One of ESL Federal Credit Union’s four strategic priorities is operational excellence in all aspects of its business. Over the last three years, the company’s Learning function has made a significant contribution to achieving this ongoing priority through a series of remedial skills training workshops that target specific operational skill and knowledge gaps on ESL’s front line.
Finding Teller Differences
As a financial institution, it’s critical that ESL process all of its members’ transactions accurately, particularly on the teller line, where cash is exchanged and errors are most common. L&D created a targeted learning workshop that provides a refresher on proper end-of-day balancing.
The “Finding Teller Differences” program provides tools and methods for quickly identifying differences, and it concentrates heavily on hands-on practice of ESL’s balancing procedures. L&D’s Level 3 evaluations indicate this program, which quarterly, has consistently and significantly reduced teller differences over a three-year period. For example, in 2013, the evaluations found that 30 days after completing this half-day workshop, participants had an average dollar per difference of $27.72 as compared to $49.37 before the session—an improvement of 43.9 percent. Compare those figures to the Level 3 evaluation L&D conducted after the first-ever Finding Teller Differences workshop in 2010: Thirty days after participating in the class, participants lowered their average dollar per difference to $77.18 versus a $334.28 average difference prior to the workshop—an improvement of 76.9 percent.
Interestingly, though the average dollar per difference in 2013 is a lower overall percentage of improvement than in 2010, L&D has found that mentors who have attended these workshops have been demonstrating best practices for identifying differences to new hires and existing tellers who have not attended the sessions. This informal learning accounts for part of the overall improvement in teller differences.
Additionally, ESL’s branch network informally promoted the value of this workshop, which led managers to send select tellers from their staff to explore practical methods for minimizing their own balancing differences.
IRA Refresher Workshop
L&D also partnered with the Deposit Operations (DO) team to design “The IRA Refresher Workshop” in 2008, a blended training program offered six times annually to front-line employees who seek to improve their knowledge of Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) in order to serve members more efficiently and confidently. Facilitated by an L&D Training & Performance specialist, this full-day instructor-led training (ILT) class focuses on ESL’s IRA procedures, paperwork, transactions, and terminology, and it features an interactive Q&A session with a subject matter expert (SME) from DO. A recent review of the error rate on IRA paperwork provides evidence of the workshop’s success. From January through August 2013, DO documented 13 IRA front-line errors, a year-over-year decrease of 7 percent. For the same timeframe in 2011, DO documented 37 IRA processing errors, while in 2010, it identified 260 errors. This positive statistical trend suggests a strong correlation between the availability of the IRA workshop and the significant reduction in front-line errors.
