Employee Retention: Keep the Keepers

You have a highly valued employee, and they quit. Why? The boss? The culture? The pay?

I'm sure if I searched for credible sources, I would get some version of one or a combination of the three. It is highly individualized. But what is universal is that each financial institution has employees that are highly valued and they want to keep. Yet rarely tell them so. For fear that the employee will recognize their worth and ask for more money or shop themselves around. Better to repress that employee, right? Shhhh. Don't say a thing.

The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis shows the number of quits, i.e. employee-driven departures, at 3.5 million in December 2018, the highest since pre-recession 2007. 

Best Strategy

The best single strategy for employee retention is management attention, according to Bill Conerly, a business economist and former banker. Employees may tell you they are leaving for more money, and if your compensation is not in the ballpark for the value they can get on the open market, then perhaps that is true. But if comp is in the ballpark, then it is likely the employee wouldn't be looking around if the company's culture was great and their boss paid attention to them.

Management and leadership are soft skills that are not on a financial institution's priority list. Seven years ago I wrote about this on these pages, and I haven't seen much improvement since. In that post, I wrote of a former military commander that worked for a large corporation that incorporated leadership into their development program. They hired psychologists to develop the curriculum, and actors to role play. 

So, in addition to the ideas below, it is important for financial institutions to develop good managers with leadership abilities. Because they are the ones that will be executing the following ideas to retain your high performers.

Three Ideas to Improve Retention

1.  Build a culture that salutes achievement. Accountability shouldn't be based on fear, recrimination, and public flogging. It should be built on open recognition of a job well done. Be it exceeding goals, achieving top quartile profitability, most improved, or proposing and implementing an innovative idea. Give that employee a trophy. Coach under-achievers that have an attitude of self improvement. Because, as one of my Navy Senior Chiefs once told me, if you have an employee that puts forth the effort and has a good attitude, and they don't succeed, that's on the supervisor.

2. Set career paths. And develop employees to achieve. So many financial institution development programs are ad hoc. No direction. But if you hire a junior credit analyst out of college, once they get the job, ask them what they aspire to be. Aside from compliance and functional training, develop them to hit their next level. Even if it is outside of Credit. Perhaps they want to be a commercial lender and some day, be CEO of your bank. That's great! If they achieve within their functional position, then we should be prepared to develop them for the next level. Instead of pushing them down in their current position because they are really good at it. Which is a sure fire way to have them shopping their resume, in my opinion.

3. Conduct stay interviews. Now, I will admit that I'm cynical about buzzwords. But I received a newsletter from a financial institution executive recruiter that caught my eye on improving employee engagement. Stay interviews will help your financial institution make tweaks to its culture and employee relations, and improve employee engagement, which I hear is a key reason why high performing employees stay. Because they matter to you. 

During our most recent podcast, we answered listener questions and one question was "what is the most effective way to recruit and find talent in a community bank?" My answer, build from within. 

Because there aren't many employees out on the street. And to woo them, you might have to pay up. And if you pay up, you may run into "equal pay" movements happening in many states, pricing up your existing talent. An unintended consequence.

What would you rather do to build an employee base capable of executing your strategy? Buy or build?

~ Jeff

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This article relates to my firm's Profit and Process Improvement and Management Advisory services. Click on the links to learn more.

https://kafafiangroup.com/services/profit-process-improvement/

https://kafafiangroup.com/services/management-advisory/

Bank Innovation: Three Ideas

I usually take more time researching blog posts than writing them. Today is an exception. Rather than searching reputable sources for how this bank or that bank innovates, I thought I would give it to you straight from the gut.

Because experience tells me that bankers are struggling with innovation. There is so much buzz about it, we are challenged to separate the wheat from the chaff. Fintech, regtech, martech (new one), AI, RPA, Chat Bot, actual bot. What's a banker to do?

At its core, innovation should solve problems. Problems we know we have. Problems we may not know we have. Customer problems. Process problems.

And who knows or can anticipate these problems better than 1) our customers, and 2) our people. 

Here is my opinion that may not sit well with some of my readers: Innovation through rapid change will rarely be led by those long in the tooth. Their experience clouds their view of the pace of change, especially if their experience is with slow, methodical, decades-in-the making change. Because we tend to believe past is prologue.

I'm full of idioms when I shoot straight from the gut.

I'm not telling you to build an innovation culture surrounded by young people. Make innovation a bank wide call to arms. But in creating a culture of innovation, don't have your long in tooth leaders shooting down innovation arrow after arrow offered by your short timers.

Here is how I think you could foster such a culture:


1.  Make Innovation Problem-Resolution Based. Nothing is more frustrating than expending organizational resources on a non-existent problem. Changing IHOP's name to IHOB comes to mind. HSBC putting actual robots in branches is closer to home. Community financial institutions' resources are already taxed by technology and regulation. Don't over-tax by encouraging innovation on problems that don't exist either internally or with our customers. So when you establish an innovation culture, the subject line of the memo proposing the innovation should be the problem the institution is trying to solve. Let your competitors waste resources on cool gizmos that only end up being resume' bullets for tech weenies.


