Becoming a Talent-Powered Bank -- Full Text

Extreme volatility characterizes the financial services industry as the first decade of the 21st century begins to draw to a close. The industry continues to be buffeted by macro economic trends over which no individual financial institution has adequate control. To most of the banking executives with whom we speak and work, the rules of the game seem to have been changed permanently.

At the same time, one characteristic of the industry remains unchanged: financial services companies are people businesses. They succeed or fail based on the quality of their workforce talent at every level—the front lines, middle management and executive leadership. Rocky times are certainly ahead for all companies in this business, but we believe one thing is certain: talent-powered banks will emerge with a competitive edge in achieving high performance.

What is a talent-powered bank? It is one that sees workforce talent as the primary engine for sustained, competitive advantage. It's a bank that knows who it is: it takes methodical, relentless steps to translate business strategy into talent strategy, define its core competencies, and then buy, develop or outsource the skills needed to embody those competencies. A talent-powered bank excels at attracting, developing, engaging and retaining its best people. It constantly works to redirect workforce performance toward activities and behaviors needed to serve customers and execute business strategy. And, since ideas and innovations are, by definition, things that arise in the minds of human beings, a talent-powered bank is continuously attuned to ways that its workforce talent is already pushing at the boundaries of accepted practices and ways of operating. Innovations are always and already present  among an organization's people, if only the right decision makers know where to look and where to listen.

Based on our research and extensive work with banking institutions around the world, Accenture  understands what high performance means in banking, and what companies must do to retool themselves from a talent management perspective to drive success in the future. This report explores the primary dimensions of our thinking, based on actual results already attained by leading banks.

The stakes today are very, very high. For too many years, financial services institutions have limited their focus on human resources and talent management primarily to finding the best or hungriest candidates, and then rewarding their individual successes. But at many perceptive institutions today, it's becoming clearer that talent management is no longer just about a few rainmakers. It's about creating a workforce in which people at every level are capable of contributing to high performance. It's about creating a culture of excellence. It's about having leadership that does more than simply say the words that, “People are our most important asset.” Talent leaders go beyond the words: they also have the knowledge to grow that asset, and then the courage to stay tied to the mast when the siren song of the short term begins to sound again.

Talent as a distinctive capability: The current state of talent management in banking
Over the past 20 years or so, a number of companies around the world have earned reputations as  leaders not only in terms of business performance, but also in terms of their world-class approaches to talent management—the manner in which they have optimized workforce talent and linked the performance of their people to business results. Because their strong workforce capability is rooted in a deep-seated belief system, nurtured by executive leadership and sustained by a broad array of processes, these companies often attain a market advantage not easily imitated by competitors—defining, discovering, developing and deploying talent becomes a distinctive capability for these organizations.

For the most part, banking institutions have not been regular members of that list of talent-powered companies. The radical changes wrought upon the financial services industry in general—and the banking industry in particular—have taken their toll upon talent management practices and, ultimately, on the workforces and companies themselves.

Here is one indicator of the problem. If one looks at the most recent list of the "100 Best Companies to Work for in America,” compiled by Fortune magazine, there is not a single large (10,000+ employees) banking institution anywhere to be found. That’s just one list, of course—one way to gauge respectability in the talent area—but it’s not a great sign.

Today, years of inattention to talent issues are catching up with banks and other financial services companies. The current industry volatility has exposed weaknesses along multiple dimensions—strategy, operations, technology and people. If companies are not careful, today's financial turmoil could lead banks to justify even less attention to the workforce—a decision that could pile error upon error, leading to competitive disadvantage that could last for years.

Banks that are to achieve high performance in the coming years will be those able to balance smart initiatives in cost transformation with parallel efforts to maintain competitive differentiation and the ability to execute strategy.

Achieving High Performance in Banking
A recent comprehensive study, part of Accenture's ongoing High Performance Business research initiative, has focused on the characteristics of high performance in the banking industry—the ability to outperform competitors over sustained economic cycles and changes in management—and what banks must do to achieve that level of performance.

This research finds that high-performance banks excel in three categories.

