Remote Employees

The talent we need will often not be in our backyard. I find that in smaller institutions, there is resistance to hiring remote employees. Unfortunately, this often results in organizations in more rural areas not being able to attract the talent that they need. Organizations that are going to survive the transition to digital will need to think about how to deal with employees who may only set foot in the office once a month, or even once a year. Here are some of the challenges that must be overcome.

Evaluations

Evaluations in the digital age will be different than the traditional evaluations that are delivered today. As mentioned in the culture section, it is important that your evaluations are aligned with your organizational culture. If you are trying to foster collaboration, then individual goals on evaluations will be counterproductive. The evaluations should reflect the employees' work environment. Organizations that are pursuing organization agility will want to reward collaboration, inclusion, and participation.

Career Paths

Career paths are among the biggest issues I see in financial institutions that are attempting a digital transformation. Often, a department such as analytics evolves as opposed to being planned out. The evolution usually involves hiring a person for a position that is new in the organization and placing that person somewhere that is the closest fit. Eventually, as the position and the value it brings evolves, the organization will decide to formalize the area into a department. In this model, the evolution hurts the employee and sometimes the organization. New positions can often become a place where good employees go to wither away. While most of the mature parts of the organization have well-defined career paths, this new area doesn't, and as a result, the employee doesn't have clear goals or expectations.

It is important for human resources to do research and map out a career path for every department long before the department positions are filled. Technical employees want to know what their options are to move up in the company. If the department has a well-defined career path and that is communicated to the employees clearly, it will help with motivation and teamwork. To accomplish this, I would highly recommend that human resources visit other tech-heavy industries and review their organizational structures—if possible, visiting a larger bank with a programming department or technical department would be a valuable experience for the HR team.

Incentives and Compensation

In the technical area, incentives are a valuable resource. I once put a $1,500 challenge out to my staff to build a financial application for the Xbox, Apple TV, or any TV streaming device that supports applications. In less than a week, an employee delivered a financial application that showed balances, pulled history, and displayed check images on a ROKU (this is a common TV streaming device). You haven't lived until you have seen a check image on 55-inch 4K television. The challenge I had was getting the person paid, because HR didn't have anything set up to do this. I knew that we had a budget for this sort of thing, as I had set aside money for these sorts of challenges. What I hadn't considered was that HR didn't have a way for me to deliver the incentive without doing a 1099 for the employee. I wound up having to give the employee $1,500 in Visa gift cards. HR should encourage innovation and work with department heads to have an incentive program that allows departments to motivate, provide rewards, and foster innovation.

Compensation for technical employees changes very rapidly in the finance space. I have seen many financial organizations lose great technical talent to other industries because HR didn't keep up with the market. For an organization that desires to be a technology company, it is very important to monitor the market as it relates to your technical positions and stay competitive. Financial organizations often struggle with this because the rest of the organizational chart is very static in comparison to the technology area. Many companies provide these services, so I would suggest that at least once a year, technology area compensation be reviewed.

Recruiting

Recruiting top technical talent is the place where I see the biggest need for improvement. In almost every financial institution I have worked with, technical talent is recruited by managers from within the technical areas of the organization. While this is certainly not the worst situation in the world, it does take away from the daily duties of these managers. Human resources should consider partnering with universities, technical schools, maker spaces, and other areas where technical talent can be cultivated. A pure technical recruiter position should also be considered for organizations that wish to operate as a technology company. This recruiter would understand the markets for the skillsets they are seeking and talented enough to do first-level interviewing.

Training

Bank Security Act or BSA training has never been more important in a financial organization. In the current world environment where cybercriminals are targeting financial institutions' employees more than ever before, it is important for employees to understand the techniques that will be used against them in their everyday job. For instance, in the past, my security people have dropped random USB sticks in the employee parking lot to see who would pick them up and put them in their work PCs, sent fake emails from the CEO with an attachment that emulated a virus, and tested social engineering by pretending to be a system administrator and calling employees and asking for their passwords. The point I am making here is that BSA isn't enough. Like all security-related regulations, I believe a financial institution should exceed the requirements as much as possible. One thing I have seen recently are increased attempts by cybercriminals to gain access to specific employees systems by targeting them with emails containing viruses that would allow the hacker to take control of their system remotely. Many times I have been asked, how do they know whom to target? A simple LinkedIn search for ACH and the bank or credit union being targeted will give you numerous targets. Even if their email isn't listed on LinkedIn, it is not hard to learn the patterns of email at an organization. For instance, if the CEO's email is [email protected] and your targets name is Jane Doe, it's likely that [email protected] will be the email address. I would encourage financial institutions to ask employees with significant access to moving funds to keep their names and information out of social media. It is likely that these threats will continue to escalate in the coming years and the quality of the training programs instituted by the HR department will play a key role in how well employees respond to these attacks.

