The banking industry worldwide is facing great challenges in retaining talent and boosting professional development.
Furthermore, employees have the power to seek out better opportunities which makes banking industry leaders struggle to brand themselves to the corporate employees and frontline.
The major problem noticed here is that financial services and banking industries struggle a lot when it comes to employee engagement.
As a result, when compared to other industries, this industry suffers from high customer switching rates, high turnover, absenteeism, and low employee engagement levels.
All in all, employee disengagement hurts the banking industry the most.
So, to make strides toward banking professionals and business success in the banking world, managers need to prioritize and practice newer employee engagement practices.
Discover how to shape your retention strategy around employee experience to boost productivity and morale so as to retain top talent.
What is Employee engagement?
Employee engagement is the level of commitment and dedication that employees have towards their job roles. Your employees can thus have either high or low levels of engagement depending upon how passionate they are about their job position.
A sufficient level of engagement from your employees increases their workplace productivity, which also improves their performance. As a consequence, factors such as employee job satisfaction, employee motivation, employee retention, etc., are also positively impacted.
In conclusion, with your employees being engaged, they can make your company reach new heights of success.
Importance of Employee Engagement in the Finance and Banking Industry
Regardless of the industry, employee engagement holds great importance in the overall success of any organization. Therefore, the banking industry is no exception, as it equally requires desired engagement from its employees as any other industry.
In fact, it won’t be wrong to say that bankers need more than average engagement to stay productive due to the dry nature of their work.
In addition to this, after experiencing ‘the great resignation,’ companies around the world are in cut-throat competition to acquire the top talent.
Just recently, near the end of 2021, the financial services industry experienced a never-seen-before voluntary turnover of 18.4 %.
Furthermore, the banking industry considers 35 percent of its employees as a “retention risk.”
We should remember that a positive number of employee engagement implies positive employee turnover. That being the case, since the engagement level of employees in the banking sector is rather unsatisfactory, the employee turnover is also not sufficient, let alone ideal.
To conclude, your ability to retain your hardworking and skilled employees is determined by how effective your employee retention approach is.
So, with a constructive mechanism for employees’ engagement in place, your rate of employee retention can also improve. And this will prove to be very beneficial for your company in general as well.
To cut a long story short, employee engagement is as essential for the financial and banking industry as it is for other industries. Also, since improving it brings the desired results in different ways, its importance for any business sector becomes inevitable.
Drivers for Employee engagement in Banking Industry
Driver 1: Employee voice
When employees are heard in regard to various organizational matters, it naturally increases their dedication to their job roles and the company.
Managers should be advised to make employees share their views. Additionally, no employee should ever be snubbed for sharing their point of view due to their organizational hierarchy.
Doing so will not only negatively affect the engagement of employees working at the same level but above and below as well.
Nevertheless, listening to what employees have to say is very favorable in terms of their engagement.
Ideally, you should give your employees a voice in this respect, which is more likely to affect their engagement levels in a positive manner.
Lastly, if possible, employees should also be appreciated every time they share their opinions and thoughts so as to keep them providing their valuable feedback.
How to achieve it?
You can make your employees share their perceptions about different matters by requesting and collecting feedback from them. However, importantly, employee feedback should never be considered personal.
Moreover, whatever your employees suggest, it should be worked on by the concerned people. Also, share whatever you plan to resolve the issue and keep communicating the developments to them.
Lastly, where acting on the employees’ feedback tends to increase their engagement, feedback not being given importance only makes the entire process meaningless.
Driver 2: Employee recognition
When employees are acknowledged for their good work, it gives them a reason to continue being on the course of action.
On the contrary, when not being appreciated, despite putting in all the effort, will naturally demotivate an employee. As a result, the engagement of the employees decreases.
So, one of the important drivers in employee engagement is employee recognition.
How to achieve it?
From a simple thank you note to an exotic company-sponsored vacay, there are many ways to perform employee recognition for an enhanced engagement of employees.
Additionally, you can either privately appreciate an employee or publicly acknowledge them for their notable work.
It is up to you how you want to appreciate your employees. But an important thing to be kept in mind is that you should timely recognize your employees.
An in-time recognition is not only effective but also precise, which makes employees repeat the desired behavior and action in the future. Resultantly, the engagement levels also improve.
How can BRAVO help the banking sector?
We have learned that the factors that drive employee engagement are employee recognition and employee voice.
And BRAVO, an employee engagement and recognition platform, comes with the ability that allows you to accomplish higher levels of engagement using these two drivers.
BRAVO allows you to share your workers’ outstanding work and achievements with the whole workforce, allowing them to be acknowledged quickly and positively. BRAVO also enables a firm to provide timely employee appreciation, which aids in achieving the desired goals.
BRAVO rewards and recognition make it even easier to encourage and reward employees by providing a variety of rewards that may be presented to qualified employees.
So, the banking industry can leverage its ability to keep employees engaged by rewarding and recognizing them for their efforts and worthwhile performance.
BRAVO also helps you empower your employees in sharing their thoughts and perceptions towards the company and its policies through its BRAVO Voice! feature.
Using this feature, not only that employee feedback can be collected, but employees can also be understood better.
Last but not least, besides empowering employees in raising their voices and enabling efficient employee recognition, BRAVO also lets employees be appreciated every time they provide feedback, which makes it easier to prompt and collect feedback from employees in the future.
So, evidently, BRAVO can significantly help the financial services and banking industries to drive employee engagement.
You can learn about this employee engagement and recognition platform better by booking a demo here.
