in the organization and the industry overall? How do we sustain and manage our teams through all the changes? How do we ensure confusion isn't jeopardizing team performance?
We need to start moving away from dependence on easy-to-measure metrics, most of which are lagging, and tell us how people worked in the past, during a moment in time. What companies need to start thinking about is how to ensure their teams can learn and adapt to new technologies, new processes, and new requirements. How will their employees learn, develop, and grow in the new AI world? Answering these questions requires the much harder work of defining culture at the behavioral level, specifically enough that people can act on it even when circumstances shift.
Five Steps to Building a Culture That Is Specific Enough to Work
Behaviors don't just change by mandate. They require deep thought into understanding what outcomes the company is looking to create, and then designing the behaviors required to achieve those outcomes. Getting clear and actionable provides transparency and, finally, building recognition and accountability systems around those specific behaviors guides future alignment. Here is how to do it:
Step 1: Get Clear on the Problem and the Desired Outcome
Before naming behaviors, leaders need to name the gap. Is the issue that collaboration is breaking down at the team level? Does accountability diffuse when decisions cross business units? Are new hires not connecting to the real operating and cultural norms fast enough? The behavior work only holds if it is designed to close a specific gap that is clearly articulated. This is where value statements can't hold up.
Step 2: Get Clear on the Dos and Don'ts
Get team members into a room and via digital whiteboard (like Miro or FigJam) or sticky notes, ask them to independently write down:
- Green Behaviors (Dos): Actions you want to see more of (e.g., "turn on cameras during internal video calls," "respond to messages within 24 hours").
- Red Behaviors (Don'ts): Actions to avoid (e.g., "canceling 1-on-1s without 24 hours notice," "speaking over colleagues in meetings").
Step 3: Write a One-Sentence Definition
Condense the list into clear, actionable statements and avoid buzzwords as much as possible. If the definition requires interpretation, it is not finished yet. Build a simple test: read it to someone two levels below you and ask them what they would do Monday morning. If the answer matches what you had in mind, the definition works.
Step 4: Apply the Street Test
The street test asks: Would someone off the street be able to easily recognize the stated behaviors in play? Behaviors are exhibited and reflected in the day-to-day actions of employees. It should be in the feedback of customers or vendors. Behaviors that fail the street test are aspirational language that do not change anything.
Step 5: Model It and Reward It
Defined behaviors only become cultural norms when leaders model them visibly and when the recognition system tells the stories of the people doing them. In insurance, where performance management tends to be tightly tied to technical output metrics, this requires a deliberate decision to build behavioral recognition into performance conversations, team meetings, and promotion criteria. What gets recognized gets repeated.
The Real Competitive Risk
Culture defined as adherence will hold together as long as the rules stay stable. The insurance industry is entering a period where the rules, the work, the tools, and the talent expectations are all shifting simultaneously. Carriers that have not done the behavioral definition work have a structural gap that a survey will not capture.
The organizations that will retain the best people and navigate transformation most effectively will be the ones where culture is specific enough to guide behavior when the process is no longer clear. That requires doing the unglamorous work of naming what good actually looks like, one behavior at a time.
Engagement scores will tell you how people feel today. Behavioral culture design determines how they act tomorrow.
