- How to build an integrated transformation strategy that reflects core values, purpose and community.
- How to deliver transformation beyond technology to procedures and processes throughout the organization.
Miriam (00:07):
This is the leadership track, and today we're talking about how to thrive during uncertainty, leadership, data, and action, love the inspirational message and thriving during uncertainty. Today I'm speaking with Kristiane Koontz, The Director of Banking Transformation at Zions Bank, and Laura Merling, the Chief Transformation and Operations Officer at Arvest Bank, and also one of our innovators of the year. Thank you so much for being here. Thank
Kristiane Koontz (00:31):
Thank you.
Miriam (00:33):
All right, so can you both tell me about your roles within the bank? What areas do you lead? How many people do you oversee, and what sort of big projects have you led recently? Kristiane, I'll start with you.
Kristiane Koontz (00:45):
Happy to. And for those that aren't as familiar with Zions, we are not just Zions Bank, but we actually own seven different banking brands across 11 Western United States. So didn't know that recently we were 90 billion in assets. Obviously like most banks, that's a lot lower now, and that's not a disclosure, that's a normal decline, but my responsibility as a transformation role. And so I'm really responsible for enterprise wide transformation. So we've got groups that will do business unit specific items, but if it's something broad reaching, then that'll fall in my purview and I partner with our business and technology leaders to achieve those outcomes. And so some of the things that I've worked on recently include our customer master data management solution implementation, and then for the last five years, really been focused on what we call a core banking transformation. It's really a lot bigger than a core transformation. It's a massive sort of standardization of products, processes, technology, and then it's not just our core, but sort of all of the integration and APIs that wrap that core that our tellers use in the branches, account opening, you name it. And we've got about 450 people working on that initiative under your purview, in my broader team, that includes vendors, that includes people that report up to some of my peers, but are responsible day to day for executing this transformation program.
Miriam (02:16):
Alright, how about you, Laura?
Laura Merling (02:18):
So very similar in terms of not the size of banks. So Arvest is about 26.8 billion in assets. There's thereabout, but very similar in terms of the mission and how we're structured. So the transformation team that I lead, we really, there's three pieces of our transformation. So I lead what's called, I'll call it run the bank, transform the bank and grow the bank. And all three of them are tightly tied together. You have to be able to keep systems up and running and while you're moving the new stuff forward. And then also you have to think about where are we going. So part this was setting the strategy of where we wanted to be in five years, how we wanted to be seen as a bank. And then the transformation path went, here's where we are, here's where we're going to head towards. So I have about 1200 reports, folks that work on my team. And then with vendors and stuff like that, it's probably around 1500. We have quite a few third parties helping us right now. We're in the early stages of what we're trying to do. If you think about run, transform, and Grow, So Run is really our chief operations officer reports into me as well of our CIO transform. We have a CTO, so I think software development, product management, and then we also have our architect, which kind of floats across both. And then we launched something recently, which is industry solutions, what we're calling centers of excellence. And so having vertical industry focus on particular healthcare and food value chain. So all that kind of sits there. Big projects, we have a lot of them. You guys are probably a little further along than we are. So one that we just completed, which I'm super excited about. So I've been with the bank about 18 months and come from just a transformation background, not really banking background. So I've got a lot of learning to do as we're on the journey. But big projects we just completed. So we moved from Microsoft to office to Google Workspace for all 6,500 of our employees. So that was no small feat and it was done in a year, which was pretty amazing. We have a little bit more to do on migrating some of the drives and things like that. And then the next one is we built out, so we're in the process right now of moving from a data center. So we have two full data centers. We're moving one of those data centers, we're moving out of it fully. We started that about this time last year. We'll be out of it by November. So moving a full data center off off-prem, building out a data platform on Google Cloud. And I said, we're doing a lot. And then we're all, and on that front we're actually focused on MDM, so we can have a single view of a customer. And then the last kind of big thing, we're working on this every year we have a major theme that there's foundational things like cloud and stuff like that. And we're picking a major theme. So our major theme this year is called year the Business Loan. And so we're building out a loan origination business loan origination platform and a servicing platform both this year, all of that on top of a new corp banking platform based on thought machine. So we're a little ambitious. I'll stop there.
Miriam (05:46):
You're both doing a lot. I know surveys and collecting data about your employees and tracking metrics are important to both of you. So can you tell me, each of you, tell me about your strategies, Kristiane , I know you do quarterly surveys among your team.
