How Financial Institutions Can Improve Employee Experience in the Hybrid Work Era

With more than 80% of employees saying they’d be willing to work for a company that offers more flexibility, it’s time for financial services organizations to look beyond traditional ways of working. Financial Institutions (FIs) are quickly seeing that in order to keep up with competition, they need to prioritize the employee experience.

Mike Hicks, CMO at digital workplace platform Beezy, explains how FIs can prove they’re working to enhance the employee experience, at a time when it matters more than ever.

• The term employee experience gets thrown around a lot. Can you define what that means?

Employee experience represents the full journey an employee takes with an organization, from pre-hire to onboarding all the way through to how they view and communicate about the company after they depart. Much like customer experience, it’s shaped by every touchpoint, whether that’s personal (like how you’re treated by a colleague on a call) or technological (for example, how easy it is to book time off).

Employee experience, by its very nature, covers many different technology categories as they all come together to form a holistic experience. Much of it is narrowly focused and specialized, but one area that plays a big role is the digital workplace – or, in other words, a ‘modern intranet.’

The digital workplace encompasses the technology we use to communicate, collaborate, share knowledge, facilitate processes and build culture. Organizations globally are prioritizing investments in their digital workplace as it’s one of the easiest ways to make a significant impact on the employee experience.

A digital workplace brings employees together, allowing them to build and foster both personal and professional relationships. It creates a single source of truth and acts as a destination to share and discover knowledge. It’s also where organizations can (and should) embrace the concept of “working out loud” – an approach to collaboration that involves openly sharing projects and ideas.

This kind of transparency ultimately enhances the employee experience because it gives people insight into where projects are, the latest developments, and an opportunity to contribute, and how what they are working on is supporting the broader mission of the organization. Working out loud is particularly important in companies with more than 500 people, where you don’t know every other employee or their expertise.

• Why is the employee experience important for banks looking to gain an edge on their competition?

While there’s been a great deal of innovation in terms of how FIs serve customers, they’ve typically been slower to adopt new technologies in other parts of the business due to compliance and security regulations. Take the corporate intranet, for example. While other industries consider replacing or updating their intranet every three to five years, banks typically make this decision every seven to nine years. Think of the advancements that have been made in how we communicate, collaborate and share knowledge, even over the last three years. Many banks still operate on legacy technology that was built for a more office-centric environment, even though we’ve moved to more flexible hybrid work models.

Banks are also typically more hierarchical and siloed, so the idea of a modern workplace focused on open collaboration and knowledge sharing is a new concept for many. Because of this, some banks are finding themselves in catch-up mode, to ensure they can compete with other industries to offer a positive and consistent employee experience – online and off.

• What are some of the biggest HR threats to growth for banks?Acquiring and retaining talent is a huge issue across all industries right now. But some would argue it’s even more pronounced across FIs due to their more traditional way of working and historically less modern employee tech stack. It’s an employee market at the moment and if smart people aren’t fully inspired by their current employee experience, they’re moving on.

In the past, money and fear of unemployment used to drive employee retention. Now, everyone’s got a much broader understanding of what makes for a great work environment. And good employees have a lot of options. Internal comms and HR groups are therefore looking to more modern digital workplace technology to help create and facilitate the kind of engaging and rewarding experiences employees today are seeking.

Having one source of truth that’s personalized, branded to the organization, and social helps larger companies feel smaller and more connected.

• What can banks do to assess their employee experience? What can they do to make it better?

The first thing they have to be willing to do is ask their employees the right questions. Run surveys and find where people are getting frustrated or gauge their overall sentiment around tools and technologies and what changes they’d like to see. That said, asking the questions is the easy part; it’s the “doing something about it” where organizations get tripped up. Having a clear action plan, combined with senior leadership follow-through, will demonstrate an organization’s commitment to making the employee experience the best it can be. Approaching it this way also buys time, as it’s not an overnight fix. But giving employees a voice shows them they’re valued and is a critical step in building a positive and productive workplace and employee experience.

• Is hybrid work a threat or opportunity for financial services institutions?Hybrid working can be a significant opportunity for any organization to attract and retain the best talent regardless of physical location. The biggest risk for FIs with hybrid is in creating inconsistencies and disjointed experiences. For example, workers are justifiably concerned that colleagues who are getting more face time may gain an advantage. And they’re concerned that they may not be as productive on a day they’re in the office vs a day they’re at home (or vice versa).

Allaying these concerns is a communications challenge – something that leadership needs to address regularly. But it’s also a technology issue. One of the great things about a modern digital workplace is that it can create a home for work, so that no matter where an employee logs on – at the office, at home, from the road – they’re starting and operating from the same “space”. And while other work experiences change, like having lunch in person or cocktail hour over zoom, the intranet grounds things, and creates a hub for those critical employee experience touchpoints, like collaboration, information gathering, or working out loud.