1. Simplification on the inside: Costcutting now has a more accurate name, and it is "industrialization." That is, banks must work to reduce the number of distinct processes and systems by consolidating common capabilities and reducing product complexity. They must strive for simplicity—standardizing products, processes and systems to improve efficiency.

2. Differentiation on the outside: At the same time, leading banks are investing in differentiation initiatives in areas such as improving the effectiveness of their sales force, increasing the ability to understand customers and tailoring or bundling products that are attractive for their different customer segments.

3. Execution mastery: High performance in banking also means becoming masters in the execution of transformational change programs, as well as in the execution of day-to-day activities to support the organization’s operational strategy.

Workforce talent—and those with key leadership roles in managing and optimizing the performance of talent—play key roles along each of these three dimensions.

Simplification on the Inside
The standardization and industrialization of processes, selling techniques and so forth means nothing if the workforce is not properly trained and then if their performance is not managed and incented to perform those processes. The disconnect that many banking managers feel on an ongoing basis—between the directives from "on high" and the way things are really done—is often a matter of changing processes in theory, but then not putting in place the right incentives to actually guide the behaviors of the workforce in new directions.

Simplification from a talent perspective also demands standardization of basic HR or talent management products, processes and systems including:

• Job frameworks, competency models and curriculums

• Processes for learning development and delivery, recruiting and performance management

• Technologies including learning management systems, competency management systems, performance management systems and human resources information systems

In recent years, the quest of banks toward ever-greater scale and differentiation has dramatically increased the complexity of the technical and workforce performance environments. Take one Top 100 bank that has more than 40 different transaction accounts; or the major Australian bank that has more than 30 product application forms to sort through.1 Also, when banks have multiple products that appear to serve the same needs, and duplicate information requests, it creates complexity in the customer base.

The back office of a bank has become radically more complex, as well—something that underscores our earlier point about the need for standardization and industrialization. New compliance regulations are straining existing processes and reporting capabilities. Duplication of processes and resources is a common complaint. Differentiation strategies have led to an explosion in the number and mix of products and services, yet the majority of these do not turn a profit. Accenture helped one large US bank to perform an analysis of its products and sales force and discovered that, although the bank had more than 350 products, its average sales person made 90 percent of sales from just six products.

Complexity of the technical environment has put a strain on traditional worker roles, too. Customer service representatives have gone from answering questions to making complex sales, but the tools workers need to be effective are not in place. Consider one bank where there are 50 primary interfaces and 150 secondary interfaces to the primary account keeping system. Another European bank has more than 15 data warehouses feeding into its information systems. Who could possibly work effectively in the face of that complexity?

By delivering simplicity and standardization in work processes and talent management functions, banks can drive toward high performance by realizing direct cost savings traced to results such as decreased turnover, lower learning development and delivery costs, and reduced technology support expenses.

Differentiation on the Outside
High-performance banks know who they are. They can articulate clearly what their distinctive value proposition is and what differentiates them from competitors. Then they take that knowledge to the next level: they make sure that workforce talent at every level understands the bank's unique value proposition to customers and can articulate it based on their particular function, job or role. At a high-performance bank, if you walk up to any employee and ask about the bank's strategy and how that one person's job today is related to strategy, you will get an answer.

The need for well-conceived differentiation—and then the talent management approaches that support that differentiation—is becoming particularly urgent in the banking industry today. Many banks are finding that neither the operating model nor the organizational design necessary to help them thrive has kept pace with market-place change. Most banks grew up in a highly regulated environment, and their talent management strategies were adapted to that purpose. Using terms from Raymond Miles’s and Charles Snow’s classic work on organizational strategy, Organizational Strategy, Structure and Process, banks have for many years occupied a niche of the organizational spectrum the authors call  defenders.” These companies have narrow productmarket domains; their market and geographical niche is constrained; managers are highly skilled in certain limited areas of operations, but they do not tend to search outside of their domain for new opportunities. As a result, defenders seldom make major adjustments to technology, structure and so forth. They may focus on improving efficiency—what we have called "simplification on the inside"— but not on new strategies and products that are differentiating in today's environment.