Training takes on another dimension completely when it comes to developing technical employees. While roles like accounting and risk evolve each year, they don't evolve at the pace that technology is currently evolving right now. Technical employees will continue to need to be trained in new platforms, new paradigms, and new services on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this training isn't cheap, and as a result, I find that most employees' technical areas wind up either self-learning or paying for courses and training themselves. In both cases, once the employee acquires the new skill, they will often leave the organization. This is usually because their effort isn't rewarded by the organization, and since the organization didn't provide training with career development opportunities, there is no incentive to stay. Millennials highly value developmental training and will seek out organizations that provide career development resources.

The good news is that there are lots of ways to do this now without breaking the bank (no pun intended). At my company, we have corporate access to video training sites that we encourage our employees to use. Sites like Lynda.com or udemy.com are excellent resources to learn new concepts, explore new platforms or just sharpen their skills on the current platforms that your organization already has in place. The key to getting your employees to use it is to provide easy access to the resource, provide them with the time, and measure their progress. I also believe that all employees should be able to order technical books without having to ask management. There are many sites that allow access to as many technical books as you can download. Providing your employees with a cost-effective e-reader like a KOBO would pay off very quickly in employee advancement by allowing them to download a multitude of technical books and have them at their fingertips at all times. A final way to encourage employee training is to give employees time off to attend local meetings of groups that focus on their specific skills. For instance, if your organization has chosen to move resources to a cloud provider like Azure or AWS, there are likely groups that meet to discuss these platforms, and your organization could benefit from the relationships formed at these meetings. In fact, it can also be used as a recruitment opportunity. It's a simple recipe: If you want to find mobile developers, go to where the mobile developers hang out—or better yet, create a place for mobile developers to hang out and have them come to you (more on that in the next section).

Dress Code

One challenge the financial community will face as it courts the upcoming millennial generation is their dress code. The next generation of programmers and technical experts doesn't understand how a tie will make them a better employee. As a matter of fact, they have been repeatedly taught not to judge books by the cover, and moreover, they are a generation that is used to personalizing everything, from their phones to their cars. However, it is difficult for the average financial institution CIO to get past full-length arm tattoos and large gauges in someone's ears (these are the big circles you see in people's ears—which, by the way, look far worse if you make them take it out). The challenge is that banking has always been a suit-and-tie industry. Fintechs, however (which is our greatest competition for top technical financial talent), don't care if you come to work in board shorts and a tank top. In fact, they pride themselves on their laidback environment, and it's a selling point to their employees.

There are several options for solutions here. One is to house your development and programming team elsewhere. When you read the “Facilities” section, next, you will find that the workspaces needed to support technical talent and development are different enough that it might be worth your while to find a space that can be retrofitted into a technical lab. After all, you only must get one or two of them to dress up now and then if they only come to a meeting or two at the main office, or bring them to your senior staff meeting. The other option is to contract these workers. I have been in many cities where in the same building park as the financial institution there is a technical company just waiting to be bought. There is value to buying an established culture and integrating it into your organization rather than trying to create it from scratch. A final option is to allow some of the staff to work at home a few days a week. I find that most technical workers can work at home and they relish the opportunity to have a day where they won't be bothered by other employees. When they are home they are welcome to wear whatever they want.

Workspaces

The thinking behind technical workspaces has evolved in the past 10 years, from high-walled cubicles to open wooden desks (like you might find at a Apple store) that can be moved around to accommodate new projects. Open meeting areas, with ceiling-to-floor whiteboards and private sitting areas with furniture that has built in charging mechanisms, are the new norm in tech companies. If financial organizations want to compete, they will need to design their facilities to be more tech friendly. The challenge is that this approach doesn't work well in other departments. For instance, accounting will not want a large wooden desk where the accountants sit buffet style and work side by side. They are more partial to the high-walled cubicles and filing cabinets. The challenge is how to mix these things together.

