1. Aligning HR Strategy to Corporate Strategy
Lewisa Anciano, VP, People
Coast Capital Savings
October 9th, 2013
90 mins format-
Agenda:
10 min: Introduction of Company - Videos
20 mins Coast Story
30 min Orthodoxies – Explain Process to drive innovation
15 mins – Q & A 1

2. Fast Facts One of Canada’s largest credit unions
50 branches in British Columbia
$14.6 billion in assets under management
Over 500,000 members and growing
1620 employees
Free Chequing, Free Debit and More
7% pre-tax profit invested in communities
Before we discuss the topic at hand, I’d like to begin by giving you a snapshot of Coast Capital Savings.
Coast Capital is headquartered in Surrey, British Columbia and has 50 branches in the Metro Vancouver, Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island regions. All our flagship branches have a distinctive open-concept design that eliminates walls, offices and barriers to create an inviting and friendly customer space. Customers are also served at “Help Stations” where they can view transactions in progress while standing beside branch staff, instead of facing them across a counter divide.
We have over $14.6 billion in assets under administration.
Our membership is large and growing. Earlier this year we surpassed the ½ million mark at 504,000 members.
We have approximately 1620 highly engaged employees who every day bring to life our mission to provide simple financial help to our members. Until recently we were approximately 1900 but in July we sold off our Insurance subsidiary to Western Financial Group, a subsidiary of Desjardins with whom we have a cooperative partnership.
With our Free Chequing, Free Debit & More account, we have passed on $38m in savings to our members last year (2012).
And we are proud to invest 7% of our pre-tax profit every year in charitable giving and sponsorships – this has added up to over $33 million since 2006 and last year alone (2012) was over $5.2 million.

3. “I’m the Boss TV” 3 3

4. What is Corporate Strategy?
The essence of Corporate Strategy is: choosing to perform activities differently than one’s rivals do. And there is no ideal and no one way otherwise everyone would be doing it.
Who are our rivals? Well first and foremost it would be the big banks & thereafter, other entities providing financial services.
So how to differentiate ourselves / do things differently than others. If you recall from your HR text-book days, Strategy is usually determined by a company’s focus on either Operational Effectiveness (put in examples), Lowest Price (ie Walmart, IKEA), or unique products/services that can command a higher price (ie Tiffany, Nike). And within each of these 3 main themes there are subtle differences that further expand on strategic options a company may choose to embark on and evolve thus making it their own.
So what did we choose? Well, as we can’t compete with the big banks it’s become imperative that we need to be different in how we approach everything - - and I can tell you we did not choose the Tiffany route. 4

5. You know very well that one’s Corporate Strategy is even MORE important in economic times like these with an uncertain economy, shrinking margins, and FI saturation.
We are all facing: Spread compression and low rates (albeit they are increasingly slowly most recently), increased Capital taxes , increased Deposit insurance, increased Pension deficit, increased regulations, and elimination of credit union tax deduction (we just avoided this with the Liberals being voted in again, whew!)
All of this results in high cost and risk of remaining relevant in a disrupting/changing FI marketplace. 5

6. How can we help you have a more helpful branch experience?
So how to stay Relevant, Keep Costs Low, Be Operationally Effective (as to us that’s a given) and find what will hopefully set us apart?
We chose to start first by differentiating ourselves with our Customer Experience. Perhaps you’ve chosen this path too, but remember, with each unique culture, etc no 2 ways will be exactly the same.
For us, this means a consistent brand experience (like Starbucks for example that has the same look and feel, simpler products (thus ie our own branded Low Fee More for Me mutual fund offering), offering as much one-stop shopping as possible (thus a generalist model) and an even greater focus on community, technology and local businesses. 6

7. Aligning HR Strategy to Corporate does not have to be scary…7

8. Five Helpful Tips as you Build your HR Strategy
Define a compelling purpose
Be bold and innovative with your employee experience
Involve others in bringing it to life
Have fun in everything you do; just bring it to life!
Expect results
And we will provide you with tools to help you on these tips
Lewisa

9. Helpful Tip # 1 Define a compelling purpose.
Lewisa
A new CEO, Tracy Redies, joined in 2009 and launched us on a journey to taking our brand expereince to a new level
Part of her first 90 days was to redefine Coast’s purpose, in our regular collaborative way, we engaged the entire Exec team in researching and defining a new purpose.