Today, deregulation has occurred, but talent management strategies have not adapted to the new environment. Geographies are less constrained due to mergers, and competition is now coming from companies that are what Miles and Snow called “prospectors”—organizations that are almost constantly searching for new market opportunities and new sources of differentiation. If they are to stay in business, banks, too, must become prospectors. They must become the creators of change to which competitors must respond. And the key to becoming a prospector is engaging the workforce and helping them perform optimally today, while also supporting their ability to be adaptive and nimble in the face of marketplace change.

Better differentiation can support high performance through measurable increases in revenue. Improvements can include increased productivity and reductions in the time needed for workers to attain basic competency and then more advanced proficiency.

Execution Mastery
Mastery in matters of execution is, of course, something totally in the hands of a company's workforce talent, especially on the front lines. It's great to have insightful strategies, industrialized processes, leading-edge technologies and excellent products. But if the person on the phone or across the desk from the customer isn't executing, nothing else really matters.

Consider the following true story told to us recently by a colleague about his interaction with a banker at Wells Fargo. He had walked into a branch with a very simple and quick request: his daughter was making a housing application to college and needed a form notarized. "No problem," said the woman at the bank, "we can take care of that right now." A few quick keystrokes at her computer enabled her to look up the customer's account. But then, as our colleague tells the story, things got interesting: "When she turned back to me to complete the notarization, she simply asked me if I was aware that I qualified for private banking status. And that led to a conversation about what additional services would be available to me. And that led to the point where we realized we had a number of mutual friends and colleagues. And that led to a referral to a private banker who called me up a few days later. This was all deftly handled and very subtle. I didn't feel ‘sold’ to. I felt that this was someone who had the knowledge to offer me a distinctive service, and the personal capabilities to make me feel I was a valued customer. She knew what her bank was good at, and she knew what she was good at."

As it turns out, this story is not some exception to the rule at Wells Fargo. The bank enjoys a reputation for cross-selling capabilities that is far greater than its competitors. It attracts the right people, develops them, incents them and creates the right culture. And when the right moment comes with a customer, the bank's people know how to execute. Such execution is a critical component of high performance in banking today.

The Business Benefits of Becoming a Talent-powered Bank

Meeting Today’s Challenges
If that kind of execution mastery is the rule at Wells Fargo, it apparently is not if we turn to the banking  industry in general. According to Accenture’s most recent High Performance Workforce Study3—part of Accenture’s extensive High Performance Business research initiative, which seeks to identify the  characteristics of high performance in different industries and business functions—financial services executives have strongly affirmed that their workforce capabilities are not currently up to the task of differentiating their companies and positioning them for success.

For instance, only 11 percent of the executives were of the opinion that  the overall skill level of their workforce is “industry leading,” and only half of those surveyed said that their three most critical workforces outperform their competitors. At a higher level, study participants indicated they are not faring well in building the organizational capabilities—such as leadership development, change management, stakeholder engagement and capacity to change—that deliver competitive advantage.

Looking at specific capabilities, results are not much better. Accenture has found that the HR and learning programs in most banks are not delivering the kind of results executives hope for. According to the Accenture workforce study, no more than 27 percent of financial services executives said they were “very satisfied” with the progress of their most important HR and learning initiatives. For some initiatives, the percentage was as low as zero (improving worker productivity) or 2 percent (improving employee engagement with/advocacy for the company).

What’s at the heart of the problem?  For the most part, banks have not recalibrated their talent management practices to reflect new competitive realities and the changing demands of a multi-polar world, one where both developed and developing regions of the world will increasingly compete on a level playing field. The task of finding and managing talent has become more complex, turbulent and contradictory than ever before. Once-familiar talent pools are drying up as new ones are rapidly opening.

Talent managers today must cope with a world of change and contrast, including:

• Global abundance but local scarcity of talent.

• Fewer young people and more older people, many heading rapidly towards retirement.

• Rising demand for new skills aggravated by demographic pressures and educational shortcomings.

• New methods of working and new  relationships between users and suppliers of talent.