The new facility is important in an agile environment. In new tech companies, the development areas are flexible and can be reorganized if necessary, so if your next project requires two developers, a UX professional, a project manager, scrum master, and QA person, this group may reorganize the space so that they all sit together for the duration of the project. The QA person will be present and can give instant feedback on the developers' efforts, the developers will be next to the UX professional who can answer questions about how things are supposed to work as they come, and the project manager and scrum master can track the project continuously. This shortens development time frames, increases productivity, and fosters a team mindset for projects. Open areas that can be used for impromptu meetings will be necessary in this environment because the flexible spaces don't lend themselves to private meetings. If the UX professional and scrum master need to meet together and work out an epic, a small conference room with glass walls (this is important, by the way) and a floor-to-ceiling whiteboard is a perfect working space for them. The glass walls allow your team to know where someone is; closed conference rooms send a message to technical employees that meetings are private and don't foster collaboration. It's important to have an open environment.

Wi-Fi

Dear financial institutions, for goodness' sake, figure out your Wi-Fi. I have been to organization after organization where Wi-Fi is a mess. Among the technical employees, Wi-Fi is considered a joke. It's too slow, too burdensome to use, or so locked down that it is useless to the average technical employee. I realize that Wi-Fi has been a security concern; however, this is 2018, and we have conquered these problems. If you are going to have a flexible workspace, then a good Wi-Fi system is absolutely necessary.

Again, I am not saying that you need to put in a Wi-Fi system that is less than secure. I am saying that you need to spend the money so that there are no dead spots, and there is a good security apparatus in place that allows productivity while protecting the organization that doesn't need an act of God to change. Nothing is more frustrating to a highly technical individual than not being able to get to the resources they need to do their job. It sends a message to them that the organization doesn't understand what they do; otherwise, they would have these resources available to them. This, in turn, creates a perception that the organization doesn't want technical people. Wi-Fi is also important if you are going to outsource. I have seen situations where contractors are sitting around being paid for days and weeks while they wait for security to grant permission for them to get to the resources they need to do the job they were hired for. This results in cost overruns, shifting deadlines, and excessive errors due to playing catch-up on the project. Having a bad Wi-Fi system will cost you money and employees.

Equipment

I have watched programmers press build on their laptop or PC and walk away for 30 minutes while they wait for the build to complete. When I asked them why this was happening, they would inform me that their machine has an i5 processor or it has very little RAM. This is always baffling to me—why would anyone hire top technical talent and then give them subpar tools to work with? Again, this sends a message to the programmer that the organization doesn't understand what they do or how they do it. It's a little like hiring a carpenter but not buying a table saw, nail gun, or any of the other tools that he or she needs to work. As new platforms evolve like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, the average IT professional's processing power needs are going to double. I prefer to buy laptops for all technical staff so that they can roam with their devices and work off-site. One good strategy is to continuously cycle the technical staff's devices down to other departments every year so that IT is continually upgraded. Another way to handle this is to move your entire development environment to the cloud (see the cloud computing section for more on this) where the development platforms can be housed in the cloud and processing power can be used in a more efficient manner. When more processing power is needed for a particular developer or technical expert on a project, the system administrator can allocate more power to the system without a costly upgrade, or design a build system that can be used by the entire staff. The point here is to not underpower your technical team—don't underestimate the frustration of technical experts trying to do their job with a underpowered system; they will eventually leave.

Meet-ups

When my kids were young, my wife and I encouraged their friends to play at our house as much as they wanted. We figured if they were at our house, we knew where they were and they were safe. I think this same approach can be true for attracting top talent at your organization. If you have built a nice workspace for technology, why not allow it to be used (with appropriate security of course) by technical groups that have synergy with your organization. In the cloud example I mentioned above, your organization could host a meeting once a month and as a result technology professionals would get to experience your culture and facilities. Again, this could be a great recruiting tool. It can also be a great way to get customers.