We carefully select and develop our Managers and Directors who are the main drivers for a healthy climate. Their approach to managing people is groomed by development programs and by an effective team of HR Business Partners. We carefully listen to our employees’ opinion, communicate often and are not afraid to address all issues in an honest manner. We measure engagement in all its dimensions and take action to improve what we hear is less optimal; when we cannot, we engage into dialogue with our colleagues to share perspectives and eventually find solutions together. We strive to maintain transparency and clarity in our direction, values and organizational expectations through management systems as well as through our internal relationships

The brain drain to other sectors, the fatigue with ever increasing regulation and compliance, inflation.

We have e bottom-up approach whereby our employees can chose their own development journeys and certifications in alignment with management. We invest in Learning and Development as a differentiator on the Banking market and we focus both on technical abilities, relationship skills, collaboration and managerial development. Digital skills and literacy as well as Design Thinking are among the directions where we encourage our people to grow. We also use a team dynamic improvement psychometric tool that focuses on key individual drivers that contribute to effective teaming and self-development. Obviously, the mandatory regulatory and compliance training are a must in our industry so that our people are up to speed with requitements and changes in the industry. 

We realized at the beginning of 2023 that we have achieved most milestones we had planned in the last three years as employer. We started from a minimal base of HR practices, mostly focused on the administrative function of HR and built progressively an organization where best in class Human Resource management practices became the norm and adopted completely. It took three full years to get here and it was time to test our maturity level with an external benchmark. 

We had already put in place benchmarking mechanisms for engagement, on 14 dimensions but engagement is only one aspect of a healthy organization, we wanted to test our People organization fully. We found BPTW in February and then we moved very fast afterwards. We completed the pre-assessment before engaging our whole population into the survey, we got onboard our Leadership on this idea and we just followed the steps the BPTW team indicated. They have been a great partner in this journey. We are now discussing with each director the feed-back on their area and, despite the very good results, we find lots of things to learn and improve.

We often have a different perception of our work in HR versus what people may think and feel. Therefore, it might be risky to engage your whole organization into this endeavor if you do not really know your employee experience. Take the pre-assessment and then discuss with some of your key employees about the chances they see for the company to reach the required certification level.

And most of all, trust your own instinct on the likelihood of the success of the certification. I am a believer, in people and an things that are done properly and I knew we had done a thorough work during this years and that we stood a fair chance to be certified. In case we had failed, at least we would have had a clear improvement starting point of a plan.