• More diverse and remote or even virtual workforces with different attitudes to work across the generations.

In this new global environment, talent moves more rapidly and freely. To cope with that challenge, the most successful companies provide people with ample opportunity to gain exposure to new business challenges that keep them engaged and interested in their work. In contrast, most banks still have highly siloed career models in which tenure typically drives promotions. With the industry becoming more dynamic and competitive, attitudes toward effective talent development and management must follow.

The Positive Business Impact of Improving Talent Management in Banking
What is the potential payoff for improving a bank's talent management capabilities? Just consider how much the following would be worth to a typical bank today:

• An improvement in productivity of just 2 to 3 percentage points for workforces most linked to improvements in sales or customer retention

• Employee learning programs that reduced time to competency by several weeks

• An improvement in customer contact skills that resulted in a few percentage point improvement in customer retention

• Collaboration and knowledge management capabilities that increased speed to market of new services by days or weeks

• The ability to reduce post-merger integration workforce issues and enable the new organization to perform optimally faster

The potential impact of these improvements is in the millions of dollars. A major retail bank in the United States has calculated, for example, that an average decrease of a single second in call handling time among its call center representatives results in US$1 million of savings for the bank. Behind that one-second reduction is much more than a good information system. It's also a matter of having the right people with the right knowledge at the right time.

Another retail bank has estimated that bringing in five products per household represents an average US$197 of profit; doubling the number of products, however, actually almost quadruples the profit. And making that happen is almost solely in the hands of the frontline sales force.

In another example, this time from the insurance industry, Accenture teamed with a global insurance company to analyze its Korean operations, which encompassed 16,000 life planners across the country. Working with the insurer, Accenture found that making just a 1 percent change in a single measure—in this case, gross written premium per life planner—translated into a US$16 million improvement for the company, most of which was pure profit. Making the case even more compelling was the fact that the 1 percent change ended up requiring less than US$1,000 in additional gross premiums per year per  planner—a goal quite realistic to achieve.

The goal here, it must be said, is to do more than produce the occasional one-off or breakthrough result based on isolated efforts to improve employee productivity or to support one major change program. The talent-powered bank has the capability and capacity to create talent strategies, structures and supports that consistently drive better performance, innovation and business results. The rest of this paper discusses Accenture's approach to creating the distinctive workforce capabilities and strategic talent management approaches that characterize a talent-powered bank.

An Approach to Strategic Talent Management in the Banking Industry
Based on Accenture research and experience, we have developed a comprehensive framework for understanding the varied dimensions of a strategic talent management approach in the banking industry—one that creates a distinctive workforce capability to drive high performance.

The framework highlights thinking and action on the part of executive leadership along several interrelated dimensions:

1. Translating business strategy into talent strategy, and then directing workforce talent toward the kind of execution and behaviors that lead to effective workforce performance with a measurable positive impact on the business.

2. Optimizing all dimensions of the talent management life cycle: defining talent needs; discoveringand sourcing talent; developing and retaining talent; and deploying the right talent at the right place and time.

3. Keeping talent performance continuously aligned with business needs and strategies, and harvesting the innovations that naturally occur among the workforce.

Talent Strategy
Shaping an overall approach to talent management begins with a workforce talent strategy—a clear articulation of how talent will enable the business to achieve its objectives. Specific activities leaders undertake within this dimension include:

• Identifying those components of the business strategy that depend on particular talent.

• Understanding the distinctive competencies that need to be nurtured in the organization.

• Defining the degree to which existing talent is aligned and engaged behind the organization’s strategic goals.

• Identifying current talent gaps.

• Understanding the opportunities and challenges in the workforce environment.

