Disengagement is the enemy
One of the greatest threats to the continued success and growth of your community bank is when the best employees, move from a point of being fully engaged in the culture and vision of your bank to a point of disengagement.
While training and coaching your employees to be all that they can be is important, we believe companies face a far greater threat to the bottom line when their engaged employees slowly become disengaged. This is the employee that was once your top performer and now, for some reason, he is in the middle of the pack. She is the one who brought innovations and passion to her work and now she seems to be going through the motions.
How did they get to this point? Management and leadership are likely to blame. Are you in danger of disengaging your best people? While there can be various reasons for disengagement, we have found these two things to be leading causes.
1. Tolerating the disengaged
As a manager, do you defend and excuse poor performance, or are you empowering the engaged? For example, if you have an officer call program and a few officers are making little to no effort in calling their customers, that’s a problem. An even bigger problem is excusing or allowing this to occur while your engaged officers support and participate in the program. At some point the best employees will begin to lose interest, knowing that you’re not really serious about the calling effort. This goes with any program or initiative in your bank. Lack of accountability and tolerating the disengaged will negatively impact your best people. They will either disengage or they will leave.
2. Sending mixed signals
A community bank’s culture should be based on relationships with the customers and its employees. If you claim to have a relationship-based culture while offering special rates to new customers and giving your loyal customers lower rates, your best employees will notice the inconsistency. If you’re paying a disengaged employee more or close to the same money as your best employee, the disengaged will be thrilled and the best will be disgusted. Where you put your money and your priorities will speak volumes to the engaged employees. Make sure what you say matches what you actually do.
The engaged have options
Your worst employees are often in a dead-end job for a reason. They’re miscast or maybe just a little lazy and they don’t have many other options for employment elsewhere. Or worse, they’re in a comfort zone at your bank because they have no accountability, very low expectations, and management seems quite fine with them collecting a paycheck. They have no reason to leave. However, your engaged employees are the best of the best, they have a difficult time not performing at the highest level. Their talents are in high demand and they have options for employment at any number of banks. Ignore the engaged at your own risk. They’ll find another job, they’ll be recruited by your competitors, or they’ll join the ranks of the disengaged.
