In a post-COVID employment culture, many companies are finding it necessary to re-evaluate their policies and strategies to maintain a skilled workforce. As an employee benefits brokerage, Moreton & Company is often asked to help with this endeavor, often in the form of creating an enticing benefits package. Moreton & Company has maintained a turnover of less than 10% and was recently recognized as the Best of State, largely due to its workplace culture and internal policies.
As Chief Operations Officer, Jonathan Fulton has been at the center of these policies and decisions. Before joining Moreton & Company in 2020, Jonathan worked in the finance industry, where he developed expertise in economic, business model, and financial analysis. Jonathan’s leadership has been characterized by an open-door philosophy that gives employees at all levels easy access to those at the executive level. This policy is designed to encourage employees to help Moreton “find a better way” as it provides insurance services. We asked Jonathan to walk us through some of the policies that make Moreton & Company a destination workplace.
What role do you feel that our benefits package plays in employee satisfaction/retention?
A decent benefit package nowadays is table stakes. If you don’t have a terrible benefits package, you have a seat at the table, and you’re going to do fine. If you have a knockout benefits package, that’s a bonus. But I’m of the opinion that it’s more of a drop in the bucket. People these days prioritize flexibility in their schedule and pay. Flexibility and pay rule all, and culture is right up there with it.
How often do benefits come up in the hiring process?
People ask. Almost every single candidate asks, “Do you have a benefits package, and what does it look like?” And there’s no follow-up after that. They just want to know that it’s not terrible.
How would you describe the culture here at Moreton & Company?
I would describe the culture as collaborative, innovative, generous, and tight-knit.
What kind of influence do you feel that upper management had on shaping that culture?
It helps that we have management teams that have been in place for a long time. The average tenure for management is over five years. That helps because they know the people they work with, they have broad company context, and they’ve bought into the vision of Moreton & Company. Honestly, it also helps that we are still in the office some days. It would be harder for management impact culture if we were fully remote.
For the collaborative and innovative parts, our managers make sure that is encouraged and rewarded. As for the close-knit part, we have managers who are in the office, which helps. People know that they’re here—and when they’re not here, they’re available.
I think the generous part pre-dates current management. It’s more current management perpetuating the generosity of the company culture that’s been in place for fifty years. These are things like profit sharing, how we bonus, and the flexibility we’re willing to give employees when they need it, should they have personal crises that arise or anything like that. Those are all habits that were baked into the culture before us, and we’re just perpetuating what we’re lucky enough to already have in place.
What would you say the ‘perks’ of working at Moreton & Company are?
There are many. A good summary is that it feels more like a tight-knit company than a major corporation. The benefits that come along with that are flexibility in schedule, generosity when it comes to sharing the profits of the firm, accommodating unforeseen life situations, stability, and the opportunity to make your own path and carve out your own role. We don’t have layers of red tape that someone has to go through; if someone wants to create a new project or explore a new product that we could develop, it’s usually just one conversation away from being possible.
There are a lot of tangible benefits. We pay well, we bonus well, we give generous leave after childbirth, and we pay for education. But mostly, the employees here are known. No one is just a number in some random department. That affects a lot of the culture and is a huge benefit.
How did COVID change Moreton & Company’s culture and processes?
Having to go remote, which led to the hybrid schedule, was definitely the biggest change. I also think now, on the other end of it, it’s given people a lot more confidence in the stability of the company. People were worried when we were in that first year. But coming out the way we did solidified a lot of confidence in the company.
The hybrid schedule was huge. That forever changed the culture and expectations of the teams at Moreton. Those employees that take their job seriously and care and are good at prioritizing can do that in the office or outside of the office. COVID also showed people the value of being around their coworkers physically. That was huge. There’s pretty good proof it’s good for us—at least some of the time—to be around our coworkers. Maybe it helped people appreciate teams and the social dynamic of work. Whereas before, everybody just defaulted to not really appreciating that because they’d never been without it.
How do you ensure that fully remote employees feel included in Moreton’s culture?
We could probably do better. We do our best to communicate often with cameras on and make sure that employee meetings have options to join remotely. It’s harder, though, for fully remote people to feel fully included in the Moreton culture, and there are probably things we could do better.
We usually have the employee come in for the beginning of their employment and be full-time in the office for a certain amount of time. That helps get a sense of the atmosphere as they meet people and develop relationships in person. We also have newsletters, a company intranet, internal employee competitions, and wellness drives that help employees feel included.
In 2022, Moreton & Company instituted a sabbatical program for tenured employees to encourage retention in the uncertain times that followed COVID. How do you feel that’s been working out since it was announced?
It’s been really great, actually. There was concern from management, producers, and the executive team that it would create more work for their teams. But people have been really considerate in terms of how far ahead they’ve teed up their work and their teams, so when they leave, it’s not just a huge burden. Everyone has a lot of advanced notice. Part of the success is that people have really gone out of their way to be considerate of their teams when they are going on that sabbatical.
A Harris Poll survey found that most employees are unsatisfied with their work-life balance. How has Moreton encouraged this balance?
Our obvious answer is that we are still utilizing the hybrid schedule. That’s probably the biggest contributor that we demonstrate as far as us wanting a work-life balance for employees. The sabbatical program and the number of holidays that we give prove that out. We’re above average for our industry in terms of the number of holidays. We also have a pretty good PTO policy.
The other key to work-life balance is that the company can support work-life balance only as long as people, when they’re at work, work hard and efficiently and well with each other. If they don’t do that, we can’t service our clients well, so then we have to start making adjustments to schedules and demands and all those types of things.
So, it’s a two way street as far as work-life balance goes, and the company is able to accommodate good work life-balance because we have a culture where our teams take their work seriously, they work hard, and they’re dedicated to the things that they do.
Does employee feedback affect company policy?
It definitely affects company policies. But we always have to take into consideration the broader context because sometimes the feedback we get is isolated in nature. We try to do a good job of either directly implementing employee feedback or having a conversation about the broader context around why we’re not implementing the feedback. We’re dead in the water the day that we don’t listen to and take into account employee feedback. It absolutely affects company policy and how we go about operating the company.
The most recent example would be our short-term disability policy that dictates how much time birthing mothers can take after they give birth. It used to be 10 weeks max at 60% pay. And we had a conversation with a mom who said, “I want to let you know that that’s a real burden, because we have a lot of women in the company who are the primary breadwinner. So, when your pay gets cut to 60%, that’s a real hardship.”
At the time it was common for birthing moms to take closer to 6 weeks and come back because they couldn’t afford to take the full 10 weeks. So, we took that feedback and changed that policy. Now, our company pays more under short-term disability; birthing mothers get 12 weeks, 100% paid.
If you had to give advice on creating a company that employees want to work at, what would that be?
I would say it’s our culture. At the end of the day, we come to work for a few things. We come to work because we have to support ourselves or somebody else financially. We come to work because we believe in what we’re doing or the people we’re doing it with, and we like the way that the company operates. People stick around if they feel like they’re compensated fairly, if they feel like they’re good at their job, if they feel like they generally like the people they work with, and if they feel like they have a sense of purpose in what they’re doing—and we have those four things here. We try and do our best to foster those four criteria.
Another thing is getting employees to trust that the company will do right by you. It does right by its employees at every opportunity that it reasonably can. People are taken care of here, and that’s because the people here take care of our clients. It’s a two-way street.
