Invest in your best for success

Last article we talked about the importance of investing in your leaders and making sure they were leading your organization in the most effective manner. In previous articles we’ve talked more globally about your members and what your credit union needs to do to optimize their experiences.

Finally, this month, we’re going to focus on your employees and how you need to focus on creating an employee experience culture in order for your leaders to be successful and your members to be satisfied.

Why are your employees as important, or more important, as your leaders and members? As my friend Shep Hyken (www.hyken.com) says, “What’s happening on the inside of a company will be felt on the outside by the consumer.” If you don’t have the right employee experience culture on the inside, you can’t possibly have the desired member experience culture on the outside.

We’ve all thought for many years that happy employees lead to better levels of service but that correlation between happiness and performance has been unclear at best. Today, however, is the time to make that connection as crystal clear as possible. Many of you have invested heavily in your member-focused technology and delivery channels and some have substantially invested in your leadership development but how many of you have invested comparably heavily in your employee culture?

Specifically, a productive engagement culture needs to start with a particular focus and discerning look at your “best” employees. It’s not that only some employees are important; but you are only in danger of losing some of your employees. And, potentially catastrophically, the employees you’re at risk of losing are the ones who are your most productive, impactful, and dedicated.

A company’s best employees can be defined a variety of ways depending on your strategic priorities but for the sake of this discussion, let’s consider your top producers and highest potentials be considered your best employees. Here’s the critical question: if you don’t invest in those employees and cultivate the culture that will nourish them and allow them to prosper, who will?

Over the past few months, we’ve had the opportunity to partner with clients to conduct a talent assessment of their employee population. This process evaluates all employees but culminates with specific development and action plans for those employees identified as the credit union’s “best” (roughly the top 10-20% of employees).

In working through this highly interactive process, many credit union leaders have realized a renewed and thorough appreciation for their most important asset – their employees. However, as Jim Collins said in his landmark book, Good to Great: “…people are not your most important asset; the right people are.” These credit union leaders have identified the right employees to focus on and on whom they will focus a significant portion of their employee culture investment. Because, again, if they don’t make this investment, who will?

The talent assessment allows the organization to specify who their “right” and “best” people are, regardless of role and based on various criteria, while also identifying specific and personalized ways to invest in them. Often, simply defining what they mean by “best” or “right” is a cathartic process – they may have thought they knew who their top 20% were but later realized that some of those employees may not be as well-rounded, productive, and contributive as they thought they were.

Generally speaking, employees want/need three things from their employer:

1. They want to feel supported in their job; that you care about them, that they can safely take ownership in their jobs, and that you are putting them in the best position to succeed.
2. They want to feel competent in their role and that they are able to make a contribution to the success of the organization (today and, in many cases, well into the future).
3. They want a feeling of belonging and camaraderie; they’re interdependent on each other and are able to collaborate with a team that shares their desire and motivation to succeed.

 
An investment in your employee engagement culture will allow you to fit your employees into situations where they can be most successful, identify the most appropriate ways to invest in their wellbeing, and rally them around the shared vision for success that should be emanating from the top of your organization.

This process of investing in an overall employee experience culture is a great way to fuel the three drivers of engagement noted above. It shows your best employees that you value them and want them to continue contributing to your team. The investment of some recent clients includes creating an extensive curriculum consisting of internal and external resources, creating cross-functional teams and assigning special projects, and coordinating an executive mentor to each “best” employee.

Regardless of how much time and money you’re able to invest, and since we’re a financially-driven industry, we do need to show an ROI on our investment in the employee experience culture, right? A recent Harvard Business Review story quoted their research showing that organizations that invest in their cultures like we’re proposing had four times the average profit and more than two times the revenue.

Further, Gallup reports that a staggering 87% of employees worldwide are not engaged, but companies with highly engaged workforces outperform others by 147%. Can you possibly afford a painfully disengaged culture inside your credit union while trying to establish a highly engaged culture with your leaders and members outside? It sounds like a culture that only Sisyphus would find engaging.

It may be an overused cliché but your people truly are your greatest asset. But will they be your asset for much longer? And what have you done lately to invest in those assets? An employee experience culture will create the environment where employees will actually want to come to work and actively live out your mission … especially your “right” and “best” employees!

As mentioned above, my firm has been busy working with clients to conduct talent assessments to assist them in their efforts to identify their best employees and create the required cultures to retain them. We’d love to help you, as well. Please let me know when you have time for a conversation about the talent in your organization and the plans you should be creating to appropriately invest in them. Probert@fi-strategies.com or 636-578-3280.