Facility Solutions: Building consensus for the branch experience

Get your key stakeholders on board, including front-line staff, to promote internal brand engagement and project success.

Even with the best operations input and branding and design consultation, a new branch and brand experience project will fail if consensus has not been built among your credit union’s key stakeholders.

In my early years, I witnessed such projects stall or outright fail as a result of not including the right participants in the process and focusing on design alone rather than engaging the whole credit union team. These experiences taught me who needs to be involved—and the process required—to ensure consensus and operational follow-through.

The credit union team must include executives, management across departments—from HR to lending to security, any consultants, front-line staff and even board members when appropriate. Anyone who has final say on the project must be in all the project meetings. Occasionally, CEOs will say they do not participate, but if they have final approval of the project, they must be involved or they may force additional input or express issues too late in the process that cause rejection of a new branch prototype. (I have a few painful stories about this.) The same can be true of the board: If the board has expressed interest in the design, one representative should be included. It’s also important to include a front-line staff member. Creating consensus and selling the resulting project to all other staff requires buy-in. Including one or two rising stars from your branch staff helps ensure the people who operate the branch can add new insights that help enrich the resulting prototype.

 

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