Kristiane Koontz (06:03):
Well, when I joined the company, it was at a point of inflection where we had been doing a transformation for a few years and there was something that was just sort of off on the culture, and so it needed a little bit of a reset and people had lost. I think the context is helpful for why we started this too, right? People had lost a little bit of faith in their leadership that if they even elevated concerns that they would be heard if they had suggestions that it wouldn't just fall on deaf ears. And so there was a bit of apathy in this group, and this is transformation work is really tough and you need people in a hundred percent and they have to be a part of that change. And so one of the things that I started doing was a quarterly survey called the program health survey. And there are seven key questions that I ask, and it's things like, do we have the right processes in place? Are we communicating effectively? And are you getting the information that you need to operate effectively in your role? Do you feel like you can openly share concerns? That was a direct question, do we have the right tools and infrastructure? Do you have the right resources, et cetera. And so it was sort of these level setting questions. And then there's a few, but what was different is we wanted to make it really simple and easy for people to participate in this survey. And our response rate is better than the US voting system. So that's good. Thinking about what we heard from Andrew Yang earlier today, you teach something, you could teach them something. Yeah, exactly. Well, here's one of the way maybe they could use this approach is their responses are given in smiley faces and it's a one to five score. And so on the back end as leadership, we look at numeric data, but it is everything from a sad face to sort of a neutral and a smiley face and some sort of half smiles and half frowns in between. And it was a really good way to just get people sort of sentiment on things and not have them anchor in a particular number. And for whatever reason, that just turned out it was just an experiment, but it turned out to be a very powerful way to get that. And then we did some write-ins and one write-in was shout outs, and so recognize a positive change or a team member that's going above and beyond. And then we asked specifically for improvement suggestions, and we were very intentional in how we worded that so that it was, you already gave us the good, now tell us what can be better, what's not working?
(08:20)
And we would get everything from why am I always having to log into different systems to do my work, to really insightful things to clearly you don't read your email, but there's also something there for like, well, maybe we need to do a better job of communicating that if that's a recurring theme. So that was sort of how we structured it. And then we look at the data as a leadership team. So we track kind of quarter over quarter, we look at the scores we all read, and I personally read every single write in as well. And those are just as valuable I think as the scores. And then we publish it out. And so we actually, I don't send all of the data, but I will send a quarterly sort of, here's where we're winning, here's where we can do better, and some improvements that we're focused on. And then we send all of the shout outs. And so those shout outs kind of became famous because people would see their names and we would bold your name in green so you could kind of get this three page email with all of these shout outs for everyone. It was very inelegant, but people loved him and our CEO got them and he would sometimes respond. And so just cycles of that, I think it didn't happen overnight. I mean it took over a year to really start getting more concrete things, but when people realized that this was one forum of many that they could actually make a difference in and that leadership cared and that we were tracking these things, then the quality of the data started to get better and better and more actionable.
Miriam (09:44):
And one thing you've highlighted to me before is that one finding was that people were getting very close to being burned out.
Kristiane Koontz (09:50):
Yes, in particular. And it would kind of waxes and wanes, so we actually could see the difference and we could correlate it to particularly stressful times. So sometimes it wasn't super shocking because we knew we were getting really close to a big milestone or something like that and the transformation, and so we could see it. And so part of it was an outlet for people and we could say, Hey, we see it. We see it in the data. We know you're working hard. And we ask about kind of morale, and then the write-ins would say, Hey, morale is high, but I'm really stressed. Or we would get some of that data from those writing comments. I think more than just the survey question, but we used that and then we actually did some brainstorming. This is particularly during the height of the pandemic, speaking of uncertainty that we were able to use then to just to have some open conversations. There was no magic wand that made stress go away, but in some cases we actually did relax some things and we said, you know what? We need to take another beat. Or Hey, there's not enough confidence in something that we're about to launch that we're really ready for it. And so instead of pushing through that, we're going to take another cycle, another sprint, and really refine things before we do that.
Miriam (11:04):
What I think is interesting is when you said it took a year to get good data, so it shows that you sort of have to play the long game with this.
Kristiane Koontz (11:10):
Yo do, Yeah. And you kind of have to trust, and very few things I think are overnight. Even some of these transformations, you are going to get some benefits overnight, but a lot of it is that long-term vision and sort of sticking with it, not pivoting too much before you get enough data to assess whether it's really working.
Miriam (11:27):
And Laura, what's your system been like?
