Being a Member of the Team

A Place That Welcomes All of Our People and Their Ideas

“My door is always open.” It’s a cliché among senior executives in almost every business. At Cincinnati Insurance, it’s not an empty platitude—we really mean it.

For 75 years, we’ve built our business on relationships, with our agency customers, with our policyholders and with each other. And that means keeping our doors open to ideas and concerns, at moments of triumph and tragedy. It means approaching people with humility and respect – always.

In the Office

Our culture of breaking down barriers between associates began 75 years ago, with co-founder Jack Schiff, Sr. Even after we had grown from a handful of associates to more than 1,000, he made sure to greet every associate by name. “I remember him walking around the department,” Theresa Hoffer, who joined Cincinnati in 1980 and is now senior vice president and treasurer, said. “Everybody always lit up when he was around.”

“I remember sitting in the file room or the mailroom when Jack Schiff, Sr., would park his car outside, come walking through that department, and chat with us like he had all the time in the world,” Jody Wainscott, retired vice president of Target Markets, recalled.

Schiff, Sr. also liked to drop in on associates in the Dining Room, getting to know them as people. Other executives followed his lead, regularly lunching with associates to hear their problems, their ideas, the details that made up their lives—the kinds of everyday conversations that build genuine relationships.

On the Road

That openness doesn’t end at the doors of our company’s headquarters. From our earliest days, leaders took their open-door policy on the road. In the 1950s, executives spent up to half their time away from headquarters, meeting with agencies and insureds. Schiff, Sr., famously made it a practice to speak with every child of a policyholder on their 16th birthdays to impress upon them the importance of driving safely. And he didn’t hesitate to help when accidents did happen. One young insured called him personally at 2 a.m. to report a collision—and Schiff made it to the scene before both the police and the teenager’s father.

Sales Meetings remain a key feature of our business model. “Top management go out and meet with agents,” CEO Steve Spray explains. “We’ve done it since the beginning. We give them a view into the company, talk about things that are on the horizon and then host a reception so that we can build relationships, talk to our agents, see how we’re doing and things we can do better.”

As with so much else at our company, it comes down to the Golden Rule and a 75-year-old commitment to serving others.

Spray continued, “I think it's the people that we hire. When you come in here as a new associate, you see how you get ahead in this company—through building relationships, making good decisions and most of all listening and trying to find solutions.”

As The Cincinnati Insurance Companies celebrates 75 years of being A Bridge to Better, we honor our legacy of putting agents first, our noble industry, and our commitment to meeting the ever-evolving needs of policyholders.