A ‘Breakout’ can transform the public face of a company

EMPLOYEE motivation was an integral part of a programme to transform the fortunes of The Australian and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) when it was at the brink of collapse, said the woman who led the initiative at a conference in Leeds.

Sonia Stojanovic also said the cultural transformation programme, Breakout, was about prioritising customer service, in other words giving the underperforming bank “a human face”.

The former head of international banking HR at ANZ was the keynote speaker at the second annual Loving the Customer conference, organised by York-based Customer First UK.

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Ms Stojanovic told an audience that in the early 1990s the bank nearly failed. It had big investments in Asia when the Asia crash happened, she said, adding: “The industry was in such a state that bank bashing was a national sport in Australia.”

Profit was coming from cutting costs and those that were left were “suffering from survivor syndrome”, said Ms Stojanovic. “We were the least preferred employer in financial services in Australia.”

The Breakout programme, which was launched in 2000, helped move the bank from number four out of the Big Five banks in Australia, to number two in a period of three years, Ms Stojanovic said. Meanwhile, its share price went from $8.34 in 2000 to $32 two years later.

Measures included the introduction of an internal ‘open jobs market’ whereby employees could apply for roles in other departments without the consent of their manager, and ‘personal development’ workshops. All employees at the bank, an employer of more than 33,000 staff, became shareholders in the business.

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Ms Stojanovic, who established her own consultancy business in 2009, Pathways to Performance, told the Yorkshire Post: “The mindsets of the people had to be about self-belief and about engagement and about a conscious choice to be at the bank and contribute.

“We found that different parts of the business were talent hoarding which means that people wanted to move to different parts of the business to different roles but because they had to have the manager’s sign off, the managers would block it. Then what would happen is people would leave and go elsewhere.”

The workshops, she explained, were focused on “who we are as individuals, what’s important to us, how we relate to each other and really understanding our beliefs, our core values, our motivators, and looking at that within the context of the values of the bank, and where the alignment was and where it wasn’t”.

But she said that through the workshops the bank did lose people. “People suddenly woke up and thought, I don’t want to be a banker,” said Ms Stojanovic, but that freed up space for “new blood”.

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“I’m a believer in cost efficiency. Generally, the way that is done is just through blunt instruments such as cutting heads. But how can you actually prepare yourself for growth if you are hacking away at the business in that way? So we continued to focus on costs but we shifted the approach from cutting heads to re-engineering the processes and systems”, she said.

Frea O’Brien, chief executive of Customer First UK, said: “I wanted delegates to listen to that story and think, this is what it takes to be extraordinary, that it’s a combination of both looking at your finances and your restructuring and cost cutting where applied, but also to invest in your people and strengthen those relationships, to ultimately... re-establish trust with the customer.”

Other speakers at the conference yesterday included Jason Horn, head of guest services at Butlins, and John Hague and Tanya Cooper, from Waitrose.