10. Our Purpose: To change the way Canadians feel about banking, forever.
Lewisa
People often tell us, now that’s a lofty goal – “To change the way Canadians feel about banking, forever.” Aren’t you aiming a bit too high? And my answer is yes, it is ambitious and that’s the whole point.
Yes, most Canadians see banking as a chore. Most don’t particularly like their financial institutions and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who would agree that their interaction with their bank is the highlight of their day. To a large extent, consumers don’t have particularly positive feelings about their financial institutions.
Our Purpose seeks to change all that. And it’s power lies in the fact that it is grand and that it will demand the collective efforts of the whole organization working in tandem to accomplish. It’s something that we will have to continually work at. It will challenge the best in us, everyday. And when we attain it, the accomplishment will be as significant as the challenge itself.

11. Helpful Tip # 2 Be bold and innovative with your employee experience.
Lewisa

12. The Employee Experience Drives The Purpose
To change the way Canadians
feel about banking, forever
To change the way my customers
feel about Coast today
To change the way I feel about
WORK
Customer Experience
Employee Experience
Lewisa

13. Daily Revolutions 13 Lewisa
Align Employee Experience to Customer needs:
To ensure we’re delivering on our Customer Promise every day, we developed the Daily Revolutions – tangible things staff could do on a regular and daily basis to provide a helpful and positive, unexpected customer experience.
I’ll touch on each of them briefly:
Real help, right away
Real help, right away is all about improving our proactive and reactive problem solving. It means taking ownership of problems and not passing a customer’s needs or request around. If it comes to me, it’s my job to do the necessary work to help the customer with the answers they need, right away.
Smart and Simple
Smart and simple is all about promoting efficient, knowledgeable and helpful interactions. Being smart and simple ensures that we are living up to our mission of providing Simple financial help and can offer our products and processes to customers in a consistent, uncomplicated way. It means eliminating financial jargon and thinking of the customer when describing a product or process, making sure we use words that they can understand.
I know you and I care
This is about building relationships with our customers that are genuine and based on empathy. In our conversations with customers, we’ll treat them as people, not account numbers and we’ll take the time to get to know them at a personal level and also understand the things they care about, so we can help them in these areas whenever possible.
Time to Wow
Time to wow is all about doing what the customer asks of us, and then doing more – something that’s unexpected. It’s when we answer the question that hasn't been asked. It starts with making sure we’re doing the customer service basics, and then looking for ways to take that service above and beyond. 13

14. Workplace Revolutions
Lewisa
We then developed 5 people themes and related initiatives, to support the Employee Promise. I’ll talk about each of them briefly:
They came out of a desire to be a high performance organization supporting the business strategy and a belief that they should be described as something employees understand.
The first theme is Leaders who inspire. We not only want strong leaders, we want ones with passion and commitment who have employees who desire to follow them.
The second people theme is Build your brand. Particularly for the next generation, this is a critical part of the employee deal. Kids are starting to brand themselves before they enter the workplace, women wanting to progress in the organization are spending time on their own personal brand, and so we wanted to help our employees stay loyal to us by helping them build their own brand within ours.
Under Room to grow we wanted to have a workforce that can flex with the demands of our customers and we want to grow our own talent so we called this out as a priority in our experience
With Cool place and space we strive to make Coast Capital a cool place to work and do business through our innovative branch designs. And something that you don’t typically see in banks is that our branch staff can wear jeans every Friday if they want.
Finally, under It’s your call, employees have the autonomy to make decisions that provide real help, right away to customers.
In addition to the five themes, we also launched an enhanced online recognition program called the High-five Hub to give staff opportunities to recognize their own peers and buy some really cool stuff. High-five Hub was launched in February and to date we have had over 25,000 instances of people recognizing other people for a job well done. 14

15. Changing the way employees feel about work
Alignment
Changing the way employees feel about work
Hire
Engage
Develop
Deploy
Lead
Retain
Plan for Succession
Strategic
Aiming
Point #1
Strategic
Aiming
Point #2
Strategic
Aiming
Point #3
Lewisa
Under each Heading of Hire, Engage, develop etc, we developed programs to support each Strategic Aiming Point for that 1-3 years.
Strategic
Aiming
Point #4

16. Take-away Tool: HR Strategy Alignment Template
Lewisa
will draw out 3 Year Strategy Template Tool (needs a Flip Chart)

