Login
6 min
Shelley Seifert is Chairman and CEO of First Bank, offering premier business banking, commercial banking, and personal banking solutions to clients in Missouri, California, Illinois, and mortgage services in Kansas. Here, she discusses her priorities around team development, embracing hybrid work and empowering managers to drive engagement.
What’s something new you or your team is focused on in 2023?
Development is a very high priority for us – building career paths, frameworks, and corresponding development opportunities for those who would like them. We’ve always offered training to do your current job, what’s new is the training to grow and do another job if you’re interested. As a smaller and flexible company, we can move people around and take advantage of passions and interest.
We’re also building a new headquarters.
Hybrid is here to stay and we wanted our building to reflect that – when people come in they come to meet people and collaborate, not close the door and work at a computer!
Our temporary space is also set up for hybrid- it’s completely open (no assigned desks) and we’re finding the collaboration and energy are better than what we had before.
And this is a big change for us. There are no offices or assigned workstations. You come in and work wherever you feel like. It’s driving greater cross-team and cross-department interactions. It’s also substantially less square footage than before – we are consolidating 3 buildings into one.
What’s your organization’s remote work policy?
For hybrid eligible employees, they are in the office at least 3 days a week. We focus on “meetup days” which is when your team will all be in the office – this way we can ensure members of teams don’t miss each other.
Related: The Biggest Challenge of Remote Employee Engagement
We know the benefits of remote work. What are your top 3 challenges with it so far?
My biggest concern is development. It’s the learning that I was fortunate enough to receive just by being around people everyday. Worry about isolation keeps me up at night and for people who want to do more it’s a little bit harder. We do internal promotions every year and we just saw fewer during the pandemic. Employees weren’t developing in the same way.
Building relationships has also been more challenging. When you have a zoom call it starts on time and ends on time, there is no room for any free form/informal conversation.
Up until January and our move into the new space, it seemed like every meeting was about how do we get people to come in? Are we supporting our branches? And then we entered the new building and those problems went away.
What’s different about Employee Experience in 2023?
For me, what feels different in my role is that it’s so intentional.
EX kind of just happened before, now we are extremely intentional about how people come together and what it feels like when they do.
Engagement happens between the manager and employee. So we brought this to our Managers, empowering them to consider what kind of experience they wanted their teams to have. When do they want them in? Who do they want to be in at the same time? What kinds of meetings are being held? Each manager designed how they wanted to work and our HR Team pulled it all together.
We saw a big change when decisions shifted from a corporate-led to manager-led approach.
For organizations with large frontline populations, one of the challenges remote work creates is the “haves” and “have nots”. What are some ways organizations might address this?
Our branch team members are ineligible for remote. All of us have enormous respect and appreciation for our branch colleagues and recognize they don’t have this same benefit. For them, the in-office experience is even more important which is why we are redesigning our branches to be open and airy and to give employees more flexibility, less tied to an operating environment and more tied to the client. We’re about halfway through the rollout across our 80 branches.
Our head of retail made a smart decision early on by adding a regional manager role, thereby reducing the territory size and making it easier for managers to get into branches regularly. So these have been some of the ways we’ve been investing here. Relationship building across branches and roles is something I’d like to do more of.
One of the big questions on everyone’s mind is, how do you build a thriving culture virtually? We’re all still figuring it out. But what comes to mind for you?
Be intentional about in-person interactions. If not, they just do what they did at home which does you no good.
We started with our sales rallies which we hold quarterly as part of our focus on vibrant sustainable growth. During these events, we recognize everyone who has helped build the sales culture, even if they are not in sales. We work hard to make them fun and exciting whether virtual or in-person.
How is your organization leveraging engagement surveys today?
We use Gallup and do a big engagement survey every 12-18 months followed by intermittent pulse surveys.
What is the post-survey action planning process like at your organization?
Each year we ask each manager to pick 1 maybe 2 things for the team to focus on, then come back together as a team, look at your outcomes, and agree on what the focal point will be. We do the same at the corporate level. We try to keep the engagement survey alive and something that the teams own vs. the company.
Challenges certainly exist with accountability and enablement. Are some managers better than others? Yes. Are the ones who need it most probably not doing as much? Yes. There’s definitely an opportunity here.
That said, I don’t want to get into a world where you’re graded on this – would rather stay focused on the bigger picture vs. the bigger structure.
Related: How to Make Better Employee Pulse Surveys | Bonfyres
What applications do you see for AI in HR?
Each year we ask each manager to pick 1 maybe 2 things for the team to focus on, then come back together as a team, look at your outcomes, and agree on what the focal point will be. We do the same at the corporate level. We try to keep the engagement survey alive and something that the teams own vs. the company.
Challenges certainly exist with accountability and enablement. Are some managers better than others? Yes. Are the ones who need it most probably not doing as much? Yes. There’s definitely an opportunity here.
That said, I don’t want to get into a world where you’re graded on this – would rather stay focused on the bigger picture vs. the bigger structure.