Laura Merling (11:31):
So we have a couple different pieces and for different reasons. Although I think to your point earlier, the project level surveys, we just did one for before we launched Google Workspace, we'd been doing them throughout, right, checking checkpoints as you're getting because impacting the whole organization. But I think what we realized is certain organizations, because everybody's going through transformation. One program we had one team, our finance team actually was going through moving their GL to cloud. We were going through workspace transformation and we were using and partnering with the finance team to help us with the new banking core platform. So our finance team was just completely stretched thin and their stress level compared to the folks in the branch, very different. Now we have an organizational change management team, but they're not going to be able to see it working on different projects at a time. But we had to do a survey in order to pull that out and say, okay, timeout, how do we fix this? And it was okay. We had two, a handful of SMEs, I'll say two, but let's say you had two SMEs for finance helping us with core banking platform, but they were helping with the GL move too. And so they're like, wait a minute, I need 10 more SMEs to support this. So some of it was also just how do you address it from an organizational structure. So our surveys we do, I'll call them two internal and two external, and I'll tell you why we do the external ones to help drive it. So the two internal ones we have one's called Drive Change, and that started before I got here. The CEO started that. And then the other one is a associate engagement survey, which we do every year.
(13:11)
So drive change is every year and associate engagement. So drive change is more about how do you feel about the transformation overall? And it's anonymous except for the top a hundred leaders in the company. And that's really to kind of get their gauge of do they know what the mission and the goal is of the transformation? Do they know what their role is? How do they feel with what's going on? And things like that. Do they feel like they're part of it? Do they feel like their skills are going to be able to support where we're going? So it's very much centered around that. Associate engagement is a little bit more around do you have the right tools to do your job? Do you feel like you're getting career growth opportunities? Do you like that? How are you working with the other departments? So it was a little more that influx. So those two things combined give us a temperature check, but what it also said was, Hey, by the way, they want to know more. We haven't been very clear about what the message is about why we're doing transformation, what it is, where we're going, what the role is, and you adjust it accordingly. So we did last year, something called a vulnerability study, actually 2021, and then we'll do it again this year. So we skip a year. And then we also did, it's not a study or not a survey, but it's something we look at. So we go through our customer complaints. So what happens is when you look at those two and you cross correlate, you know what problems you need to go solve and you know it then how that applies to what your vision is of where you're going. So then you can start to answer the drive, change questions, concerns, and the associate engagement concerns by saying, okay, the reason we're doing this is customers are saying this, they have these rocks in their shoes, and if we keep with these rocks in their shoes, they're going to leave.
Miriam (14:51):
Love that phrase by the way.
Laura Merling (14:54):
And so that's kind of it, you know, you got to have a mission so everybody knows why you're doing the transformation and where you're headed to and then what their role is. So that's really kind of what we've been working on.
Miriam (15:05):
And I was also wondering, what are some leadership initiatives or changes you've made that have spilled over to the broader organization with you? Laura, I think me at Arvest is one example.
Laura Merling (15:16):
Yeah, We actually have two of them. One is me at arvest, but one before that was this idea of quick wins. And it was funny, I came across this HBR article from 2011 that was talked about this. So this idea of quick wins was really around the how do we show success if we're going to do this thing that's a five year transformation, we know where we want to get to as a bank and how we want to s design what we're doing, how do we show progress towards that? And how do you feel incrementally people want to come to work every day knowing that they have a goal and that there's going to be an outcome and they can see the outcome so that they feel like, yeah, I'm part of this and we're making progress. So one was establishing this notion 90 day quick wins, and now everybody in the bank uses 90 day quick wins. They might call them quick wins, they might call them 90 day quick wins. Some quick wins are more like 120 days.
Miriam (16:05):
No one's counting,
Laura Merling (16:06):
But it's still more than the two year rollout, right? Yeah, it's still less than the two year rollout. To me at Arvest program was another one, and this started if we were going to start moving to cloud and fill the new core banking platform and we needed to do software development and APIs, modern API design and things like that. We needed to train people. So we launched something called me at rve last year, which was centered around initially around giving people cloud skills, but we started it with a survey, an assess self-assessment, which everybody thought they were going to get fired based on the self-assessment. So that took a lot of work. So you had to have, we're going to do a self-assessment because one of the pieces in this survey associate engagement survey was, you don't even know what skills I have.
(16:46)
I feel like I could do more than what I'm doing today to help contribute. And it was like, okay, well then tell us, because if you don't tell us, we can't help you. And so tell us. And then we created me at Arvest, we started with cloud computing skills, and then we've been building on it. And at this point we have over a thousand folks that have been through, we have 63 job profiles and we have over a thousand people that have been through what we call specific learning journeys associated with their job profile. And so we're super excited about that. And then the impact of that was our drive change survey. We had a 21% increase in, I feel like my skills, you've worked to help me work on my skills to suit where we're going in the future. So that's kind of been it. And so now the marketing team is the next group to go into the ME at Arvest program. It took us a full year to learn, organize, structure it, put together our own material, and now we're going over to the marketing team.