17. Take-away Tool: Scenario Planning
Lewisa
will explain…. (maybe a Tool as well as a hand-out)

18. Helpful Tip # 3 Involve Others.
Now let’s move on to Tip # 3….
When we design our Business and our HR Strategy, it’s all about Engaging Others & Testing What we think we know to be true…
…so we get together & brainstorm with others…

19. And then Bust those Orthodoxies
And we Test those ‘Truths’ through an Exercise known as: Orthodoxy Busting.

20. Orthodoxy: …a key belief we hold about what determines our success…
If left unchallenged, these beliefs can blind us to new opportunities.
Reference: Peter Skarzynski
Earlier we discussed how we all want to differentiate ourselves….
No better way than to review each of our beliefs about ourselves and see how they line up to what we think our strategy, business plans, market opportunities etc should be.
If they don’t line up, either our belief in ourselves should change OR the strategy / business plan etc should change. Either way, something has got to CHANGE.

21. Orthodoxy Held: Orthodoxy Flipped:
Dealing with animal waste is a cost we have to put up with running a zoo . . .
Orthodoxy Flipped:
What if animal waste was a profit center?
So let’s quickly look at an example of a business that emerged out of a cost and a problem…
Now that’s orthodoxy busting at it’s finest!

22. Identifying Orthodoxies
What would they “never say”?
What orthodoxies does the statement represent?
What vulnerabilities result from that orthodoxy?
How can we flip the orthodoxy? What new opportunities emerge?
So how did we apply Orthodoxy Busting at Coast?
Firstly our Senior Executive Team were called to practice this. They had to ask themselves ‘what would customers never say about banking, about credit unions, about Coast’?. And that’s how our Purpose came to be: To change the way Canadians feel about Banking, Forever!
The goal is to always question everything and then flip it into something useful / helpful to action on.
So after our Sr. Executives created the Purpose, it was then up to the rest of us. We held focus groups throughout the company to bust many orthodoxies that we thought was true about credit unions, banking, etc. And then we turned these Busted Beliefs into NEW / FRESH Ideas to help us be differentiated….
For example. A customer would never say ‘gee, it’s so enjoyable standing in a line-up at my financial institution’. Or ‘I love getting charged for every transaction I do with MY money’. Or ‘I understand perfectly what to do with my money & I don’t need anyone’s help’. Or ‘I love reading through a mortgage application and filling it out - - it’s so FUN!’ See how easy it can be? And then the real work starts…. What are you going to do about these then? If you ignore them, you’re not really differentiating yourself are you?

23. In your Workplace, next time…
Pick a People Theme and ask:
What would an employee never say….
What orthodoxies (beliefs) do the statements represent?
What is the vulnerability or risk in that orthodoxy?
And of course, then each Business Unit had to do the same within their own areas…
Hence our Employee Promise: To Change how Employee’s Feel about Work
And our 5 Aiming Points to support our Purpose.
So, what might an employee never say? How about:
‘I love performance reviews!’

24. Ask yourselves…
How could you flip the orthodoxies on their head? What new ideas and opportunities emerge?
Be sure to flip the orthodoxies in different ways.
So how are you going to flip the fact that an employee might never say ‘I love performance reviews’ To
Employees actually do saying: ‘I like performance reviews. My manager knows what I’m up to, has my back, and inspires me to give my best every day’
‘LOVE’ might be too strong a word to get to…but if you can get to ‘LIKE’ you’re definitely a super-star!

25. Helpful Tip # 4 Have fun in everything you do: just bring it to life!
Lewisa

26. SET says “Thanks” 26 Lewisa A leader who inspired moment….
It features our poor Chief Operating Officer, Kathy McGarrigle. When Kathy to join our organization almost two years ago, she had no idea she was signing up for this!
Let’s roll the video… 26

27. Helpful Tip # 5 Get Results.
Lewisa

28. Success Measures: How do we know we are successful as an HR Division
Success Measures: How do we know we are successful as an HR Division? (a.k.a. do we help the company make money or save money?)
Lewisa

