It’s an age-old maxim which we’ve all heard: people are a company’s greatest asset. That statement is as true at my company as it is at each of yours. And while some may say this is stating the obvious, the composition of that workforce is in a state of change.
At SunTrust, we have over 5,000 individuals supporting our technology and back-office operations. Our technology teammates support legacy solutions, develop online applications for our clients, install IVR systems, and perform countless other activities for technology applications across the entire bank. As with all companies, the skills needed within our workforce are diverse and ever changing. And as technology leaders we must always ensure that we have the right staffing models in place to support these needs.
In recent years we’ve formalized efforts to recruit and retain the next generation of our workforce. As members of my own generation begin retiring across the country, it’s important that we have an active recruitment effort for Gen Y. Our summer intern program is one example of our effort to develop talent through a partnership with local educational institutions. This ten-week program embeds college students and recent graduates directly in our technology workforce. These interns participate in project teams, meet with executive management, and develop skills that will prepare them whether they come to work for us or decide to go elsewhere. But I’m most proud to say that our management team gets a valuable learning experience of its own through the intern program. This year we challenged our interns to develop a detailed presentation to our senior technology leadership team to help us understand the motivating factors and work environments which most appeal to their generation. I came away from the presentation with a page full of ideas! This intern program is just one example of the educational partnerships we have formed to encourage youth in our communities to consider a technology-focused career path.
In addition to our educational outreach efforts, our programs focusing on emerging technologies for our clients also attract these younger generations to our workforce. These programs include our social media initiatives and an enhanced mobile solution targeting clients who spend as much time on an iPhone as on a laptop.
Although the younger generations of the workforce may get a lot of press, the knowledge and experience within my own generation is still a very critical component for a technology organization. The institutional and systems knowledge they have developed in their careers is an incredibly important resource to our entire workforce. We also recognize that these mature members of our workforce frequently have different personal needs from an employer, and as such we’ve reviewed and adjusted our policies where appropriate. The telecommuting policy we have instituted over the past two years provides the flexibility which is so often requested from a generation which is focused on work-life balance in the latter part of their careers.
Regardless of where an individual is within their career, professional development opportunities are critical to their workplace engagement, success, and retention. Through our competency-based leadership strategy, our professional development managers are charged with identifying technology efforts aligning to an individual’s background and skills while also supporting their career goals. As a result, teammates in roles such as project managers, business analysts, and architects are aligned to resource pools rather than technology units exclusively supporting one business function.
Outsourcing partnerships also provide an important option for augmenting our staff with relative ease. Our partners typically have greater bench strength with specialized skills to support our specific, immediate, and often short-term needs. These partners are able to roll these skills on and off projects at a speed that allows us to deliver solutions faster and more efficiently for our clients and business partners.
The right staffing model is critical to our technology operations. We apply the same planning principles to our recruitment, retention, and staff augmentation efforts as we do to application and infrastructure needs. How are the other Georgia companies represented here tackling these issues? Do you focus on a staffing strategy?
Comments
As the southern usa leader of a company that is growing rapidly helping our clients deal with the impacts of improving the use of advanced collaboration, communication and customer contact technologies I have to say I am in awe of the structure, rigor and level of employee engagement you have brought to this. Of course this is Suntrust we are talking about so why am I not surprised.
Our clients are mostly multi-nationals and multi-regionals but struggling with the same issues especially with the whole concept of "office of the future", "branch of the future" and "store of the future"
Some day I would love to hear how you deal with something a client of mine raised last week (thursday afternoon in fact) and even whether you agree with the issue raised, that is the "critical employee” issue.
This is the concept that any business actually really runs on 30% or less of the employees and that everyone else is a communication layer (hopefully a value add communication layer) between those key people and the people who want to work with them.
Companies that figure out who those 30% of people are, who put the culture and tools in place to maximize their value and take the other 70% of their people and put as many of those people in lines of business where they can be “the 30% critical people” as possible will win in their industries.
Of course everyone I know is in the 30% and somewhere out there someone will tell me their entire employee base is in the 30% for their industry !!
The contention in this discussion was that was one of the main objectives of the internet revolution was to blast past the non-value layers to put the customer in touch with the core of a company (or organization, same thing applies to government or non profits). This will just get more extreme as we become more global and technologies get more advanced.
GC
Motivating and engaging their people is one of the biggest challenges businesses face today. Here at Jabian, we use “Innovation Councils” to generate new ideas and solutions to problems our clients face to engage the creativity of our workforce in a way that motivates and excites them. These sessions have resulted in several ideas that our clients have implemented, mostly outside of our scope of services. People want to contribute in ways that are bigger than their day-to-day role. Providing ways for your people to experiment, be creative and contribute in new and exciting ways will drive improved employee engagement and retention.
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