Working from home to be option for Erie Insurance

Beginning in March 2020, when a few thousand Erie Insurance employees first reported for duty at their kitchen table, or in their spare room, CEO Tim NeCastro began looking forward to a day when they could all return to the office.

Nearly two years later, NeCastro is still looking forward to that moment.

But what neither he nor the company is doing these days is making public predictions about when the bulk of the company's workforce — including more than 3,000 people in Erie — will return to their offices.

And perhaps more importantly, he said, the company will likely never return to a situation where most everyone is at the office five days a week.

That won't likely be an issue until the company decides to once again open its doors to employees.

"We are not going to try to predict the return date anymore," NeCastro said.

Instead, that decision will be made based on the state of the pandemic.

"It really boils down to: Are people able to safely interact with people? That's really determined by COVID cases," he said.

The company, which could legally have returned to the office in June 2020, came to recognize the futility of making long-range projections.

"Honestly, there is no way to predict," NeCastro said. "I think the (management) team pointed out to me that we had predicted (return dates) six different times."

Phased-in plan, flexibility, when it does happen

What the company does know, and made public in December, is that the return-to-work process will be phased in and will begin with volunteers.

Matthew Cummings, a spokesman for the company, confirmed last week that the plan to seek volunteers remains in place.

When employees do come back, it will be under different terms.

"We realize now that we will not likely return the way we left with pretty much everyone being in the office. We know we are going to need greater flexibility," NeCastro said.

The details haven't all been worked out, but when concerns about the pandemic have eased, many Erie Insurances employees will have the opportunity for increased flexibility in hybrid arrangments that would allow them to split their time between home and the office.

NeCastro, whose company has a new, never-used $147 million office building in Erie, did not leap immediately to this conclusion.

Just months ago, there was an expectation coming from Erie Insurance that most of the company's 6,000 employees, including more than 3,000 in Erie, would return eventually to in-person work.

"I have had to go through a journey on this," NeCastro said in an interview with the Erie Times-News. "I am very traditional. I do like the human interaction, but I was imposing my own personal values on the organization and not without support."

The company's outline of a plan would allow many of its employees to create and follow some sort of hybrid schedule or to work full-time in the office.

That puts Erie Insurance squarely in line with many of the nation's largest companies.

According to a CNBC report, "I believe there's going to continue to be hybrid offerings. ... Flexibility is here to stay, especially if you want to be competitive for talent," said Shellye Archambeau, a director at Verizon, Nordstrom and Roper Technologies.

NeCastro said Erie Insurance employees have demonstrated their ability to work remotely in every phase of the business.

He admits, though, that he has a personal preference for in-person work.

"From its foundation, the company's values center around human relations, the human touch," NeCastro said. "There is something magical is being in that real dimension. Part of what makes our company special is we attract people who value those interactions."

At a time when employees are difficult to find, NeCastro said Erie Insurance continues to find good employees. But it isn't always easy.

"We have more open positions now than we would traditionally have as a company," he said.

Does the company's new policy open up the possibility of hiring new employees who would be entirely remote?

The short answer is new employees would need to live inside the company's geographic footprint that includes 12 states and Washington, D.C., Cummings said, enabling them to have access to one of the company's offices.

Even then, NeCastro suggests the company is not looking to add large numbers of new, remote-only workers.

"We really do want to hire people who want to be with us and not at home," he said.

Contact Jim Martin at 814-870-1668 or jmartin@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNMartin.