Insights from a Peoples Bank Talent Acquisition Manager

The 2022 ‘Great Resignation’ prompted many local businesses to gain a better understanding as to why so many people were leaving their jobs and how to do a better job retaining valued employees and recruiting top talent. Understanding larger trends affecting employment, both here in Snohomish County and across the country, was key to our approach to employee recruitment and retention at Peoples Bank. What we found was that people were often leaving their jobs not for better pay, but because they didn’t see room for growth within the company where they were employed.

Identify Employee Needs

Peoples Bank’s Human Resources department is focused on three main areas: Improving employee growth and development, enhancing the candidate and employee experience, and deepening employee engagement. The first step in attaining those goals is the same: Ask questions.

The reasons employees leave their employer will be different in every industry, so it’s important to understand your business and industry first. Your employees are a great resource for that knowledge, so hearing from them first-hand is critical.

Peoples Bank uses surveys to gather information about things like remote work preferences. We have also started using focus groups, bringing a diverse group of people together to discuss a specific topic. These efforts have influenced one-on-one interactions too, making managers and their teams more comfortable having direct conversations about what they need to be successful.

Ask, Listen, Act

Once you ask employees to share their needs, management teams must listen and be ready to act on that information. If you ask for engagement and do nothing with the feedback it can have the opposite effect of disengaging your employees.

When we surveyed employees about returning to the office after working from home, many departments requested a hybrid model. Utilizing staff input, our management team worked hard to create a flexible hybrid model for non-customer facing teams, setting a standard for a how much time should be spent in the office, then empowering supervisors to make their own teams’ schedules. We understand how important it is for us to be together to collaborate, but also want to give employees the option of a flexible work schedule.

By creating this flexibility, we strive to recognize the employee as a whole person. Whether they’re taking care of children or aging parents, or are dealing with other unique situations, we understand our employees are more than just their work at Peoples Bank.

Building Company Culture

Shared values create a company’s culture, and Peoples Bank looks for candidates with similar values during the hiring process. When we ask long-term employees why they’ve stayed with us, they often say it’s because their personal values aligned with the Bank’s, so we know this is very important.

Our commitment to our employees is a reflection of the Bank as a whole, which translates to our ability to execute on our promise of delivering a higher level of service to our customers. Delivering on this promise starts with understanding the needs of our employees and creating an environment where they can bring their best to work, and to their customers, every day.

Learn more about careers at Peoples Bank. Please visit www.peoplesbank-wa.com/careers/.

— By Debbie Hogue, Talent Acquisition Manager at Peoples Bank