Autonomy, mastery and purpose is what drives and motivates people according to Daniel Pink, author of a Whole New Mind and Drive. As the video below discusses, autonomy is about feeling like you are in control and have ownership. Mastery is the desire to get better and improve. Purpose is the feeling that you are contributing to something that is meaningful—that makes the world a little better.
What does all that have to do with employee attraction and retention? Lots! Because once you get past money (i.e. having enough so that you can focus on your work), it is the other motivators that matter more in driving the desire to work at your organization and perform at high levels. It starts with clearly communicating your purpose so that staff understand what the big picture is and how they will be contributing to it. Your website plays a role for potential employees because it is virtual voice of your organization, and should build the case of why a talented candidate should come to work at your credit union. Walking the walk, of course, is important too in giving your staff the sense of ownership and control over what they do, and the opportunity to improve their knowledge and skills. Finally, incentives and money do matter, so providing things like an employee discount program and competitive compensation are important.
In this issue our Marketing Solutions group will cover how marketing can play a role in communicating your purpose to staff and getting their buy in for it. Technology Solutions will outline how to build an effective career center on your website. Membership Enhancements will discuss how you can make Invest in America an employee benefit through the discounts it provides. HRN Performance solutions will cover creating a competitive compensation program. Also look for tips how to use Twitter as part of event you host and using the related links feature in our content management system.
Sometimes when credit unions merge and grow, they lose track of what they’re all about. Not so with Lake Trust Credit Union. They’re the end result of a merger between NuUnion Credit Union and Detroit Edison Credit Union and have made the transition seamless, especially on their website.
Lake Trust Credit Union’s website illustrates how they pay close attention to details, something which is evident even on their career page. Their career page is a great example of a credit union getting it right. It spells out the benefits of working there, gives users the ability to search and apply for jobs online including attaching their resume and cover letter. Theirs is the perfect model if your credit union is looking to create or revise its career page.
Your 411 to the CMS
To make your life easier, we’re offering monthly tips to help you navigate the Content Management System (CMS).
Related Links
To help you save time by not having to enter the same Related Links several times on your website pages, you could create a Related Links Category. All you have to do is group your commonly used Related Links into a single category and then just select if from your Category Listing. All your popular related links will be listed in one simple step!
A good example of related links you may use frequently are:
Contact Us
Locations/ATMs
About Us
Apply Now
If you’re unsure of how to create a Related Links Category, take a look in your online CMS Help Section. Related Links is a module that can be added to your CMS at an affordable price if your credit union doesn’t currently have it.
Delivering Your Brand Message Through Your Staff
As marketers we spend a lot of time developing our credit union’s brand and ensuring that all of our messaging reflects this brand. Knowing that our brand is really the sum of all the messages we deliver and of the members’ collective experience with the credit union, we need to make sure we are putting appropriate emphasis on the role our employees play as a delivery channel for our brand messaging and the brand experience.
Research indicates that members, despite the growing popularity of other delivery channels, still prefer the branch for banking transactions. They perceive face-to-face interactions as a higher quality service experience.
It is imperative that we allocate the time and resources necessary to train our staff on what our brand promise is and what this looks like in member interactions. It also means providing them a strong knowledge of our products and services and, more important, an understanding of how they can help our members in each unique situation. Not only will this help us accomplish our sales goals, but will make our staff feel good about cross selling; because for them it won’t be about selling, but about serving our members and helping them with their finances.
First steps for involving your staff in delivering your brand promise:
Develop brand guidelines that you share with your staff. Include dress codes, standards for teller station and desk decorations/personalization, social media usage and how members will be greeted and handed off to other employees. This sets clear expectations of how your brand experience should be delivered to members.
Deliver brand training and involve all of your staff. Take time to explain your brand to your staff. Discuss what your brand promise means and how their interactions with members reinforce or break down that promise.
Role play member interactions with your front line staff. Act out member interactions with your employees to help reinforce how your products and services are relevant to different life stages that members may share with to your staff. For example, if a member tells you they just welcomed their first grandchild into the world, explain how this is a perfect opportunity to tell them about your youth savings accounts so that the member can start out their grandchild with savings for their future.
Encourage staff to participate in community events that support your brand. Urge your staff to participate in the community events that your credit union supports so they feel a part of good work you do for the community. Explain how their involvement reinforces your brand within the community and the connection between the events and your brand.
Bringing this back to the video inspired by Daniel Pink featured in this newsletter, your staff will have a purpose motive instead of a profit motive, with the end result being both. You are also meeting their urge to have a purpose that is satisfying by providing them the training needed to best serve your members with their financial needs.
