News you can use

San Diego employees can join the IS-led Meet Up Mondays where twice a month for 30 minutes at lunchtime you are invited to join a TED-style talk where a coworker will be sharing their ideas.

"We have a lot of talent here," said Tom Lugo, the Meet Up Mondays initiator, "and even though we are traditionally a Java house, we should be looking at additional problem solving with other technologies." Tom, a software engineer, said the IS team is all about problem solving, and creating this new meeting environment allows them to think outside the box and challenge themselves and each other.

1st Quarter 2016

The charity committee was busy last quarter with a lot of wonderful events and donating opportunities, and we want to thank YOU for your generosity and involvement.

There are no signs of slowing down as we dive into the first quarter of 2016, so take a read through our first newsletter of the year to find out how you can get involved in your office location.

No, we’re not really going to be featured on the MTV show Cribs, where rappers delight in showing off their gold-plated hot-tubs. But we are excited about new offices opening, because it’s a great sign of our company’s growth and presents opportunities for our employees to relocate.Arrowhead and ACM have jointly opened a Roseville, California office. For those who don’t know – Roseville is a suburb of California’s capital (Sacramento) with a population of over 120,000. It might be a small city but it helps our companies create a larger presence in Northern California.

Got a licensing question? Need another license? Our Licensing and Compliance Department can help; it’s just one of the multitude of tasks and projects that they perform to ensure that sales, marketing and compliance for every program flow smoothly.

“Our job is to make the whole licensing procedure run seamlessly,” said Wendy Castelo, vice president of Marketing Ops. “Occasionally a manager will forget that we can provide this service for them, and instead they waste a lot of time setting their employee up with training, exams, fingerprinting, etc.” The licensing team led by Carolyn Marshall can handle it much more quickly and efficiently in house.

As Brown & Brown's top management sizes up the insurance industry landscape – both current and future - they spot the market shifts and have begun preparing our companies to take advantage of those changes. And that's why they’ve tapped Arrowhead’s Information Systems (IS) group for help.

With 14 offices spread out across the country, we are no strangers to events that require an office closure. Wildfires, earthquakes, floods, blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes and power outages are just a few issues we have had to deal with.

Save this emergency hotline number now to your phone, so that you're prepared for the next office disruption. This hotline will let you know real-time about office closures/openings, etc. in all time zones.

Have you used our new Service Desk? Still thinking about Footprints? Because heads up - that was soooo last year. The Help Desk team retired their old ticketing system on December 1, 2015 and introduced their shiny new Service Desk customer portal.

This new system offers self-service tools with FAQ’s and common how-to’s. It also generates a ticket so you can track everything from your email.

Whether you need to complete continuing education credits to maintain a license, begin coursework to help you achieve a license, or would like to pursue another professional designation in, say, project management, Arrowhead offers tuition assistance.

Last year, 20 Arrowhead employees participated in the tuition assistance program, taking classes ranging from CE credits to courses in HR, IT security, project management, leadership organization and presentation skills. Still others took CPCU classes towards obtaining their designation for underwriting; assistant underwriters followed coursework for an AINS designation (Associate in General Insurance). The number of participating employees has doubled since 2013, when just 10 took advantage of the program.

From new employee onboarding to leadership style training, Brown & Brown University courses are now available for every employee. Based on Saba Cloud technology, the learning management system (LMS) offers courses customized for each user.

“We’re excited about the new learning management system,” said Lisa Stahl, Arrowhead's commercial division chief operating officer, who also contributed to the B&B University LMS development. “It’s very user-friendly and easy to navigate."

We just wrapped up the holidays, but many of us are already thinking about our next vacation. It’s two and a half months until Spring Break. Where are you planning to go? A family trip to Disney World? A cruise to the Caribbean? Snow skiing at the Sundance Resort in Utah?

Whichever you choose, you can get more bang for your buck by booking your personal travel on Brown & Brown’s Concur travel site. Hooray! More money for souvenirs and tropical drinks with umbrellas in them. We are encouraged to use the site as much as possible, because the more we use it, the more discounts we can get for both personal and business travel.