Mobilising people’s minds to change, challenge and be different is key

Hatton National Bank's Chief Human Resource Officer/Deputy General Manager – HR Chiranthi Cooray shares useful insights into the bank's success in HR strategy and development as well as industry challenges whilst emphasising employees are a company’s greatest asset. Here are excerpts:

HNB Chief Human Resource Officer and Deputy General Manager HR, Chiranthi Cooray

By Cathrine Weerakkody

Q: How would you characterise Hatton National Bank?

A: Hatton National Bank (HNB) PLC is an epitome of stability in the local banking industry. It has a uniquely Sri Lankan identity with a rich history of over 125 years. The bank’s services reach out across urban to rural with a 249 customer centre footprint across the country. Its diverse product range serves infants to senior citizens, micro level entrepreneurs to top corporates. HNB is an iconic bank that represents the versatility of the country and the nation and is truly a symbol of Sri Lankans.

Q: What are its principle values? 

A: The principle values of HNB are to treasure professional and personal integrity at all times, to demonstrate mutual respect in all our interactions, be passionate about everything we do, commitment towards being customer centric, courage to change, challenge and be different and finally, demonstrate unity in diversity. 

Q: What are its greatest challenges?

A: At a macro level, political stability and progressive economic and fiscal policies are a must for the country and banking industry. As banks form the nucleus of the economy of the country, it is an imperative that the macro environment is stable. From the point of HNB, balance sheet growth is an exciting journey that however can be a challenge, in the absence of the preceding. 

The technological transformation is a successful challenge HNB has overcome with focused investment and strategy execution. Our investment into technological advancement exceeds Rs. 2 b over the last three years. Achieving the ROI on this investment is another milestone for HNB. The challenge for the entire industry is enhancing the technology adoption of customers, which is the single largest determinant of accelerated ROI into tech investments in banking. 

Mobilising the minds of our people to change, challenge and be different is a challenge the bank faces right now. It is one of our core values, and however much we are ready to embody and embrace this value, there is still so much change to embrace as a team, in an ever changing VUCA world. Successfully navigating the Hatna family through transformative change is a key leadership challenge for the dynamic corporate management team of HNB. Our key to success is continuing to offer service par excellence to our valued customers. We do this through our relentless pursuits in change management and organisation renewal.

Q: Could you describe the company culture and how does this impact your search for right candidates to ensure cultural fit?

A: The company culture has got embedded over the years as one which respects diversity and equal opportunity. We treasure professional and personal integrity at all times. We are custodians of public wealth and goodwill. Thus, although a tough ask, we do practice a zero tolerance policy on control violations and integrity breakdowns. 

HNB as Hatna family is indeed passionate in everything we do, be it developing a new product, opening a virtual branch, introducing a new service or fun and play at work. We believe in creating adequate opportunities for staff interaction, knowledge sharing and recreation. Our sports fiestas, annual awards nights, Christmas party, new year celebrations, Vesak lantern competitions, carols, Bakthi Gee, all island inter-branch quiz make up for the work-life balance that the bank actively promotes. 

Since HNB has been traditionally following a grow talent model, it has been easy to inculcate a cultural fit, as we hire school leavers at entry level. With the changing demands of business, we have stepped up this hiring practice by creating a CSR platform for a large number of school leavers who now have the opportunity of joining HNB as an intern. We identify the best-fit talent during this period and create a wider pool for stepped up hiring at different levels.

Q: How are candidates trained and what are the opportunities for professional development within the organisation?

A: Predominantly our talent is sourced from within, other than specialist skills that are hired externally. Whether internal or external, as soon we hire them, we have an extensive induction. This is the initial training provided when joining the organisation and job role. After that, depending on work area, they are trained in technical aspects. We have mandatory online competency courses for core banking, AML and KYC. Confirmation of employment is dependent on completion of these courses successfully. Apart from technical training, induction and post induction training aims at ethics and values, soft skills and interpersonal skills. We have strengthened our HR compliance using modern technology to assure honest and ethical wealth custodians serve our valued customers.  If you take the last three years, you can see rapid career progression and acceleration that has happened across HNB. We firmly believe in giving an opportunity to our staff to hone their leadership skills. Our merit based promotion system records a staggering 650 promotions from support staff to corporate management across the bank over a span of just three years. We are comfortable empowering young leaders as our bank has strong mentoring, coaching and training programs to support promotees to transition into their new roles. 

Q: Are there strong succession plans within the bank?