Miriam (17:40):
And I love the idea of 90 day quick wins because as you were saying before, if it takes a year to make change, you really have to stick with it. But I love the idea of getting quicker satisfaction to maybe feel more encouraged.
Kristiane Koontz (17:51):
Yes, it's brilliant.
Miriam (17:53):
And Kristiane how about with you? I've heard you use the phrase radical transparency. Is that something like you came up with and has that sort of spread over Zion's more broadly?
Kristiane Koontz (18:02):
Yeah, I'm sure someone else has invented it. I can't imagine that I did. But I'll take all the credit, right? But again, back to that sort of seminal point where the culture was a little bit broken, and this isn't broad in the whole organization, but in this transformation team, which was a pretty big the largest capital investment that we've made in the company's history, is doing this sort of tenure core transformation. And yet it was a point where you would be green, green, green, green, green until you were red and everyone felt like they were, like, they got hit in the face and they would say, what just happened? And people couldn't even talk about issues until all of a sudden it was something you were elevating to the board of directors and asking for money and saying, Hey, there's a material delay, et cetera. And so it is something that has spilled out over into the rest of the organization, but it's just this sort of radical approach. I call it radical transparency. It felt very uncomfortable for people to talk about problems and talk about them very openly and talking about problems when we sometimes didn't have a solution yet. And it might simply be, Hey, this isn't an elevation, but one of the things that we're working through is X, Y, and Z, and we're thinking about it this way and we're going to have more information in 30 days, et cetera. But we would start to just talk about this and it still makes some people uncomfortable, but we've got this executive steering committee, it's our CEO, it's all of our C-suite that sits on this, all of the business line heads as well as my team and my peers that sit on this transformation steering committee that we have. And we meet monthly and it's become, we had to slim it down because people started to want to join, I think for entertainment because we would be talking about these things. But it was actually great because we got senior leadership engaged in problem solving. One of the ways, so some of the things that came out of this radical transparency, obviously this willingness to sort of solve and tackle problems early, but we got so many better solutions or we didn't solve problems that we didn't need to solve. One of the things was we've got some specific conversions that we're doing, and we made a very quick executive decision that we were just going to close branches for a few hours on Saturdays versus trying to figure out how to operate through in the old regime. The team would've spent months trying to solve and estimate and size to say, Hey, we can close branches, or it's going to take us three months to figure out how to build this mouse trap that will keep us from closing branches for a few hours on a Saturday when branch traffic is fairly low in these markets. And instead, we were able to just avoid wasting many weeks of time to size that. And we just had that conversation sort of upfront by saying, this is what we're working on. Another during the pandemic is we very tightly because we're the largest capital investment, we manage our money. I mean, it's just stunning how much money you can spend in a day or a week. So my team knows how much we cost per day to operate, and so we're watching our rate per hour and what does it actually cost for us to run this engine? And so we said, Hey, we're seeing some really, our labor rate, labor rates are really going up. Yeah, we've got long-term contracts with suppliers and those are locked in. But when we have turnover and we were seeing elevated turnover in the pandemic as were many, we were really seeing that replacement costs come in much higher.
(21:18)
And so we were sort of the first ones to say it in the steering committee meeting and say, Hey, our cost of labor has gone up close to 10% over the last year and this is pretty material for us when you're doing something at this scale. And all of a sudden, every leader in the room said, you know what? We're seeing something we're seeing sort of the same thing. And it became this sort of bigger focus at the company, but it was sort of at the early days before some of this was even maybe reported that we could actually surface that. So just some of those insights that I think come and then value that gets delivered from, we've got to find a better way to solve for this. Right? And you get just creative people speaking up cross-functionally in the right way because there's an openness to just talking about the problems instead of always trying to have the solution before you get to an executive level discussion.
Miriam (22:08):
So we have about five more minutes. I have a couple more questions. One is has, have you heard anything from the other person today that's resonated with you or maybe inspired you to adopt that for your own company?
Laura Merling (22:21):
I'm going to change our survey step smiley faces.
Miriam (22:24):
That is a very easy fix.
Laura Merling (22:25):
I noticed smiley faces at the top.
Miriam (22:30):
Love it.