Defining Talent Needs
Defining talent needs involves the following activities:

• Assessing current and future talent needs, with a strong focus on the most strategically pivotal segments of the workforce and critical jobs

• Matching available talent sources with demand, highlighting specific requirements for future talent and identifying potential sources of talent

• Continually evaluating the state of talent, workforce challenges, attrition rates, levels of engagement and productivity measures with clear data on key performance indicators to help ensure the right people are performing the right jobs with the right skills, competencies and behaviors

From the perspective of most banks today, the first item on the list above is especially important: identifying the high-impact, critical workforces that make the most difference in business performance. These are the three to five key workforces that, if improved only incrementally, would make a 10 percent to 15 percent difference in a company’s top and bottom lines. By isolating a key metric for each workforce, a company can quickly quantify the potential benefits.

Branch banking is an example. We worked with one US retail bank to perform an analysis of where they could have the most impact on workforce performance. We found that they could have a major impact by focusing on five jobs—personal banking, tellers, teller supervisors, customer service representatives and branch managers— which comprised more than 40,000 people in its workforce.

Accenture is working with a Europe-based global investment bank on an initiative to improve the performance of one such critical workforce. Faced with limited organic growth potential, this company has embarked on a transformation of its relationship manager workforce. In general, this workforce is not performing at effective levels, despite new technologies and processes. However, there are standout relationship managers who consistently outperform their colleagues, generating the highest revenue return per clients. Accenture is helping the company conduct a “top seller assessment” to identify the reasons for these standouts’ success and how their individual skills and behaviors can be infused into the larger relationship manager workforce.

When those business-critical workforces  have been identified, the next step is to determine what, exactly, constitutes high achievement and excellent performance for those workforces: tellers, customer service representatives, branch managers and so forth. The meaning of excellence changes over time to meet new marketplace needs, and banks must ensure they are working with up-to-date job profiles.

Consider the very different behaviors expected from business-critical banking workforces today. A decade ago, the principal responsibility of a teller, for example, was to greet customers and process transactions. Today, tellers are being asked to spot potential sales opportunities during their  interactions and to refer customers to bankers. Call center workers, too, are charged with turning inbound service and dispute resolution calls into cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, with associated performance goals and metrics.

The roles of bankers, too, have been transformed in light of new and intensified competition from mid-tier broker dealers and financial planning firms. Banks have begun to license bankers and equip them with broker-dealer licenses, with the expectation that they will sell a broader array of investment products and capture a greater share of the spending of an affluent customer base. These changes mean bankers have not only new levels of responsibility, but new levels of risk inherent in their work as well.

Old and outdated understandings of what “excellence” is for any given banking position often hinder  progress toward more effective performance by that workforce. At many banking institutions, it’s been too long since recruiting profiles or potential recruiting pools for positions have changed, or since basic training has been radically overhauled. The revision date at the bottom of performance evaluation forms may still be in the 1990s. Hiring and performance evaluation decisions will lead banks astray if they are made based on out-of-date criteria.

How does one identify what excellence means in the performance of critical workforces? With any population sample of any given workforce, the quality of job  performance (if left to its own devices) will follow a classic bell-curve pattern. That is, graphing the size of the workforce population against level of productivity and performance, the vast majority of the population will perform in the middle of the pack. A small percentage will perform below acceptable standards. Most important, a percentage of the workforce—generally around 10 percent—will be the “stars”: those who consistently outperform their peers according to most relevant measures.

Those top individuals are key to transforming the entire workforce segment. By analyzing what those people do right—their behaviors, as well as their backgrounds, skills, level of experience, education and a variety of other factors—banks can help a higher percentage of the workforce move toward the higher end of achievement. Banks can support more generalized workforce excellence with integrated solutions that address the full life cycle of the employee—including the critical processes of sourcing, learning and performance management. In this way, banking institutions can bring a more disciplined, rigorous approach to workforce enablement that can position them for sustained competitive advantage for years to come.

Armed with two things—(1) an agreement about which workforces are most important to overall business performance and (2) insight into what constitutes performance excellence within each of those workforces—bank executives can more effectively discover and source the talent they need to help them achieve high performance.

Discovering, Attracting and Sourcing the Right Talent
Successful banks have sourcing capabilities that put the right people, and the right people capabilities, in place to effectively execute business strategy. One of the opportunities HR departments of banks have today is to use new selection techniques and technologies to match new profiles of jobs (and the performance characteristics of the workers who are the highest achievers) against potential worker pools, instead of relying on the hit-and-miss tactics of recruiting in the past. One of the biggest hiring  problems banks face today is the disconnect between new job profiles and a recruiting process that too often hires based on out-of date profiles. Here’s what we mean.

