Transforming the Bank’s Skills

These constraints – to which must be added the strong administrative dimension of the profession – have resulted in organizations where the high specialization/Taylorization of tasks met the requirements of technicality, control, and sometimes productivity. Over the years, this logic has led to the stacking of managerial layers, to operating in silos, and to strong skills on the business level but perfectible in the areas of customer relations, innovation & digital, and cross-functionality.

In an environment that is now highly mobile and under strong economic pressure, these organizations, and the skills that go with them, are becoming obsolete. For retail banking, which is also a labor-intensive industry with nearly 300,000 employees, this is therefore a huge project that is opening up for the next 10 years. A project that is opening up under increasingly tight cost constraints for banks. And a project guided by a revolution in professions, which will be increasingly expert, with the transfer to the client or the inevitable automation of the simplest tasks (50% of front and back office professions ) but which will also be increasingly open to others to facilitate cross-functional work and constant adaptation to new technologies. The quantitative and qualitative challenge is therefore enormous! And it is key to the transformation of the sector.

Integrate the evolution of skills and professions

The evolution of the skills of customer-facing teams is crucial

In a world where all information is accessible to customers, who have very often taken the time to research and compare, simple technical and commercial skills are no longer enough, and front-office employees will need, even more than today, to master new skills:

• Relational and emotional skills, to adapt to the characteristics of each interlocutor and to make each human interaction a pleasant and useful experience,
• an ability to be the “ senior banker ” for each client, being able to handle their needs, to mobilize the right department or the right contact; all while ensuring 100% support for requests expressed or identified,
• an ability to mobilize all this know-how regardless of the method of contact used: face-to-face of course, but also by telephone, in writing, by messaging… and by adjusting the response time to the “time” required by the method of contact.

These skills, in addition to traditional skills in mastering all the “technical” dimensions of the banker, are essential, because they alone allow for real differentiation from “technological” interactions and a perfectly tangible appreciation of the human element by the client.

The topic of skills also concerns central teams, and with equal acuity

First and foremost, the evolution of skills stems from the inherent evolution of different functions: new regulatory frameworks and new standards to be applied for control functions, new ways of recruiting for HR teams, new digital approaches to reach customers, etc.

These developments are, of course, linked to the business developments that are underway.y

 Increased automation of operations, with a range of possibilities that is expanding every day with robotization and the effective use of artificial intelligence, all with increased pressure on profitability, which leads to optimizing and therefore managing operations and processes in a fine and transversal manner.

New skills or new professions? In many cases, the question does not arise because the two go hand in hand. Like webmasters in the early 2000s, new skills are regularly required to maintain control of one’s activities and take advantage of new opportunities. One example is current: the need to invest in the subject of data sciences and to internalize ad hoc skills embodied by a data scientist. From a skills perspective, this type of need raises several questions:

• The ability to adapt HR practices (salary, classification, etc.) to be attractive to targeted, sought-after populations who do not necessarily imagine working in retail banking
• The need to consider new career paths (aiming to satisfy two distinct objectives, not necessarily complementary and to be adapted according to each profile): to propose a career path which does not confine a specialist to a single activity, and to mobilize on a defined mission, in project mode, the completion of which can be synonymous with departure
• The importance of hybridizing technical skills and banking skills. The example of data science is eloquent in this regard: only the combination of data and business skills is truly meaningful.

Integrating new professions is a major challenge. But the main challenge, in our opinion, is to develop the skills of the workforce, based on the business challenges and issues to be addressed. Strengthening business management, operating in project mode, developing cross-functionality, the ability to gain support for an objective outside of hierarchical levers, bringing teams and decision-makers on board, etc.: the skills are numerous and explicitly fall outside the scope of the technician, managed by a more senior and knowledgeable technician, mobilized for execution tasks.