Laura Merling (22:31):
Because I think that's, it does. It's really hard. I mean, our folks, we've done the drive change survey enough now that people actually, and they write in a lot of, write in a lot of feedback. So a lot of what we have to do is actually read the content, which I love, but I think the smiley faces make it feel less. You don't want to put stress on people, the smiley faces. Yeah, I kind of feel like that. So yeah, I'm stealing that one.
Kristiane Koontz (22:53):
I was going to say, I think everything that Laura's highlighted, I already think took a few things back when we did our prep call. I love the 90 day quick wins, but that the ME at Arvest, when you do these transformations, you always get people that are just, they can't move forward because they're so worried about their jobs. And we know that we need to re-skill people. And the conversations around AI are really helping to accelerate that as well. And so it's a little bit of a terrifying time, but people have to be a part of the change. And so addressing it through skills assessment, skills pathing, and really helping to invest in people I think is key. Or give them clarity of like, Hey, we don't have this job. This is, but here's another one. Here's a new job. Here's three other jobs that you could do. I think that's going to become more and more relevant. So I just love what you're doing there.
Laura Merling (23:41):
Yeah, thank you. Well, it's interesting, the 21 point jump in our drive change was just like, okay, this is, it's working, right? But I think the other part was it also depends on where the people come from. So in the market that we're in, so one of the other large companies that's next to us where we have some people from our team that came from there, when they moved to cloud, they actually, not only did they move to cloud, they actually then made it fully outsourced. So it was a fully managed cloud service. And so what they said was they let go of a lot of their IT team, which is how we got some of them. And so when we said we were going to cloud, they were all like, oh my God, we're going to be out of a job. And so you had to come up with an answer and an action right away, not just so like, well, we're eventually going to train you. Yeah, we literally, we did the Google announcement and in parallel we announced we made our best. We just had to.
Miriam (24:29):
Yeah. And then last question, how do you make the workplace feel like a safe space for employees? To be very honest with their feelings, because I think people do worry about criticizing their workplace. How anonymous is this survey? Is it going to reflect badly on me? So how have you gotten really honest answers from people?
Kristiane Koontz (24:51):
I mean, I think it's, yes, you can. It is anonymous. I mean, we could go back, we talked about this, but you could go back and probably find someone's email address or login if I really wanted to spend my time doing that. They don't give us that information. It would just come from whatever data or survey tool has gathered. But I think it's not punishing people that bring up bad news. And once you create a culture of that, and it means you have to receive bad news, that sometimes is very critical. And even if you don't totally agree with it, just sort of taking it with grace because that's how that person feels and that's their perspective. And they took a risk to share that with you, whether it was very public or in private. And so I don't think it happens overnight, right? Yeah. I mean think it's not, no one is ever going to believe that a survey is anonymous, even if it truly is. And so it's more like knowing that you're not going to get punished for sharing something critical.
Miriam (25:43):
Yeah.
Laura Merling (25:44):
I think we did a couple things. So one, my team all like I do skip levels and then my team leaders do skip levels. We want to hear the feedback, and it's about us just listening. I think to your point too is when they do give you that feedback, you say it's anonymous, and yeah, you could probably, but it wants to, what we've been trying to do is say, Hey, these are some of the themes that we heard from you guys in this survey. And we say these are themes. So it wasn't like it was one person. We heard a few folks say this, this, and this, and they go, oh, they actually listened to what we said and here's what we might do. And then for my leadership team, so it was interesting, if I look back to where we were in January, we were still, I'll call it storming because, so I had folks from the outside that came in, plus some of the folks that had been there for a while. And so I brought my team through my leadership team through, I'm going to call it coaching, but it basically is what's called an it's intentional leadership program. And the intentional leadership program is coaching for my leaders, but also how do we get along, but also how we work with our team and other teams. But through that, there's a perception interview that each one of my leaders and myself are going through. And then our teams will go through the perception interview. And the perception interview is like, Hey, what? It's kind of like a 360, but you do it in a conversation. You don't have somebody hide behind. And then it's like, okay, it shows them that I'm okay at receiving feedback and then when the leaders are, and the other team members are, right, because you're going to ask people across the company. And so it was interesting, our CEO, he didn't know that we were doing this with our team. And then some of the other leaders started to say that we were doing it, and he basically now wants the other leaders to go do this. He's like, that's really cool. He's like, I've gotten a lot of feedback, so we think we're actually going to start this with the other rest of the organization. And I think that kind of sets a tone for if I'm open to feedback, then that means you are too.
Miriam (27:44):
All right. Well, thank you both so much for being here.
Laura Merling (27:46):
Thank you.