With more than 80% of employees saying they’d be willing to work for a company that offers more flexibility, it’s time for financial services organizations to look beyond traditional ways of working. Financial Institutions (FIs) are quickly seeing that in order to keep up with competition, they need to prioritize the employee experience.

Mike Hicks, CMO at digital workplace platform Beezy, explains how FIs can prove they’re working to enhance the employee experience, at a time when it matters more than ever.

• The term employee experience gets thrown around a lot. Can you define what that means?

Employee experience represents the full journey an employee takes with an organization, from pre-hire to onboarding all the way through to how they view and communicate about the company after they depart. Much like customer experience, it’s shaped by every touchpoint, whether that’s personal (like how you’re treated by a colleague on a call) or technological (for example, how easy it is to book time off).

Employee experience, by its very nature, covers many different technology categories as they all come together to form a holistic experience. Much of it is narrowly focused and specialized, but one area that plays a big role is the digital workplace – or, in other words, a ‘modern intranet.’

The digital workplace encompasses the technology we use to communicate, collaborate, share knowledge, facilitate processes and build culture. Organizations globally are prioritizing investments in their digital workplace as it’s one of the easiest ways to make a significant impact on the employee experience.

A digital workplace brings employees together, allowing them to build and foster both personal and professional relationships. It creates a single source of truth and acts as a destination to share and discover knowledge. It’s also where organizations can (and should) embrace the concept of “working out loud” – an approach to collaboration that involves openly sharing projects and ideas.

This kind of transparency ultimately enhances the employee experience because it gives people insight into where projects are, the latest developments, and an opportunity to contribute, and how what they are working on is supporting the broader mission of the organization. Working out loud is particularly important in companies with more than 500 people, where you don’t know every other employee or their expertise.

• Why is the employee experience important for banks looking to gain an edge on their competition?

While there’s been a great deal of innovation in terms of how FIs serve customers, they’ve typically been slower to adopt new technologies in other parts of the business due to compliance and security regulations. Take the corporate intranet, for example. While other industries consider replacing or updating their intranet every three to five years, banks typically make this decision every seven to nine years. Think of the advancements that have been made in how we communicate, collaborate and share knowledge, even over the last three years. Many banks still operate on legacy technology that was built for a more office-centric environment, even though we’ve moved to more flexible hybrid work models.

Banks are also typically more hierarchical and siloed, so the idea of a modern workplace focused on open collaboration and knowledge sharing is a new concept for many. Because of this, some banks are finding themselves in catch-up mode, to ensure they can compete with other industries to offer a positive and consistent employee experience – online and off.

• What are some of the biggest HR threats to growth for banks?Acquiring and retaining talent is a huge issue across all industries right now. But some would argue it’s even more pronounced across FIs due to their more traditional way of working and historically less modern employee tech stack. It’s an employee market at the moment and if smart people aren’t fully inspired by their current employee experience, they’re moving on.

In the past, money and fear of unemployment used to drive employee retention. Now, everyone’s got a much broader understanding of what makes for a great work environment. And good employees have a lot of options. Internal comms and HR groups are therefore looking to more modern digital workplace technology to help create and facilitate the kind of engaging and rewarding experiences employees today are seeking.

Having one source of truth that’s personalized, branded to the organization, and social helps larger companies feel smaller and more connected.

• What can banks do to assess their employee experience? What can they do to make it better?

The first thing they have to be willing to do is ask their employees the right questions. Run surveys and find where people are getting frustrated or gauge their overall sentiment around tools and technologies and what changes they’d like to see. That said, asking the questions is the easy part; it’s the “doing something about it” where organizations get tripped up. Having a clear action plan, combined with senior leadership follow-through, will demonstrate an organization’s commitment to making the employee experience the best it can be. Approaching it this way also buys time, as it’s not an overnight fix. But giving employees a voice shows them they’re valued and is a critical step in building a positive and productive workplace and employee experience.

• Is hybrid work a threat or opportunity for financial services institutions?Hybrid working can be a significant opportunity for any organization to attract and retain the best talent regardless of physical location. The biggest risk for FIs with hybrid is in creating inconsistencies and disjointed experiences. For example, workers are justifiably concerned that colleagues who are getting more face time may gain an advantage. And they’re concerned that they may not be as productive on a day they’re in the office vs a day they’re at home (or vice versa).

Allaying these concerns is a communications challenge – something that leadership needs to address regularly. But it’s also a technology issue. One of the great things about a modern digital workplace is that it can create a home for work, so that no matter where an employee logs on – at the office, at home, from the road – they’re starting and operating from the same “space”. And while other work experiences change, like having lunch in person or cocktail hour over zoom, the intranet grounds things, and creates a hub for those critical employee experience touchpoints, like collaboration, information gathering, or working out loud.