Modernizing the Employee Experience (EX) - Best Practices to Attract, Strengthen, and Retain Banking Operations Staff

This is Part One of our Series: Modernizing the Back-Office: Enhancing the Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) with Workflow Automation

If you are struggling to find the right people or keep the best people, workplace automation can provide job design enhancements that pay off in recruiting and retention. 

In Fall 2022, U.S. technology firms began rightsizing their workforces for the post-pandemic economy. Large numbers of employees were let go from Twitter, Amazon, Meta, several FinTech startups and more recently large bank failures. Nearly 150,000 tech employees were laid off in mass job cuts this year (Source: Crunchbase). There is an immediate opportunity for banking organizations to capitalize on this influx of highly skilled workers if they can compete in a tight labor market.

Tech workers expect collaborative environments often facilitated through cloud-based sharing of documents, information and resources. Banks and credit unions must provide a modern, connected work environment to be attractive to these workers. According to Raj Singal, CEO and Founder of FINBOA, “Having experienced hundreds of banking clients transition to automated workflow environments, we have not yet learned of any worker layoffs as a direct result of introducing intelligent process automation to the work environment. What happens is a shift of workers to more value-added job categories such as client service, treasury sales or fraud detection.”

We’ve collected best practices from our banking organization clients that have modernized and digitized their back offices with transformational automation. Workflow automation not only makes your organization more attractive to new hires, it helps keep your best employees.   

Here’s are ways to impact your back-office work environment to be more attractive to high-tech workers:

1. Talk to your leaders and managers to evaluate feedback on the employee experience in your back-office work setting. Work with HR to identify potential areas of improvement in job design. Both existing and potential employees appreciate technology that eliminates redundant tasks and facilitates collaboration.
2. Identify specific compliance processes that can be improved with automation technologies. For example processes that pose risk because of rekeying errors, missed deadlines, disconnected data or other inaccuracies.
3. Determine the best cases to improve employee collaboration and client onboarding; such as smarter forms, more digital client intake; organization-wide access to information; payment dispute origination, fraud detection, and reporting capabilities.
4. Retrain and teach employees about technologies that improve efficiency and accuracy. Existing employees will also benefit from improvements to the employee experience (EX), but will need to be informed, involved and retrained on the new processes integrating workflow automation. Thus, retraining existing knowledgeable employees on technologies that improve efficiency and accuracy in back-office processes is also a winning approach to improve the employee experience. 

Workplace automation can help operations directors in deposit, compliance and treasury departments create more appealing work environments that help retain their best workers and attract tech-savvy workers used to highly digitized environments. 

In our next segment, we’ll look at how back-office automation impacts your existing customer experience (CX).