Sri Lanka is a fast growing economy and banking is one of the drivers of growth. In this video, Chiranthi Coorey, CHRO, of Hatton National Bank, one of the largest and oldest banks in Sri Lanka, speaks about some path-breaking and innovation people practices that they are implementing in HNB.
There has been spectacular growth for the bank in the past few years. As a result of that, they have created Vision 2020 and HR strategy is embedded into the transformational business vision. There is a lot of CEO sponsorship and buy-in.
Chiranthi shares “A Chief Employee Experience Officer role has been created this January. That is an industry and country first in itself”. Since unique position the key deliverables of such a role are still evolving, but it is mainly about how you look at your people factor in the business and augment the employee experience in a bigger way. So the CEEO focuses on creating a better workplace experience for the people.
Apart from that branding is a core area. “Augmenting the brand value and the value proposition is what we will focus on going forward. For the 2020 approach, our new EVP is Purpose, Value and inclusion” says Chiranthi.
The other area of focus for HNB is Diversity. “We have 37% women in the workforce. But when we start transferring them out it creates a lot of issues in the family ecosystem. So we have created a lot of family friendly policies to ensure that women remain in the workforce” reiterates Chiranthi.
Alongside that, there is multigenerational diversity due to 4 generations in their workforce. It is an element that needs to be factored in. Along with that the different types of ethnicity is also factored in.
Going forward, Talent Attraction is another area where HNB has developed path-breaking practices. It has used technology for hiring and onboarding. The bank has invested in the first cloud-based app for learning and development, and created an ROI-based model which also has gamified learning.
“Learning is like a lifestyle. Initially there were worries that only the younger employees will onboard. But when I looked at our Top 5 scorers, 80% were Gen-Xers” as per Chiranthi.
Through such initiatives, HNB is emphasizing the importance of rewarding the right set of behaviours for building an institution. A complete re-engineering of the system has led to aligning the learning and talent development framework to the competency platform.
Finally, Digital behavior is being on-boarded to the entire workforce as well. As per Chiranthi, “Our first course in Digital literacy is digital etiquette. You need to tell people how to behave in a digital ecosystem.” A digital literacy index has been created for all employees, right till the top - to meet the vision of having a 50% techno-commercial workforce by 2020.
Watch the complete discussion here.
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