Reasonable work demands equals happy employees

Valley Credit Union strives to maintain a good work-life balance

Bill Falconer
Vice-president, Organizational Development
Valley Credit Union

Headquartered in Waterville, N.S., the financial institution employs 65 staff.

The survey process identified Valley Credit Union as a leader in best practices that leads to an engaged workforce. Bill Falconer, vice-president of organizational development at Valley Credit Union, was interviewed about two best practice areas in which his firm excels: clarity and feedback and reasonable work demands.

Clarity and feedback

Valley Credit Union’s variable pay program is based on eight or nine key products and promotes clarity and feedback because performance, and therefore compensation, is clearly related to specific products, said Falconer.

“As well, feedback is quarterly on achievement of two kinds of goals: sales goals and job performance goals,” he said. “For an employee involved in sales, for instance, we establish a dollar value representing sales of each financial product. At the end of the first quarter we hold a sit-down appraisal with the employee. The focus of this first session is, ‘Are the goals realistic?’ This allows adjustments to be made based on management’s appraisal and also on feedback from the employee.”

The remaining three quarterly appraisal sessions focus on achievement of the targets, but not in a blaming sense, he said. The aim is to help sub-achievers by:

•sharing with them the experiences and tips of high achievers in the organization; and

•if necessary, teaming them up with a high achiever over the course of the year who acts as a coach. This helps prevent a “dog-eat-dog” working environment from developing, since it involves co-operation.

Several organizational characteristics make it possible to operate the variable pay program effectively:

•a variable compensation committee with representation from management, employees and the board. This committee monitors the program and recommends changes to increase its effectiveness;

•a progressive board that understands the need for employee support and for communication with employees;

•an understanding and supportive CEO who has an excellent relationship with the board; and

•the work of other committees that is consistent with, and supportive of, the work of the variable compensation committee. For instance, the company has a benefits committee that intends to work on healthy employee lifestyle issues, and it has an HR committee that focuses on internal succession so employees see they have a growth path within Valley Credit Union.

“Recently we had a teller who was having trouble balancing funds adequately,” said Falconer. “We accept a certain margin of error in balancing, but she fell outside the margin. We know from previous experience that as a teller’s balancing accuracy improves, her contributions to sales improve as well.

“We were able to spot this problem early in the year. I met with her, with a support focus rather than an accusatory one. I indicated that her branch manager would work closely with her to help her improve her balance accuracy, and she did achieve an acceptable accuracy rate later in the year.

“My contribution was sitting down with the employee in a supportive environment and matching her with the branch manager to act as her coach. My job was to encourage the employee, not to discourage her. In a broader sense, what made this work was the willingness of the organization to show an interest in a person. By this I mean an interest in the person and not just in the person’s performance dimension.

“I contribute as well by maintaining an open-door policy. Employees can contact me anytime, day or night, on-site or off-site, if they need support.”

Reasonable work demands

In an organization that relates compensation to performance, there is a danger that employees could quickly conclude that unreasonable demands will be placed on them, said Falconer.

“We are aware of this danger and have taken measures to ensure it doesn’t happen,” he said. “Fostering reasonable work demands depends as much on what we do not do as on what we actually do. For instance, we do not routinely increase the base targets for performance acceptability. If we expect you to sell or process 100 widgets this year, we do not expect you to sell or process 200 widgets next year. We recognize that our bonus system creates ‘stretch’ in employees, so we don’t need to create stretch through unwarranted increases in baseline demands.”

The company also conveys the message that it does not expect staff to work 80 hours per week and the CEO makes it clear that specialized resources will be in place to ensure help is available if employees feel they are becoming overstretched by work demands.

“Recently we moved an employee to a higher position. The person she replaced had been much more experienced in the position, and the new employee in the position indicated she felt overworked,” said Falconer. “After working with her to understand her predicament, we hired a half-time person to assist her. But we did more than that. We found out, from other branches, what the workload sequence should be for an employee in her position and the time it should take a seasoned employee to perform each step in the sequence.”

The company told her about this information and made it clear that performing at the level of a seasoned incumbent would take some time, but that the information it had provided to her about job-step sequencing, plus the initial additional staff support, plus other options for supporting her, meant she would eventually achieve the time benchmarks of a seasoned employee.

“These steps greatly reduced her anxiety while maintaining her expectation, and ours, that she would improve,” said Falconer. “My role was to make contact with other branches to find out that sequencing and time benchmarks could be provided by these branches, and used in respect to the branch in which the performance-stressed employee works. I had the contacts in these branches to seek out this information.”

Falconer said Valley Credit Union is able to provide these levels of support without incurring great costs to the organization.

“In fact, our HR costs as a ratio to assets are low because we are a well-managed organization,” he said. “As well, our links with HR resources in other credit unions within our area — what we call our ‘central unit’ — allows us to benefit from the HR knowledge and experiences of others, and in turn to contribute to their reserves of knowledge.”



For last issue's coverage of i>How Much and How Important? Executive Views on Employee Engagement Factors, check out Misfiring on the rules of engagement as well as the case studies on Computronix and the Translation Bureau.

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