2.  Coach Long-Timers. I've called them stoppers, sergeants, and old-schoolers. These are the people that implemented processes in the past that your innovators are now trying to solve. Like the cumbersome process that may exist in your bank to send wires. The story goes like this: a fraudulent wire got through, the bank CEO sternly directed ops personnel to ensure it doesn't happen again, and it now takes a DNA sample for someone to get a wire out. And the owner of that process is the department manager of the innovator trying to solve for a problem created by their boss. Here is where senior management will earn their leadership chops. Turn the stoppers into innovators. Or at least facilitators of innovation.


3.  Recognize and Reward. I called for a bank wide awards ceremony in a post two years ago (Five Ideas to Build an Accountability Culture at Your Bank). Innovation awards should be a part of the ceremony. Perhaps a central feature of it. Hand out a trophy. Give out meaningful cash and/or vacation time. Salute Long-Timers for fostering the culture that led to innovation. Demonstrate tangible results. Emphasize the problem solved.


These are my ideas on how to build an innovation culture that focuses innovation efforts on solving problems, real or emerging.

What other ideas do you have, or have heard of, that can move financial institutions forward fast enough to build a long-term future?

~ Jeff

Bankers: Here's What I Do

Content marketing gurus tell us not to put sales pitches in your content. But I would like readers to know what I do in case they want greater context to blog posts, or are generally curious people, as I am. So here goes... 

What The Kafafian Group does, by Jeff Marsico

We help financial institutions perform better. How?

We manage and moderate the strategic planning process. From strategy team retreat, to the operating plan, to financial projections. We build strategy components, such as capital plans and strategic alternatives analysis. Yes, financial institutions should regularly perform a strategic alternatives analysis so the Board and Senior Management know who can be bought and at what price, what others can pay for you, and the present value of your strategy. A focused strategy and a disciplined strategic planning process is critical in our changing industry.

We perform profit improvement projects that help financial institutions increase revenue, decrease costs, and allocate organizational resources consistent with your FI's strategy. Today, more than ever, we must focus our resources on the most profitable endeavors in order to build an enduring future. Sometimes senior management deems it preferable to have an outside firm perform this project because of our perspectives from multiple FIs and business models, and our ability to cut through organizational barriers.

We do general advisory work to FI senior management and Boards of Directors. This has included management studies, retainer advisory so senior managers have a go to resource outside of the FI to evaluate significant decisions, assisting the Board perform day-to-day management duties while the FI searches for a new CEO, valuations for private FIs, etc. 

We measure the financial performance of business units, branches, products, officers, and feed customer profitability systems. We do this on an outsourced basis so those FIs that don't have the resources to do it themselves can build an accountability culture at the business unit level. We review results and areas for improvement regularly with senior management. This service includes funds transfer pricing, cost allocations, equity allocations, and most of the other tasks associated with getting an FIs profitability reporting up and running. You might be surprised to read that credit unions also avail themselves of this service. They care about profits because it is their sole source of capital.

We do merger advisory. We are a niche player in whole bank, branch, fee-based business merger and acquisition work. Niche because we don't typically go from FI to FI, pitching deal ideas. We react to client senior management request for assistance, and work hard to achieve client objectives, and get deals done so long as they are additive to the client's long-term performance, as deals should be, right?

So there it is. Contact me if you would like our help. Thank you for reading.

~ Jeff

Banking's Curious Lack of Profits in Fee-based Businesses

Remember the good old days when bankers talked big about their fee income prowess? And bank stock analysts issued glowing reports about revenue diversification, and the banks that get “it”. As a side note, if anybody knows what “it” is, please let me know. Because in the fee based business game, “it” appears to be wasted effort.

Why? Because most of us are not making serious money, if we’re making anything at all, from our fee-based lines of business (LOBs). What do I base this on? My firm has been measuring the profitability of LOBs and products since our inception. The average profitability of fee-based products was -10% during the first quarter of 2003, and is –7% during the first quarter of 2012. Are there exceptions? Yes. But on the whole, we have laid a giant egg.

This sad truth reared its head in profit improvement engagements that I worked on. Banks that have meaningful fee based LOBs typically dropped little to the bottom line. We recommend changes to not only get profits to where they should be, as defined by RMA’s common sized income statement (see table for Insurance Agencies), but also to absorb some overhead/support costs from the bank.

I like using RMA numbers because 1) bankers use these statistics to evaluate borrowers by industry, and 2) they are an amalgamation of profit performance of largely private companies by NAICS code. Sure, I could use publicly traded companies. But we have to be cautious comparing a community financial institution’s brokerage operation to Charles Schwab.

But publicly traded companies can be instructive. They typically operate independently, containing HR, IT, and Marketing Departments. These departments are not usually found in community FIs brokerage arms. That is why it is important to measure these units’ profitability with an overhead/support allocation. They rely on HR, IT, etc. from the bank. They should pay for it.

I am not against fee-based LOBs. In fact, managing finances, employee benefits, and risk is becoming increasingly complex for individuals and businesses… i.e. our customers. Developing expertise can clearly be consistent with your FIs strategy.

But they must be developed and managed to deliver meaningful profits to the bottom line. Succeeding will increase the amount of business you do with existing customers, make them stickier, and your FI more valuable to them. It will also increase your profits, reduce dependence on the spread, and reduce the relative size of your big three balance sheet risks… credit, interest rate, and liquidity.

Increase profits, make customers stickier, and decrease risk. Worth it? I would say so.

How about you?

~ Jeff