By making it a priority to provide your staff with the training and knowledge they need to comprehend the products and services you offer to the extent that they can recommend the most relevant products and services for each member’s unique situation, you can provide them the autonomy to do what they do really well. Listen and connect with your members and provide them with financial advice that will reinforce the credit union as a partner in making financial decisions. And isn’t that what most of our brands are about, being a financial partner with our members?
Retain and Delight Your Employees with Meaningful Discounts
Employee retention is top-of-mind for many credit unions as the economy continues to improve and the competition for quality employees heats up. In addition to offering competitive compensation, many credit unions strive to provide a comprehensive mix of benefits to maintain an edge over other organizations and create a “great place to work.”
One often overlooked but highly valued employee perk that helps make credit unions a great place to work is an employee discount program that offers meaningful discounts on relevant products and services. In addition to traditional discounts on items such as movie tickets, your credit union can easily partner with Invest in America to also offer significant savings from companies like GM, Sprint, Intuit, DIRECTV and more. Invest in America is the single source for discount programs customized for credit union members and employees. To build awareness about your employee discount program, simply leverage your current employee communication channels:
Web – Develop a dedicated “Employee Discounts” page on your intranet and post banners with links that go directly to any pertinent discounts.
Newsletters – Dedicate space to employee discounts and promote the most relevant seasonal offers.
In-branch – Provide frequent updates to employees to remind them about the availability of discounts (and ask for suggestions about additional discounts to add to the program).
Creating a great place to work requires a careful balance of compensation, benefits, career growth, incentives and recognition. But once that perfect combination is found, the employee loyalty and goodwill you’ll foster will be felt throughout your credit union.
How to Create an Effective Career Center on Your Website
An essential part of attracting qualified applicants is selling them on your credit union and making it easy for them to apply. An interactive career center on your website can help you accomplish those goals.
With an increasing number of job seekers using the Internet as one of their sources when looking for a job, adding a career center to your site is a worthwhile endeavor. The number of job applicants who use the Internet for their job searches has been steadily rising according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project Poll. The poll conducted in April 2010 showed that 54% of those questioned use the Internet to look online for information about a job—compared with 52% in 2009 and 47% in 2008.
It makes good business sense, then, to provide those online job seekers the information they need to make a decision about applying for a job with your credit union—and what better place than your website? Any number of potential candidates—and that group can include credit union members, potential members, and applicants who want to work in the financial services industry—might turn to your credit union’s site when searching for employment. Make it easy for them to learn about your credit union, find the job openings, and apply.
An effective career center should include the following:
Highlights about your credit union – What sets you apart? Why should a marketing professional, member service representative, or loan officer choose your credit union?
Credit union brand –Include an overview of your credit union that includes your mission and purpose to convey your brand to potential employees.
Description of employee benefits – Cover the basics (health insurance and FSA) and include any “unpaid” benefits such as flex time or any employee discount program you may offer. List of open positions, including internships, by location – Include the full job descriptions and a link to your online job application.
Online job application and the ability to upload a resume – Whether you use a simple or detailed application, make it simple for applicants to complete.
Ability for applicants to create an account and save their information – Job applicants don’t always get the first position for which they interview; allowing them to store their information will save them time when they want to apply for a different position.
Ability to refer the position to a friend – The person perusing your career center might not be qualified for the open positions—but they might know someone who is. Also, your employees might know some eligible candidates and can direct them to the career center.
Information should always be current; no applicant wants to get excited about an opportunity only to find out that the job was filled two days ago.
Optional features that you might want to consider for your career center include:
Employee testimonials – No one says it better than a happy employee! Use their words to help tell why working at your CU is a positive experience.
Blog – If your credit union blogs about topics that are relevant to employees, include it.
Alumni area – Let former employees catch up; this can enhance the sense of camaraderie that your credit union has; former employees might see an opportunity to come back.
With an effective career center on your website, you can increase your pool of qualified job applicants, thereby increasing your chances to find the person best suited for the career opportunities at your credit union.
Creating a Competitive Compensation Program at Your Credit Union
Compensation can be an intense concern for your credit union and your staff. And chances are, you both have a different perspective when it comes to what you think is fair and equitable. The solution can be a basic HR tool – a sound and effective base salary administration program. When crafted correctly, it provides the logic for both entities and addresses a framework for reasonable understanding.
Job Analysis
Often called job information gathering. Job analysis is a process that helps define the content of a job. Job titles are not as important as job content; in fact, job titles can often be misleading. What is important?
