The Great Reshuffle

Rethinking Risk in the New Geography of Work

Since 2020, the foundations of American work, real estate, and infrastructure have been quietly shifting. Office towers stand half-full. Employees live hundreds of miles from headquarters. City centers once packed with commuters now echo with uncertainty. At the same time, suburbs and second-tier cities are booming, supply chains are rerouting, and employers are rewriting policies.

This is not a return to normal. It is a structural realignment, a Great Reshuffle, and its ripple effects on commercial risk are vast and ongoing. As brokers and advisors to large commercial enterprises, EPIC is helping clients confront these changes head-on, transforming risk management strategies to meet the new geography of work.

From Risk Gatekeeper to Portfolio Strategist

For most of the insurance industry’s history, underwriting has been linear and reactive. A submission is received, assessed, priced, and either accepted or declined. It’s a workflow that has long depended on individual judgment, internal guidelines, and pattern recognition developed over years of experience.

But this approach breaks down under the weight of modern risk complexity. Climate volatility, systemic cyber exposure, supply-chain interdependencies, and digitized operations have introduced compounding effects that defy linear assessment. In this world, risk is not isolated, it’s dynamic, interconnected, and fast-moving.

The solution isn’t to process faster. It’s to underwrite differently. And that means shifting from transaction-based assessment to portfolio-centric decision-making.

Modern underwriting requires a new mindset: one where the underwriter views every individual risk through the lens of its impact on the portfolio, its contribution to accumulation, diversification, capital efficiency, and expected margin across time horizons.

This shift is already underway. In leading organizations, underwriters have access to real-time dashboards showing portfolio heat maps, loss ratio variance, and predictive analytics tied to capital allocation. They no longer wait for actuarial year-end results, they course-correct throughout the cycle. They think more like portfolio managers, less like case reviewers.

Over time, this transformation will separate underwriters into two camps: those who underwrite accounts, and those who underwrite books. The strategic future lies with the latter.

The Rise of the Distributed Workforce: Beyond the Four Walls

Remote and hybrid work is no longer a trend, it’s infrastructure. In 2024, over 22% of U.S. employees worked remotely at least part-time, a figure that remains more than double pre-pandemic levels. For many firms, flexible work is now a critical strategy for talent retention and recruitment.

But the distributed workforce brings new risks. Ergonomic injuries, blurred work-life boundaries, and jurisdictional complexity are redefining what it means to be “at work.”

• Workers’ Compensation must now account for injuries in home offices
• Employment Practices Liability (EPL) policies must address virtual harassment, discrimination, and proximity bias
• Cyber liability programs need to account for a dispersed attack surface such as unsecured networks, shared devices, and cloud reliance

Companies succeeding in this new era are proactively updating insurance programs, workplace policies, and HR protocols to support safety, productivity, and compliance from anywhere.

The Office Market Reckoning: Commercial Real Estate (CRE) at a Crossroads

Downtowns are no longer the gravitational centers they once were. Office vacancies are at record highs, with urban centers like San Francisco and New York reporting 20–30% unoccupied space. Meanwhile, property values are declining, defaults are rising, and adaptive reuse projects, like office-to-residential conversions, are gaining momentum.

From an insurance standpoint, these shifts are significant:

• Commercial property insurance must address buildings with reduced occupancy, deferred maintenance, or changing usage
• Vacancy clauses, vandalism risk, and fluctuating replacement values are top-of-mind
• Builders’ risk and wrap-up policies are increasingly relevant for conversions and renovations

Risk managers must reassess their portfolios to reflect a new CRE reality: fewer trophy towers, more flexible footprints, and a long tail of underutilized assets that need intelligent coverage.

Infrastructure Strain in High-Growth Zones

While cities adjust to lower demand, suburban and Sun Belt metros are experiencing rapid growth. Places like Austin, Boise, and Nashville are absorbing talent and companies alike, but their infrastructure wasn’t built for this surge.

• Road congestion, power grid stress, and public transit gaps are raising exposure
• Water, sewer, and broadband systems face capacity limits
• Insurance losses from natural disasters, from wildfires, hurricanes, and floods, are rising in these high-growth regions

For insurers and risk managers, this means reassessing catastrophe (CAT) modeling, updating Business Interruption plans, and understanding how infrastructure fragility can cascade across distributed workforces and asset locations.

The Human Risk Factor: Talent, Turnover, and Leadership Blind Spots

The Reshuffle isn’t just geographic, it’s cultural. Talent churn remains high. Leadership transitions are accelerating. Generational divides in work preferences are widening.

These shifts have real implications:

• EPL claims are on the rise as hybrid policies spark legal disputes
• Directors & Officers (D&O) insurance must now contemplate workforce strategy as a governance issue
• Key Person coverage and succession planning are vital for resilience

At EPIC, we’re seeing increased demand for insurance solutions that integrate HR, legal, and operational insight, because talent risk is now enterprise risk.

The Innovation Imperative: Modernizing Insurance Portfolios

One lesson from the Great Reshuffle is clear: traditional policies aren’t built for distributed, hybrid, and digitized risk. Forward-looking organizations are rethinking their coverage structures entirely:

• Captives are being deployed to address hard-to-place or emerging risks
• Parametric insurance is gaining ground for outage, weather, or supply chain triggers
• Hybrid endorsements for remote equipment, home offices, and multi-jurisdictional workers are growing in popularity

Risk strategy is no longer an annual renewal checklist. It’s a dynamic toolkit for organizational resilience. And brokers must evolve alongside it.