KQ Article

We hear it all the time, and most of us believe it ourselves. People don’t like change. They resist it. We feel this is especially true when it comes to employees.

Yet as we hold fast to this belief, we see very cool companies making very cool changes that bring them incredible success. And, more often than not, it was the employees themselves who drove the transformation.

What is going on here? Why are these people embracing something they supposedly detest? Because in truth, employees don’t dislike or resist change. What they do resist is change without a context, change without logic, and especially change that occurs without their involvement.

In today’s difficult financial services industry, change seems to represent more than just an option. It might instead be a mandatory measure to help insulate you from the threat of commoditization facing all banks and credit unions. But before doing anything, you must first make sure that your plans are driven by employees at all levels of your financial institution.

A FAMILIAR EXAMPLE
Let us consider a real-world case of employee-driven change — one that the creators of this publication know well. It’s the story of Deluxe Corporation.

Several years ago, a group of Deluxe employees got together to discuss changes they were beginning to notice in their business. Specifically, they were seeing a steady increase in the number of unconventional requests coming from clients. More questions and more proposals were arriving that could not be sufficiently addressed. At the same time, demand for core Deluxe products and services was declining.

Deluxe employees had uncovered an important truth: the Deluxe offering and the needs of its clients were slowly drifting apart. Immediate change was a necessity.

In response, people across the company stepped back and took stock of their company, which included comparing Deluxe’s current offering to the products and services its clients needed most. This soul-searching led the company to set a rather ambitious goal for itself: to become the most valued partner in the financial services industry.

To accomplish this goal, Deluxe recognized it needed to become the preferred resource for researching trends, identifying challenges and learning new approaches to overcoming them. That is why Deluxe created the Knowledge Exchange Series. This free resource includes informative quarterly publications (including the one you’re reading), quarterly Web seminars and a dedicated Web site, all of which connect our clients with innovative ideas from their peers and the industry’s foremost thought leaders.

THE JOURNEY CONTINUES
This was a good start in our employee-defined mission, but it wasn’t enough. We also needed a forum — a means of testing ideas and potential customer-centric solutions in the real-world environments of our clients.

To meet this need, Deluxe employees developed The Collaborative: an 18-month engagement that involves recruiting and selecting 15 executives from banks and credit unions throughout the U.S. In partnership with Deluxe, these executives identify and research a critical customer-related issue facing the industry, ultimately designing and sharing a new solution to the issue through association presentations, white papers and a two-day expo.

And we are still not done. This change is a journey that will continue for some time. But the very fact that we are on a journey — and that we know where we’re headed — is due in large part to a group of engaged and informed employees who neither feared nor resisted change. Rather, they sought it out and rallied behind it, because they knew change was essential to their company’s continued success.

Might a similar opportunity for change await you at your financial institution? Only your employees know. And only through their active participation can any meaningful change be achieved.

_{© 2012 Deluxe Enterprise Operations, Inc.}