CUSTOMER STORY
Standard Bank Group Leads the Way in Measuring Manager Effectiveness
Johannesburg-based Standard Bank Group is unlocking manager effectiveness measurement via customized people analytics. The organization democratized people insights to over 9,000 managers across multiple countries in Africa, then incentivized the leaders to deliver on the key business and people metrics by tying them to their performance contracts.
INDUSTRY
Financial services
HEADQUARTERS
Johannesburg, South Africa
EMPLOYEES
50,000
VISIER PEOPLE® SOLUTIONS:
• Organization • Talent • Benchmarks • Planning • Learning • Talent Acquisition
Standard Bank Group is a banking and financial services company represented in 27 countries, mainly on the African continent. Standard Bank is the largest bank in Africa from a market capitalization perspective and is Africa’s biggest lender by assets.
With Visier’s people analytics solutions, Standard Bank Group has:
Improved performance with custom manager effectiveness dashboards
Standard Bank defined which employee metrics had the biggest impact on business outcomes, then created a dashboard to track and measure manager performance.
Progressed diversity goals
Putting diversity metrics in place led to a positive trend in women representation at the executive and senior management levels and in African representation, which is important to track in South Africa where the org is based.
Predicted & mitigated turnover
With Visier, the organization could identify drivers and attributes linked to employee turnover, allowing the company to predict and mitigate rising turnover.
Underlying Standard Bank Group’s goal to track manager effectiveness is the desire to "guide our leaders to create ideal conditions for our people to thrive." Says Werner Merbold, head of Workforce Insights. “It's not about just measuring the individual. It's about how we create a workplace where employees can thrive, contribute to the organization's success, and then measuring those success factors to link them back to the manager.”
THE CHALLENGE
Connecting manager effectiveness with business outcomes
Werner Merbold and the People and Culture team at Standard Bank prioritized enhancing managerial effectiveness to drive overall business success. Recognizing that effective leadership is pivotal to employee engagement, retention, and performance, they aimed to equip 9,000 managers with comprehensive, actionable insights through the Visier platform. By introducing "True North Metrics" aligned with organizational goals, such as client focus, employee engagement, and diversity, Merbold's team ensured that managers could monitor and act on key performance indicators.
"These metrics form part of [senior leaders'] performance contracts as well as their remuneration plans," explains Ampie Swanepoel, Head of Workforce Insights Value Management. "So it is critical for managers to make sure that they deliver not only on the financial results of the organization, but also the non-financial metrics."
"We are the go-to people now for the business—for insights around their managers, their leadership effectiveness, and the return on investment."
Werner Merbold Head of Workforce Insights
"We realized that the ultimate beneficiary of people data is not the HR organization, but people leaders. They are responsible for leading the teams to the level of business goals and creating a positive people experience. To do this well, they need to be empowered to become more data-driven in their decision-making process."
Ampie Swanepoel
Head of Workforce Insights Value Management
THE SOLUTION
Defining "True North Metrics" of an effective workforce and tying them to leader performance
Grounded in the belief that empowered and informed managers are crucial for fostering a productive work environment, driving growth, and achieving strategic objectives, Standard Bank Group set out to identify the company’s value drivers of client focus, employee engagement, risk and conduct, operational excellence, and C-suite financial outcomes. The concept was that if the company was focused on the clients and had an engaged workforce, it was delivering operational excellence and Standard Bank Group would then be financially successful and socially responsible. Therefore, they sought to define which employee metrics actually have the biggest impact on business outcomes.
"We aimed to identify the key metrics needed and we primarily focused on the engaged workforce, evaluating organizational design, leadership effectiveness, turnover, and diversity," explained Merbold. "These aspects are a priority for senior leadership and are reviewed during performance evaluations at the end of the year."
A glimpse into how Standard Bank Group keeps tabs on the effectiveness of their managers using Visier’s people analytics.
With the metrics outlined, the team developed a "leadership effectiveness index" scorecard. The annual performance review of senior leaders would be based on this scorecard of five to seven “True North” metrics that defined leadership performance.
How Standard Bank Group continues to evolve their "leadership effectiveness index"
The ability to flex and evolve is key to continued success in measuring leadership effectiveness at Standard Bank, says Merbold. Since establishing the True North metrics on which the leadership effectiveness index is based, they've learned and refined the index to measure what matters most.
"It's evolved over time," explains Merbold. "In terms of something like learning and development, we've looked at things like learning hours and we saw quickly that we had to change that to not how much people are learning to what they are learning."
THE OUTCOME
Positive impacts on employee retention, diversity, and leadership effectiveness
Retention improvements
By consolidating disparate data into a single platform, Standard Bank could create specialized metrics and gain deeper insights into various issues affecting the business. One notable example Werner provided was a project within a specific business area's operations team, where they identified high absenteeism, declining NPS scores, and numerous employee relations cases. By analyzing these metrics together, they realized there were significant issues, leading to a management change and subsequent positive turnaround. The new managers, empowered with detailed data, could implement effective changes, resulting in noticeable improvements across all indicators, including employee retention.
Meeting diversity goals
The integration of Visier's platform allowed the team to make diversity metrics highly visible and a key part of the organizational performance evaluation. Standard Bank set stringent targets for female representation in senior management and closely monitored pay gap information between male and female employees. By incorporating these metrics into their "True North Metrics" and linking them directly to managers' performance goals, they ensured that diversity objectives were prioritized and regularly assessed. Werner emphasized that making these metrics accessible to all line managers increased accountability and drove improvements in diversity numbers across the organization.
Leadership effectiveness efforts drive significant performance improvements
The implementation of the Leadership Effectiveness Index dashboards at Standard Bank has had a profound impact on performance, says Merbold. The ability to drill down into specific metrics and trends helped managers implement targeted interventions, leading to enhanced leadership effectiveness and overall organizational performance. The dashboards also supported the creation of a monthly people pack for senior leadership, further integrating people analytics into strategic decision-making processes. Overall, the leadership effectiveness project fostered a data-driven culture, improving manager accountability and driving significant performance improvements across the bank.
Visier solutions used by Standard Bank Group
Visier People® Organization
With core HR metrics, Organization starts you on your analytic journey answering questions around headcount, employee starts, and demographics, and how you compare to Visier Benchmarks.
Visier People® Planning
Securely distribute planning, and then visualize, and account for your growth today, and tomorrow.
Visier People® Benchmarks
Visier Benchmarks complement government-published measures such as those from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and US Bureau of Labor Statistics—also included with Visier— adding even more relevant context and timeliness.
Visier People® Talent
Identify the attributes that produce long-term, high performing employees and make better hiring decisions faster.
Visier People® Learning
Connect learning data with KPI to measure program effectiveness and direct your learning resources where they’ll have the most impact.
Visier People® Talent Acquisition
Connect recruiting data with employee outcomes so you can refine and define recruitment processes, programs, and results.
About Visier
Visier is the recognized global leader in people analytics, workforce and compensation planning, embedded solutions, and GenAI for people answers. At the core of Visier’s innovations is a simple premise: People impact is business impact, and you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Visier gives people-powered organizations the tools and insights to drive productivity, performance, and business outcomes through people impact. Founded in 2010 by the pioneers of business intelligence, Visier has over 50,000 customers in 75 countries, including enterprises like BASF, Panasonic, Experian, Amgen, eBay, Ford Motor Company, and more. Visier is headquartered in Vancouver, BC with offices and team members worldwide.
For more information, visit visier.com