By now, your organization likely knows that having a staff of universal bankers offers your organization more flexibility in terms of staffing, creates more career fulfillment by providing opportunities, and most importantly, creates a better customer experience by enabling one continuous interaction to serve customer needs.
With all of these benefits in mind, you should think about ways you can enhance and support your universal banker staff. Consider the following ways to improve and reinforce your universal bankers.
Invest in Training
One of the most important elements of a universal banker staff is training, and as a director, you should continue to invest time and money into training for numerous reasons.
- Keeping skills fresh. By nature, your universal banker staff will be less specialized than typical employees. Naturally, various staff members will develop strengths and weaknesses. By providing regular training on new and existing skills, you can help keep skills sharp and increase staff’s confidence in executing those skills.
- Creating a forum for experiences. Even with comprehensive training, there are likely gaps in your informative sessions, or perhaps missing nuances that your universal banker staff will understand more intimately. Ongoing training sessions create an opportunity for your staff to share their experiences and explain the subtle details of the big ideas you’re trying to execute.
- Enhancing camaraderie. Universal bankers need to function in an interdependent way, especially when questions related to different skill sets arise on the job. Universal bankers also require more training to get up-to-speed after hire, so newer bankers will be more reliant on experienced staff. By creating training sessions, you create a greater bond among your staff and will encourage your team to support each other on the floor.
Leverage Growth to Retain
Maintaining a universal banker staff requires an ongoing acquisition and mastery of skills. Think about ways you can chart the progress of your employees to demonstrate their growth, and make sure you find a way to reward that growth as well.
Importantly, you want to make your staff reflect on the positive growth they’ve made and the new skills they’ve acquired, rather than make them feel micro-managed by creating a report card of all the skills they’re expected to learn. Make sure you’re highlighting their growth in a positive way, demonstrate the way that growth is enhancing their careers and skill sets, and offer ongoing praise for that growth.
Share Success
Sometimes as bank directors, it’s easy to be so process-oriented that you forget about why you begin a program in the first place. For example, a universal banking staff is typically implemented to improve customer experience and drive revenue.
In that sense, if customer experience metrics are improving, show that success to your staff! They’ll be delighted to know how their efforts are paying off, and if possible, any sort of bonuses tied to customer experience improvement can be highly motivating.
