CUSTOMER STORY
Standard Bank Group Uses Visier To Shape Their Workforce
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.
INDUSTRY
Financial services
HEADQUARTERS
Johannesburg, South Africa
EMPLOYEES
50,000
VISIER PEOPLE® SOLUTIONS:
• Organization • Talent • Benchmarks • Planning • Learning • Talent Acquisition
Key outcomes
Improved line managers’ team compliance
Progressed diversity goals
Enabled predictive workforce planning models
By implementing Visier, Standard Bank Group saw:
managers become more effective with easily-accessible insights.
of work hours saved thanks to improved workforce planning.
The investment in Visier, what we call the 'Meaningful Workforce Insights' initiative, was seen as central to shaping our workforce of the future.
Werner Merbold, Head of Workforce Insights, Standard Bank Group
THE CHALLENGE
Rearview mirror reporting lacked predictive modeling
For several years, Standard Bank Group has had a small team of people analytics experts. Originally they were using BI solutions to provide reporting, but they knew it wouldn’t scale to the kind of insights needed for the business.
Standard Bank chose Visier because they needed a fresh, effective, and more strategic way to deliver data insights.
THE SOLUTION
Engaging executive leaders key to scaling people analytics within the company
The people analytics team knew that an investment in Visier was critical to the company’s aims, and also understood sponsorship of the initiative by the senior business leadership team was pivotal to the program’s success.
Standard Bank Group’s chief people officer presented the business case for Visier, explaining the investment required. For each member of the executive leadership team to individually sign off on the initiative, they first needed to know what the benefits would be, and how to fully engage all stakeholders.
We realized that the ultimate beneficiary of people data is not the HR organization, but people leaders. We are responsible for leading the teams to the level of business goals and creating a positive people experience. In order 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, Standard Bank Group
4 steps to success
1. Assemble a team of champions
To raise awareness and get initial buy in, the team began by finding the right project sponsors to create internal champions. The people analytics team made sure to train these champions well, set up learning paths and identify those who excel in reporting inside the business. In some cases, especially if the experts’ specialty is something like the learning environment, the specialized knowledge is highly complex, so a strong partnership with the people analytics team delivers better quality analytics.
2. Define the “True North” of leadership effectiveness
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. Standard Bank Group would then be financially successful and socially responsible. Therefore this "True North" project sought to define which employee metrics actually have the biggest impact on business outcomes.
The people analytics team identified leadership effectiveness as key. Part of measuring leaders’ effectiveness was by compiling the attributes or dimensions of a leadership index. This framework is embedded in a dashboard available to leaders and forms the basis of a leader 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.
3. Engage managers
Stage one of using of Visier started with the HR community and, after a two-month head start, continued to line managers.
Standard Bank Group’s philosophy is to provide people leaders with full access to people data for their employees within their reporting hierarchy. This means, a line manager will have aggregate access to data for the business areas they are part of, including detailed data such as performance ratings, employee demographics, leave, and compensation information only for the teams they manage.
With 9,500 managers of varying levels, assigning secure permissions was a top concern.
4. Secure sensitive data
The incredible value and insights from combining performance data and compensation data was in reach, but first necessitated a robust security model. When implementing Visier, Standard Bank Group installed it with a permission-driven engine that helps the team smoothly roll out the solution to everybody in the organization.
As the people analytics team rolled out additional Visier modules, experts in functional areas such as rewards or performance management advised on access rights. The culture team ratifies every instance of exposure to sensitive data beyond senior people leaders. Standard Bank Group also complies with governmental data restrictions on personal data, for instance, the POPI Act (South African data privacy legislation).
THE OUTCOME
Standard Bank Group is reaping the benefits of predictive insights.
1
COMPANY ALIGNED TO “TRUE NORTH”
Standard Bank Group’s first goal was achieving leadership buy in—all leaders throughout the business are now using these metrics. Secondly, they standardized these metrics for everyone across the company. They now track the Workforce Return on Investment metric to see if it correlates with profitability as a bank—the ultimate metric showing the linkages between employee metrics, people metrics, and business metrics. This is something Standard Bank Group will certainly be doing in years to come.
2
TRANSPARENCY INCREASES VACCINATION DISCLOSURE
Standard Bank Group required all employees to disclose vaccination status as part of the plan to return to the office, but nearly 30,000 of the workforce in South Africa had not yet declared their status.
A focused online analysis and nudges informed 4,000 line managers who in their teams still had yet to comply. In just over six weeks, line managers used this visibility and ensured that 99% of the workforce responded to the vaccination disclosure process.
3
PREDICTING RESIGNATIONS
Standard Bank Group had been seeing rising turnover rates in the pandemic years, particularly in specific specialized functions in the business. The integrated employee data across the HR value chain within the single platform allows them to leverage the predictive capabilities within Visier to identify drivers and attributes linked to employee turnover, allowing the company to see how many employees are likely to resign over the next year.
4
WORKFORCE PLANNING
Standard Bank Group is able to model cost optimization scenarios based on certain business assumptions, across various dimensions, just by leveraging the workforce planning capability of Visier. Here are some other examples of benefits provided by workforce planning:
- Diversity planning
- Representation of women
- Impact of promotions
- Turnover
- New hires
5
BENCHMARKING IMPROVES DIVERSITY GOALS
Providing leaders with visibility on how they track against the metrics has led to a positive trend in women representation at the executive level and senior management level and in African representation, which is important to track in South Africa.
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®: Talent
Identify the attributes that produce long-term, high performing employees and make better hiring decisions faster.
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®: Planning
Securely distribute planning, and then visualize, and account for your growth today, and tomorrow.
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.
Discover how Visier provides the answers you need to make your people count, manage change, and drive business impact.
About Visier
Visier’s purpose is to reveal the human truth about your workforce and contribute to a better future. Visier was founded to focus on what matters to business people: answering the right questions, even the ones a person might not know to ask. Questions that shape business strategy provide the impetus for taking action, and drive better business results. Visier delivers fast, clear people insight by using all the available people data—regardless of source. With best-practice expertise built in, decision makers can confidently take action. Thanks to our amazing customers, Visier is the market leader in Workforce Analytics with more than 15,000 customers in 75 countries around the world.
For more information, visit visier.com