We divide these new skills, or more precisely, these skills to be acquired by a greater number of employees, into three main families

• Cognitive skills and adaptability.  Even more than today, tomorrow’s employees will need to be able to analyze their activity and be problem-solving oriented, proactive, and creative in a less stable environment. They will need to know how to adapt to change, be agile daily, demonstrate curiosity, and manage their learning process more independently.
• Communication and interpersonal skills. In a world where intrinsic authority is no longer enough to drive and legitimize change, each employee will have to strengthen their mastery of oral and written expression in order to convince and know how to explain clearly and demonstrate pedagogy. In more horizontal modes of operation, where working in project mode with multidisciplinary teams is becoming the norm, it is important to know how to demonstrate solidarity, listening, and empathy, and to play as a team.
• Digital and digital skills. Even more so than today, and faced with natively digital generations, it is essential to have a thorough mastery of office tools, or even more complex tools, to manage and process data, master digital and collaborative tools, and know how to interact on internal and external social networks.

Transforming the collective and the organization

Beyond the individual professions or the individual skills to be acquired, the collective dimension is just as important in the transformation of financial institutions. It is not uncommon to see their transformation stumble upon ultimately quite simple obstacles:

• The lack of transversality, allowing for a relevant design at the outset and quality marketing at the end
• Lack of resources or methods, because efforts are spread over too long a time, and too many collaborators have little mastery of project methods.

Improving the “collective” game, therefore, involves changing postures but also evolving work routines and organizations, which will facilitate and anchor them

The postures of managers and employees alike must change:

• Greater delegation to employees, including participation in meetings or contributing to projects with other departments
• Kindness, the right to make mistakes, and encouragement to experiment or innovate
• Participatory team animation (everyone speaks, not just the manager).

Work routines need to be renewed.d

Meetings and emails are the two major drivers of cross-functionality today. But they monopolize the schedules of managers, and even more so, managers of managers: 50% of the time is spent in meetings (excluding preparation and reporting time), and probably 10 to 15% of the time is spent on emails. This leaves too little time left to support teams, take a step back from their work, or innovate. And these times are only increasing!

Although cross-functional in principle and therefore important, the meeting can nevertheless weigh less on the agenda: shorter duration, fewer participants, and invitations open to employees and not just managers, who should not have a monopoly on exchanges with other departments. It must also be prepared and led in such a way as to make it a real moment of exchange and not a moment endured where one deals with one’s emails.

Email is now the universal workflow; the best way to transfer work to a colleague or rely on a third party is by copying them. Proliferating, untraceable, and unmanageable, the email could likely be replaced tomorrow by a true workflow for requests and by an enterprise social network (Yammer, for example) for information and animation.

Organizations can usefully contribute to the development of skills

The organization should first seek to flatten hierarchical levels and limit the number of units. Fewer units are less difficult to coordinate and limit “territorial” issues. Fewer hierarchical layers facilitate delegation and the flow of information from the bottom up and from the top down. They also encourage movement and recognition of efforts made.

The reduction in hierarchical levels frees up several managers, who should be offered career prospects. The creation of project, expertise, and management programs in some banks is a good way to do this:

• The project sector values ​​transformation skills, their management, and their mobilization when project resources are necessary,
• The expertise sector offers a path to very strong profiles in terms of business dimension, antheyho are very useful in contributing to daily production or high-stakes projects,
• The management sector would retain its traditional vocation of supervision and management of daily production, with managers being able, during mobility, to switch to the project sector or the expertise sector (and vice versa).

Finally, comitology must also contribute to the development of skills.

Governance circles (particularly the executive or management committee) must no longer be primarily a means of recognizing a status. They must now facilitate the upward and horizontal expression of managers and their creativity. We can also delegate a level of decision-making to them, the difficulty then being to separate what relates to strategy, therefore to general management, and its implementation, which can be delegated. Committees must be redesigned to better separate committees, where the decision takes precedence, involving managers, preferably in small numbers (< 8 to 10) from commissions, whose purpose is, depending on the case, to prepare the committees or to share their decisions and action plans. The participants can then be more or less numerous and more varied, involving managers or employees.

Conclusion

Recruitment, training initiatives, HR programs, attitudes, tools, organization, and committees—there are many ways to develop individual and collective skills in financial institutions. The HR department plays a key role as conductor, working alongside the transformation and digital departments, to quickly and significantly improve the skills of the entire workforce. This is an ambitious but exciting challenge, serving all employees and, therefore, all customers. And we are convinced that the banks that successfully develop their human capital will be the most successful banks of tomorrow.