A: Well, let me share with you a real scenario, which will be ample testimony to how strong the succession plan in the bank. I am one of the five corporate management members who joined HNB six years ago. Just a few weeks ago, we promoted five AGMs from within HNB. In the last three years, we have promoted nine altogether from within into the corporate management team of the bank. This kind of internal promotions cannot take place unless the second and third tiers of the bank are readied to shoulder higher responsibilities. We have a young, dynamic and versatile corporate management team at HNB now, who are subject matter experts as well as general managers with strong business acumen and solid leadership skills. The vibrant leadership top 100 of HNB is a true testimony of strong succession planning that has been our key focus in the last three years.

How did we achieve this? We institutionalised the three-tier leadership track for HNB in 2013, with Catalyst Acumen and Aspire to build capacity in C-1 and C-2 levels in the organisation. Since then, we have added a feeder channel to Aspire as well. In addition to this, ongoing performance development and coaching initiatives have helped us to strengthen the succession plan of the bank. CEO level commitment to succession planning is an important element for the success of this initiative. 

Q: How do compensation and reward systems support the bank’s growth strategy and serve as a catalyst to achieve its goals and objectives?

A: Our rewards pillar underpins the ethos, superior rewards for superior performance. The bank’s executives are on performance-based rewards. Benchmark salary surveys consistently indicate that HNB leads the industry in remuneration. We have successfully introduced a performance bonus for our junior executive officers in the recently concluded collective agreement, which resulted in them getting a higher bonus than before. 

Rewards are linked to the achievement of individually balanced scorecards as well as the bank’s performance in varying proportions by grade. A C-suite executive would have a significant weighting on the bank’s results while a first level executive would have a larger percentage based on their own scorecard. This results in working together as a team to drive the bank’s performance. I believe a differentiated ESOP is a strong and sustainable driver of consistent organisational performance. 

Q: What strategy do you have in place to ensure retention and engagement of employees?

A: Our retention and engagement strategy is to offer our employees a unique employee value proposition. We do this by ensuring they have access to a healthy and versatile range of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. HNB offers stability, security and equal opportunity to its employees as its EVP. 

Open and two way communication processes, removal of status barriers, facilitation of idea flow and access to senior leaders of the bank, has built confidence and trust in our employees. HNB is the market leader in pay and superannuation benefits for 81% of our workforce who are unionised. Regular benchmark salary surveys have consistently positioned HNB as a market leader in base pay and a range of benefits for banking assistants, allied grades and junior executives. Our Executive staff who are on performance based variable pay plans enjoy competitive pay and perquisites, in par with industry. Our pension scheme, a defined benefit plan, provides economic stability to our employee’s post retirement. Bank events such as sports fiestas, inter branch quiz, Christmas party, carols, Vesak Bakthi gee, Vesak lantern competition, employee voluntarism projects strengthen the camaraderie and workplace bonding among peers.

Q: What role does talent management play at HNB? How would you address talent risk?

A: HNB has a strong track record for its results based training and development strategy. This is the result of HNB’s long-term outlook to nurturing and developing talent. Our efforts have been consistently validated with several local and international awards won in the HRD sphere. We have invested in a state-of-the-art training centre with modern classrooms, a fully-equipped library as well as a cloud based learning and development system. 

Learning is a lifestyle in HNB. We have relentlessly worked on our virtual content delivery through on demand services and today we proudly host most of our CPD programs, tests, formal learning and informal knowledge development in HNB TalentSpace. We are conscious of talent risk, and we have compiled a talent competitiveness report that serves as a leaderboard for the talent team at HNB. This ensures we continuously look out long term, while we stay focused on business and market needs and challenge ourselves to a relentless pursuit of excellence. From T&D to L&D to Talent modelling, we are right now on an exciting journey to shape the next game changing strategy in talent development for HNB. 

Q: What is your overall long-term strategy for the HR function of the bank?

A: We are imagining the future and busy creating the future workplace. While we manage human capital priorities to serve our customers today, we are at the same time putting a lot of energy towards creating the future bank. Big data, digitalisation and business HR have become our main thrust within this strategic HR vertical for HNB.  Personally, speaking of the future, I believe we can achieve much more agility and optimise cost with synergy. If we can serve our customers through any ATM of any bank, why are we duplicating resources to carry out similar functions within each bank and passing down that cost to the end customer? Unless banks change the game, non- banking businesses with hardly any regulatory limitations will come and offer bank services at a lesser cost. It’s already happening right around us. That’s why I would say the time is right for the industry to come together and explore synergistic partnerships to create services on demand while retaining proprietary data within each bank and create more value to the customer with lean and efficient digital banks. The industry needs the support of the policy makers and regulators to move in this direction. 

(The writer is a CIMA Passed Finalist and a graduate in Financial Management.)