A good example is the real case of one large US-based financial services company and the process it goes through to fill client-facing financial advisor positions. Each year, the company receives 150,000 applications. About one-tenth of those applicants are admitted into a sponsorship period—a trial period of work, at the end of which about 3,300 pass a certifying examination and go into another pre-client readiness program. Twelve months after the initial hiring period, 1,700 workers remain out of the original pool of 150,000. By analogy, imagine a manufacturing process where companies had to manufacture 150,000 parts in order to end up with 1,700 that were of acceptable quality. Yet, even in the face of this extremely inefficient on-boarding process, HR departments still often feel management pressure to increase the pool of potential workers. We believe that this is not a recruiting problem; it’s a selection problem. Companies don’t need to increase the pool; they need a better yield.

Basic hiring practices for banks, even in call centers, have not kept pace with the actual performance environments in which workers find themselves. As a consequence, as they search for the best people for roles, HR departments are getting “false positives”: workers that appear on paper to have the skills to succeed, except that the “paper” contains out-of-date performance criteria. Just as worrisome, HR professionals are also getting false negatives: they are failing to hire workers with the right backgrounds and skills to perform optimally, because the HR department is not aware of the change in the definition of optimal work performance.

Banks that are successfully finding the highest achievers in their workforces are learning to think about different talent pools than the ones in which they generally swim. Consider, by analogy, what banks learned over the years about credit scoring by applying principles of Fair Isaacs, the dominant developer of scoring algorithms. Old-school thinking arrived at credit scores by looking primarily at consumer financial data, an approach that did not always have a particularly high correlation to events.

What Fair Isaacs discovered was that a number of important, non-financial data— such as length of residence at a current address—was a more accurate predictor of credit worthiness. In much the same way, straight A’s in university accounting classes may not necessarily make someone a good banker, at least not under current performance conditions. It may well be that the liberal arts graduate, or the business major/theatre minor, or even the experienced high school teacher, may be the person who has the customer interaction skills necessary to succeed.

Based on Accenture’s experience, banks can get smarter in their selection processes by:

• Retooling their recruiting and selection profiles based on analyses of the performance of the most successful workers in the current work environment.

• Applying that success-based profile and those performance characteristics across the company’s basic core processes.

• Using new, next-generation technologies and tools in the selection process to reduce both false positives and false negatives among potential workers.

• Pushing the biggest part of the filtering to the front end of the process—before more costly human analysis is applied to selection—and letting insight-based applications help predict those applicants most likely to respond to and perform well under updated performance conditions.

Increasing the “Rate of Production” of Competent Employees
The supply chain/manufacturing analogy for talent selection and staffing is helpful for understanding other leading practices that can meet, in an ongoing way, the demand for the right staffing levels within banks. Consider another real-life example—one of the largest retail banking organizations in North America. The company has approximately 15,000 call center employees scattered in about a dozen sites throughout North America. Like many institutions, HR planners have a rigorous demand planning activity in place. It plots the demand for resources and then monitors this number carefully so the bank can efficiently match supply and demand.

Based on their experience, these managers know that, from the time they specify demand, the time needed to deliver what they call “productive associates”—meaning, workers capable of performing to certain minimum standards, assessed by such metrics as average handle time and quality of customer service—is six months. So to follow the process through discrete stages—recruiting, selection, training, bridging to performance and so on—takes half a year.

This is a supply chain problem. Accenture worked with the bank to analyze this situation and recommend a solution. At the heart of the bank’s challenge was the need for a different approach to managing risk in the hiring process:

1. Supply/demand matching. From a risk perspective, the bank was focusing primarily on risks associated with overstaffing. The result, however, was a highly reactive process which responded only after demand was clearly established. This was a major contributor to the staffing lag time. In our opinion, given the inherent volatility of the workforce, correction of oversupply conditions (assuming no major business disruption) could be accomplished very quickly.