29. The Where You’re At Money Chat
Lewisa
We also realized that we needed to structure the conversations our staff were having with customers to ensure it was driven by our Customer Promise and our mission to provide “simple financial help.” This led to the development of an innovative tool we call The Where You’re At Money Chat.
The Money Chat, for short, is a tool used by our staff to explore a customer’s financial situation so we can best determine how to enhance their financial wellbeing. The Chat is designed to take about 30 minutes to complete and is easy and non-intimidating.
As you see on the slide, the centre-piece for the Money Chat is essentially a piece of paper divided into 4 quadrants each representing one of 4 “money basics” – how to Manage your money; how to Save your money; how to Grow your money and how to Protect your money.
[Lawrie elaborates further]

30. Connecting the Money Chat to employee performance
Lewisa
Here is a concrete example of aligning Corporate Strategy to HR Strategy. We are in Beta mode on this journey…

31. The Where I’m At Performance Chat
Quarterly Performance Conversations
Lewisa
Prototype Only

32. Changing the way employees feel about work
Alignment
Changing the way employees feel about work
Hire
Engage
Develop
Deploy
Lead
Retain
Plan for Succession
Strategic
Aiming
Point #1
Strategic
Aiming
Point #2
Strategic
Aiming
Point #3
Lewisa
Remember this slide? Building on this, let us show you quick highlights of some of our programs
Strategic
Aiming
Point #4

33. Samples of our Alignment building programs
Kristina
So we’ve chatted about how we Busted Orthodoxies to help both on the Corporate Strategic and Tactical front and then on the HR Strategic and Tactical front. We used Performance Reviews as our example.
Now let’s briefly journey through a few more of our HR programs that we created to support the Employee Promise and the 5 Aiming Points.

34. Say hello to MEL: A guide for leading & inspiring employees from hire to retire
To help our Leaders GROW into Inspiring Leaders who have a great Professional Brand so that they can help their employees Grow, Build their Own Brands, know how to make Great Calls, and believe that they work in a Cool Place & Space, we created MEL (short for Managing the Employee Lifecycle): a section on our intranet site containing guides and resources (from template letters to forms to work-flows) to support our managers as they lead and inspire their employees from hire to retire.
Being an Inspiring Leader isn’t only about being a great ‘cheer-leader’. It’s also about knowing one’s ‘stuff’ that comes with the privilege of being called ‘Manager’. And so as our managers are leading their teams & run into a scenario like “someone just resigned – what do I do?” or “what should I be covering during my performance review conversations?” where do they turn to for information?
We put all that and more in MEL so that it’s easier for our managers to access the HR information they need to make the call as they manage the employee lifecycle. And so the first question our HRBPs now ask when they are called by a Manager for help is ‘did you check MEL’? And if they did and still have a question, then they proceed to further help. 34

35. High-five Hub
Another program we implemented is the High-five Hub. This supports 3 of our Employee Promise Aiming Points: ‘Cool Place & Space’, ‘Leaders who Inspire’ and ‘Build Your Brand’ as well as some of our Core Values and our Corporate Brand: HELP.
It’s an on-line program that allows anyone within the company to recognize a fellow colleague within any part of Coast for their achievements or to say ‘thanks for the help’. It provides instant feedback, automatically alerts the person’s manager, and is viewable by the entire company. It can be accessed by a mobile device and from home so that they can show the family too.
Last year 25,000 pieces of recognition were delivered.

36. Core Management Development
Assessment Tools & Development Guides
MEL
The Self-serve Mycoast Manager Portal
Core Management Curriculum
Onboarding & Quickstart Guide
Management Profile
Workforce Planning & Talent
Management
Our Core management Development Program supports our Room to Grow, Leaders Who Inspire and Build Your Brand aiming points.
I’ll briefly identify what each of these 6 resources are….
Onboarding and quickstart guide – a process and resource that outlines the first 90 day responsibilities on managing people at Coast.
Management Profile – simple value or principle statements that describe what is the job of a manager/leader at Coast (used for selection and performance management of our managers).
Workforce Planning and Talent Management - the overall program that helps identify the high potentials, guides the mentoring program, establishes key role identification and job experience rotation programs.
Assessment tools and development guides – linked to the management profile and other universal core management competencies, we’ll provide tools that assess the manager’s strengths/weaknesses as well as provide development ideas to address the development split of 70% learn by doing, 20% learn from others and 10% learn from study necessary to populate their IDPs.
MEL– we already discussed this…
Core management curriculum – in-house structured learning modules under three main categories: managing people, managing business and managing customers. Already available are the self-serve 42 online Harvard Management Mentor modules, the intensive Managing Individuals and Managing Teams Workshops. Some of this curriculum is mandatory and some are optional; the components are available on a just in time basis.
Our design commitment is to minimize in-class delivery as much as possible & embed learning interventions into existing meetings such as Staff Meetings. 36

