In the following interview, which recently featured in Insurance Business UK, Jane Pocock – Managing Director of Copart UK & Ireland – discusses the qualities needed to be an effective leader in a time of crisis.
Speaking with Mia Wallace for Insurance Business UK, Jane paid warm tribute to her team for the strength and adaptability they have displayed throughout the crisis. At the very beginning of the lockdown, she said, Copart received a letter from the PRA and the FCA to confirm their status as essential workers and the business has been working through the pandemic ever since.
“Because of what we do in the claims process and because we had to continue the sale of cars so that policyholders would not be out of pocket due to the pandemic, we have kept on operating, and this has meant developing COVID safety protocols for our drivers and within our operation centres.
We’re fortunate as, due to the sheer scale of these centres, we’ve been able to put in one-way systems, and most of our people are out and about working outside anyway. So we’ve adapted our rest areas and our office space to ensure that people are not crowded in any way.”
Examining the attributes which enabled the team to embrace these changes to the way they work, she noted that she and her colleagues share very robust operational backgrounds.
“If I was to single out traits that the Copart team share, we are very calm and very determined.
So we created the Copart Cobra room where one member from every significant department sat down to discuss how we should communicate with everybody both internally and externally, as we do a lot of external communication, from the Environment Agency to local councils to unions to MPs.”
In addition, Copart communicated widely with its internal people. This meant letting all employees know the processes that have been put in place to protect and support them, especially vulnerable people with pre-existing illnesses who needed to be shielded.
“We’re lucky that we’ve always been quite a technology-led company so we were easily able to initiate homeworking. And we’ve still got many of our office-based claims handlers happily working from home.”
The way that Copart has managed to navigate the pandemic and prove its capacity to be there for its partners is likely to have long-term implications on how these partners view the business.
Pocock noted that the number one thing that Copart prides itself on is the collaboration it has with its insurance partners and it is dedicated to continuing that.
“We already knew each other prior to this, but the depths of our relationships are now incredibly strong. Some of our competitors have had to close because their business structure is quite fragmented, so we are a survivor and that has been noticed, and we have attracted new business.
So there have been positives that we’ve taken out of this, especially how the depths of our insurance partner relationships have been solidified.”
Source: Insurance Business UK