Case study - Banking sector

Project scope

A few years ago, four major banks in South Africa decided to amalgamate. From the perspective of employee restructuring, the task proved to be daunting. New branch teams needed to be formed to function effectively under the integrated company name.

Traditionally four different manager types existed within a branch. The new company wanted to retain this structure, yet branches of the four different banks needed to integrate, requiring new teams to be formed.

The challenge

To illustrate the scale of the challenge, in a single province, 813 employees performed on managerial level in the branches of the four banks. The executives of the new bank realised that logistics alone would not optimize the effective functioning of branch manager teams. Past performance plays a role, as well as the competencies that managers will bring with them to the new team.

Our solution

First, a thorough job description of each branch manager type was obtained, using SHL’s structured profile called the WPS. From here we built a sophisticated mathematical job-fit strategy that represented  the identified competencies required for good job performance. Competencies were weighted to reflect their importance to the particular job function.

Each branch manager was assessed using a battery of psychometric tests, including the MBTI, OPQ, IMC, leadership styles, Belbin team types, and others. These personal and peer reviews were compared against their current performance with regards to three components, namely business growth, client satisfaction and the corporate climate at branch level. While the psychometric assessment was on an individual level, the original branch team as a whole achieved the job performance scores, a factor we reckoned with.

The employee portraits that we created, enabled us to determine the types of branch managers that were traditionally recruited and developed within the banking environment. Based on the job-fit strategy, branch managers could be rank-ordered and placed in categories, from where future teams likely to be the most effective in their job were formed. With the refined system that we equipped them with, the bank executives could now decide how they wanted to use their resource strength, and also continue the formation of highly effective teams.