Why Amwins Built Its Collaboration System Around People

Amwins built its internal collaboration platform to help brokers find the right specialist across a large, decentralized business. The system, called Amlink, points people toward colleagues with relevant expertise and contact details, giving them a reason to connect directly. The design reflects a broader lesson: digital workflows can move tasks along, but relationships help people get the work right.

Work platforms such as Salesforce, Asana, HubSpot, Figma, Git and ServiceNow make it easier to assign, track and hand off tasks. Their efficiency is hard to dispute. Yet an assignment can leave room for misunderstanding, or produce a result the person who requested it didn’t expect. A task may be easy to send and difficult to interpret.

That gap comes from the way workflow tools handle communication. A task assignment is asynchronous: the sender and recipient don’t need to interact at the same time, and a response may be delayed or never arrive. A conversation in real time is synchronous, with people able to clarify the request and respond immediately. Moving work between colleagues through a platform can also remove the person-to-person handoff that would otherwise give them a chance to align.

Why face-to-face contact can help digital work

Research on software engineers offers one indication of how these forms of communication can reinforce each other. The engineers worked in two buildings several blocks apart. Some teams shared a building; others were split between the two locations. Across both setups, the engineers used a digital platform to share code, assign work and provide feedback.

The teams in the same building received 23% more online feedback on their code than teams whose members worked across the buildings. The study’s authors wrote, “Sitting near workers increases not only in-person but also digital collaboration.” In this case, more frequent opportunities for direct interaction were associated with more feedback through the online workflow.

That feedback can carry practical value beyond the task itself. Colleagues may share knowledge, coach one another and help newer team members learn how work gets done. The article reports that newer employees stayed at higher rates on the teams working together in one building than on dispersed teams. It also notes that younger employees and women were “substantially more likely to quit the firm when they lose proximity to coworkers.” The findings point to a connection between workplace relationships, digital collaboration and employees’ experience of belonging.

For Amwins President and Chief Operating Officer Ben Sloop, personal ties are part of how the business works. Sloop said that building “deep, real relationships with our salespeople” is a core requirement for taking on more responsibility. He spends much of his time speaking with colleagues in the field and said a broker who reaches out is at the top of his inbox.

A network of specialist expertise

Amwins is a wholesale insurance broker. Its clients are retail brokers and agents seeking coverage for complex risks that can be difficult to place, such as workers’ compensation insurance for circus performers. Amwins helps those brokers connect with specialty carriers that focus on particular types of risk.

The business depends on finding the right expertise for a specific client need. A retail broker may need a construction wrap policy in Scottsdale, for example, while the Amwins broker handling the request may know little about that coverage. The broker still needs to locate a colleague who does. As Sloop put it, brokers need to be specialists, and clients want to work with someone who is a “deep expert.”

With thousands of customers, carriers and brokers in the mix, locating that person is a major coordination challenge. Amwins developed Amlink to help address it. Rather than returning a collection of deal listings, presentations or papers when a user searches for a type of risk and location, the system identifies colleagues by name and provides their contact information.

That detail shapes what happens next. The user can reach out to the person with the relevant knowledge, often someone they already know through company sales events. Amlink combines an internal way to coordinate expertise with a prompt for direct conversation. That can help a broker get a client’s question to the right person while also strengthening connections across the firm.

In a business where knowing whom to ask can affect whether a complex risk finds a suitable market, those links among colleagues matter. Amwins brokers compete through specialist knowledge and through their ability to connect that knowledge to a client’s needs.

Technology works through the relationships around it

Sloop described Amlink as unusual in an industry that often calls itself a people business but doesn’t always track information at the level of individual relationships. He framed technology as support for the workforce: “The thoughtful use of technology makes our people better. But we are fundamentally a person-to-person business.”

That distinction also helps explain why employees may stay. Sloop has been at Amwins for 19 years and still thinks of himself as one of the newer people, he said. People tend to remain when they value their colleagues, feel connected and believe in the company’s direction. Pay alone doesn’t capture those reasons for staying.

For teams choosing or building workflow tools, Amlink offers a useful design point: help employees find the right colleague, then make it easy for them to talk. A platform can organize assignments and surface expertise. The quality of collaboration still depends on whether people can build the relationships that make those tools useful.

Social Capital at Work, by John Burrows and Seth Rachlin, is scheduled for publication by Simon Acumen on Nov. 10. This article is excerpted from the book.

Read the research: study of software engineers’ collaboration.

Authors: John Burrows and Seth Rachlin.