2. Hiring risk management. The bank was still using quite traditional methods to manage selection risk, creating a significant lag period and too much use of management time. The bank’s current processes really were only creating the illusion of protecting downside hiring risk, while producing both false positives and negatives, and, worst of all, not overcoming the existing cost and time issues.

3. Proprietary risk management. It was important for the bank to explore a more collaborative approach, rather than maintaining all control itself in a proprietary way. The bank had become too insular in its approach to hiring and staffing issues. The way to produce dramatic change in this process would be to create a much more expansive process model, opening up the system to a number of strategic partners.

4. Identifying the essential skills needed for adequate on-the-job performance. Initial training of new hires often stands in the way of delivering skilled resources to a business more quickly. Let us suppose that in a six-week, new-hire training program, the skills and information needed to perform at basic competency for 85 percent of performance situations are delivered in the first three weeks. This means that companies then spend the next three weeks delivering very specialized skills required only infrequently. Certainly customers must expect to be served well even in those relatively rare cases. But leading companies are taking a different approach: skills-based routing of calls. By making sure that calls can be routed to employees equipped to deal with the customer request—and then gradually stepping new workers through more advanced skills, even as they serve basic customer needs—companies can more rapidly move talent into productive roles.

The comprehensive solution we recommended for this bank addressed a complex set of issues including process change, adjustments in risk management, technology enhancements, new and expanded partnerships and expanded diversity in hiring profiles. Based on our analysis, we believe the bank could reduce the time needed to become a productive associate in half, while also decreasing false positives in the hiring process by 20 to 30 percent.

Developing and Directing Talent Potential: Learning, Knowledge Management and Performance Management
One of the biggest changes in the learning and training field today is an intensified demand that learning investments be planned and executed based on their impact on the business. Over the past decade in particular, learning has become a strategic endeavor, central to the performance of people and organizations. Individuals know that their careers depend upon their willingness to engage in lifelong learning that can help them advance to meet new challenges. And banks realize that, unless they can develop, direct and manage their people effectively to execute strategy both today and tomorrow, they cannot achieve high performance and sustain their competitiveness.

The typical bank faces enormous challenges in improving the effectiveness of its learning function, in measuring the return on its investment in learning and in running learning more like a business. Most banks have learning functions that are organized according to their lines of business—resulting in a highly decentralized structure. Although such an approach may help to keep learning focused on the immediate needs of each business line, it also results in a great deal of inefficiency and redundancy—and also prevents a bank from using the learning function to push out learning experiences common to all workforces, and to use learning as a means of creating a common culture. A decentralized structure also makes it much more difficult to keep learning investments aligned with business needs.

Alignment of Learning Investments and Business Needs
One way to maximize the investment in learning is for banks to improve their learning governance structures. What's needed is a way to ensure close collaboration between those responsible for the development and delivery of learning content and the company’s senior management responsible for establishing business goals and objectives. This collaboration is too important to be left to chance, or to simply “keeping management informed.” Banks need a more formal organizational structure and system of governance to ensure that strategy and workforce development are “locked in.” We call this reporting and governance process “Business Interlock”— a proprietary Accenture process with services, interactions, metrics and application capabilities that link learning outcomes to business objectives.

Business Interlock operates on several critical guiding principles:

• Involve senior executives in the planning process regarding the specific learning programs that can achieve the best business results.

• Facilitate an annual planning process and quarterly demand forecasts around learning demand, capability and affordability.

• Establish a single point of contact for all learning and performance requests from the business.

• Structure more effective communication channels between the business and the corporate learning organization.

• Ensure participation of the learning organization in the overall governance process.

Business Interlock does more than just add another step in the learning supply chain of content sourcing, cataloging, delivery and administration. It transforms it in the same way that new processes transformed the manufacturing supply chain to enable just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing. In fact, that’s the one of the goals of Business Interlock: a JIT approach to learning, where a streamlined learning supply chain delivers support, when and where it’s needed, to support real-time performance needs of a company’s most critical workforces.