37. 77% of Top organizations view advancement as upward and lateral
Success Spot
77% of Top organizations view advancement as upward and lateral
Kristina
Our aiming Points Room to Grow and Build Your Brand are also supported by our Success Spot Program. Where we are orthodoxy busting to our employees the idea of only Upward Mobility via the Corporate Ladder to zigzagging mobility through a Career Lattice.
While one of the studies we referenced says that 77% of Top organizations view advancement as upward AND lateral…our traditional credit union employees where many employees start early with us and stay until retirement may remember the ‘days of yore’ where it was only up.
No longer.
So while we aren’t ‘unique’ externally in this regard, we definitely are paradigm shifting internally and educating that as more organizations like ours have become flatter over time, it is more realistic to emphasize lateral movement and that a flatter structure can (and has) actually enable wider Room to Grow. (i.e. a couple years back we calculated that 56% of our operational leadership team were in new roles in that year!)

38. Some Success Spot Tools
Workforce Plan and Needs Assessment
Posting
Selection
Follow Up with Candidates
On-going Development
Evaluate Process
Business Unit Leader and HR discuss workforce plan
HRBP puts out posting with criteria by eBulletin
Selection Committee chooses candidates
Selection Committee gives feedback to candidates
Manager coaches to develop candidate
HR ensures process integrity and relevance
Job Shadow Series Summer was a success…winter is up next!
This brings us to the tangible tools we’ve designed to enhance the employee experience as it relates to Room to Grow and Build one’s Brand via career development.
For example, we have:
1. The Inspiration Template using real Coast Capital Career stories where we show the career of an individual mapped on the lattice and share the career journey of the individual so that employees know it can be done and that it does require zigzagging.
The How Can I Help ME Plan (traditionally known as the Individual Development Plan or IDP)
The step-by-step work-flow process of Workforce Planning and Hiring where roles & processes are clearly identified
The Job Shadow Series to create positive Unexpected Employee Experiences where employees shadow cross-functional leaders for a day to learn more about careers at Coast and to expand their knowledge of the company in general. We aim to do this quarterly.

39. Cool Place and Space
And of course where we work and how we interact with one another can help make or break the Employee Experience and destroy our Employee Promise.
Our Brand of HELP, our Corporate Purpose and Employee Promise that support our Corporate Strategy all also are a reflection of our surroundings and so HR is involved in aspects of Cool Place & Space as well where we help align between Corporate Strategy and the Employee Experience.

40. Daily Connection to Employee Promise
Healthy Sustainment of any program that anyone builds is a critical factor to the success and longevity of a program. Otherwise, it’s quickly become flavour of the month and soon to be discarded.
So, we sustain our programs on our Intranet and actively use the tools built to support each program.
But we also have to somehow wrap it all up together in a concise way to keep the employee experience momentum.
So we use Coast Daily, our daily electronic bulletin where supporting programs/features are highlighted in the side-bar under the umbrella of any one of the 5 Employee Promise Aiming Points. This mock-up obviously features Its Your Call.

41. Influencing Stakeholders
Seek first to understand and then to be understood – what “keeps them up at night?”
Whatever is the question, relationship is the answer
You need to be 3 steps ahead of them, without them knowing. 
Personal credibility is everything – they “buy” you.
Think about HR’s value-add; if you or any of the HR team left tomorrow, what would they do?
Lewisa

42. Key Competencies
Lewisa

43. Thank you from the HR Team at CCS.
Lewisa
Eat an elephant one piece at a time.
Apply change principles to everything.
A picture speaks a thousand words.
Set up your HR department right; separate “people programs” from “fire fighting” at first and then integrate them gradually as you execute the programs.
Build 3 year plans for everything; it’s all about planning, implementation and sustainment.
Take every opportunity to enforce the business priorities.
It’s a journey; have fun along the way!

44. Changing the way employees feel about work, forever.
Culture Video
To play video, click on photo (you’ll hyperlink to slide 54, where you’ll click again)
Private & Confidential--Property of Coast Capital Savings Credit Union

45. Culture Video
To play video, click on top 2/3 of screen