Remote Work, AI and Rising Expenses: Two Bank Executives Talk Talent

Banking is fundamentally a people business. No matter how tech-forward a bank may be, it can’t succeed without the right talent in place.

Managing that talent is part art, part science and a whole lot of logistics. This function is increasingly influenced by emerging technologies and cost of living, and the strategies that work for one bank may not necessarily work for another in a different geography. But it all begins with culture and that starts at the top, agree two bank executives who recently discussed those strategies with Bank Director.

“Creating the culture starts with leadership,” says Penny Camp, chief administrative officer with the $2.9 billion Bank Independent of Sheffield, Alabama. Heather Ames, chief people officer of the $2 billion Montecito Bank & Trust in Santa Barbara, California, has a similar view.

“If you don’t have the right culture, if you don’t have a leadership team that is well trained, that knows how to inspire, engage and lead efficiently, then that’s where you start to see some problems,” she says.

The transcript below has been edited for brevity, clarity and flow. To watch the full conversation, access the webinar recording here.

BD: How are you handling recruitment and retention within retail banking in particular?
Camp: We have extended hours, six days a week. We have a number of offices as well as a call center that’s open from 8 in the morning until 8 p.m. That creates its own unique set of challenges. We use a lot of part-time team members, and we’ve had to get flexible and creative with how to leverage that part-time availability on the scheduling side.

On the retail side, we use a lot of college students. We do a lot of recruiting within the colleges, starting them out as part-time team members and interns to get that talent in and keep developing that talent. That has been a great way for us to continue to fill roles, particularly on the retail side.

Ames: One of the things that I oversee is our process mapping. We move that into mapping career paths by identifying what does that path look like? What is the skillset to get to the next step? And where can that go? While a lot of bankers start in the retail side, there are many avenues to grow from the branches into audit, into lending, into business banking and to technology. Then we make strong career paths within the retail network to make sure that we’re not driving people out of the branches, but we’re able to retain them.

BD: How does your organization approach remote work?
Camp: We are predominantly in office. What we have found, though, is not that our team members necessarily want to be remote full-time, but what they do want is flexibility. If they have a special need to work from home on certain days, we work with their manager to help them have that flexibility. But the team has decided — and they communicate this through the engagement survey — that there’s a value to being in the office and learning from each other.

Ames: We have a hybrid model. Based on just the cost of living in Santa Barbara County, it’s near impossible to get anybody to relocate to this area. There’s definitely a limited talent pool. A good strategy has been to employ people that are maybe on the rural outskirts of our locations if they’re able to commute once or twice a week, as opposed to coming in five days a week.

We’ve let the senior leaders manage that because every department and every role is different. But there are a lot of days we’re in Zoom meetings, and we tell people, if it’s a day you’re going to be working in an office with your door closed on a Zoom, that’s a great day for remote work. That has absolutely helped us because the cost of living here is just really challenging.

BD: Bank Director’s Compensation & Talent Survey finds year after year that expenses increase. How do you manage rising compensation expenses?
Camp: We have been trying to become more efficient because we see that the cost for specialized team members is going to continue to increase. So how do we use automation to manage overall headcount and to manage our full-time equivalents so that we can continue to invest from a compensation and benefit standpoint to remain competitive and perhaps be a little bit above market when necessary?

Ames: We’re really thoughtful. If there’s a position that vacates, we don’t just replace it. Things are changing so rapidly with technology that a lot of times that job has probably changed. Sometimes there’s a totally different need and we look for a whole different skill set. Sometimes we’ve found we didn’t need to replace. But we also will pay what we have to pay. Sometimes we’re paying up because there’s a small talent pool here and it’s competitive.

BD: How is artificial intelligence impacting your workforce so far?
Ames: No matter what we do with AI, there’s got to be human oversight. That’s critical for us. We’re learning that we need to have [subject matter experts] in every area. We need to identify those folks throughout the bank who we’re going to re-skill, who really have the aptitude, the right skills to be those leads.

Interestingly, what we started hearing is almost any technology position we had open, applicants wanted to know where our appetite was with AI. At this point, technology is now moving from software development to AI opportunities. That’s what they want to build on their resume. To even retain some of those tech positions, we’ve got to find a way to embrace AI and to train our folks.