Tasks, duties, responsibilities and what functions a job is responsible for
Often called job evaluation. Job evaluation is a logical process and systematic method to determine and compare the relative value of one job to others within the organization. It uses “compensable factors” (major common elements found in most jobs which lend themselves to differentiation based on value and worth; typically education, experience, decision-making, problem-solving, organization impact, etc.)
Job Evaluation provides internal equity and flexibility by:
Providing the ability to measure the value of jobs for the organization
Providing the ability to value hybrid jobs, such as a loan clerk that also does collections, or an accounting clerk that has IT responsibilities
Providing the ability to value unique jobs
Providing the flexibility to measure a job according to its value to the organization
Market Competitiveness
Salary information, as painful as it is to collect, is vital for pay grade and salary calculation.
Submitted or collected survey data should be:
Industry specific, if possible. If you use systems like HRN Performance Solutions’ Compease, you are already linked to a reliable survey source as the salary ranges for positions are blended from multiple credit unions and financial institutions
Position fitted (your positions to the survey positions) at a 75% or greater match
Indexed by company size (i.e., employees, revenue, assets, etc.)
Sufficient in sample size per position (to prevent skewing of data)
Adjusted to geographic location indicators
The Next Text Step
With those three critical components listed above, an equitable and competitive salary structure can be designed. Things to keep in mind, however:
Effective salary structure development is somewhat complicated. It typically requires a multiple regression analysis to formulate the pay line and to develop the pay grades.
If you are not well versed in this process (many are not), retain a compensation consultant to develop this for you.
Establish enough pay grades to provide differentiation between positions of difference, but not so many to make it administratively burdensome to manage (a consultant can help with this).
Most compensation-effective organizations, depending on size, will have between 18 to 24 pay grades (often dependent upon the asset size of a credit union).
Pay grade spread can vary, but a 50% pay grade spread (difference between the minimum and maximum) is very common.
The Final Step
Develop your compensation philosophy. Examples are:
How will you determine merit or annual pay adjustments?
Will you give COLA’s?
Do you have any reward programs for teller referrals, cross-selling products or special promotions?
How will you treat compensation if an employee is promoted within the credit union?
What logic will you use in placing new hires within the pay grade?
How will you deal with employees at the top of their ranges?
The Result
When completed, you will not only have an effective, efficient and state-of-the-art compensation system, but you will have a “proof positive” case to tell employees why their pay is what it is, and also a defensible case to explain to boards, executives and managers why the compensation expense is so high. Even though all might not agree, you have done what is important to provide fair pay to both employees and managers. You’ll also reduce the risks of pay discrimination charges.
Twitter isn’t just for daily updates at your credit union anymore. Event attendees have been bitten by the Twitter bug and are taking advantage of everything it has to offer. Here are six reasons you should tweet at your next event:
You are able to generate awareness about the event, even before it occurs.
It’s a great way to network before and during the event.
You can promote events, session topics or any changes.
It enables you to keep track of what’s going on while you’re there.
You can engage non-attendees who either wanted to be there but couldn’t , or weren’t aware of it and may attend your next event.
It gives you real-time event reviews and feedback.
Not sure of the best way to tweet from an event? It all starts with something called a hashtag. When you’re on Twitter and see something like #creditunions in someone’s tweet, the pound sign lets you know it’s a hashtag. All you have to do is either click on that hashtag to see every tweet that has it, or do a search for it in the search field. While this is the first step to tweeting from a event, three are four other things you’ll want to do:
Start tweeting weeks, even months before the event to build followers and excitement.
Encourage your attendees to tweet during the event.
Let your staff have a personality as they tweet, it increases the likelihood that you’ll be followed.
Be transparent and honest whenever you tweet.
To get an idea of how this all works, we’ll be attending CUNA’s America’s Credit Union Conference June 19-22 which already has a hashtag: #ACUC11. Start following the event today to see just how powerful Twitter can be.
Is loan volume stalling out at your credit union? You’re not alone. Stop by next month as we look into new and creative ways for your credit union to boost loan volume and its bottom line. Some ideas may be ones you’ve never even thought of!
The CU Solutions Group Online Gallery is now open for your viewing pleasure!
On exhibit are examples of Marketing Solutions' and Technology Solutions' works of art.
Don't have Adobe Reader?
Download it free here!
The CU Solutions Group Online Gallery is now open for your viewing pleasure!
On exhibit are examples of Marketing Solutions' and Technology Solutions' works of art.