2 minutes
Five steps to take
Your credit union’s staff is its most important resource. They are the ones making day-to-day decisions, interacting with members, and acting as the face of the organization. How efficiently and productively they work impacts the success of the credit union.
Controlling staffing levels is crucial to this success. If you are employing too few employees, staff can feel overworked, become burnt out and have the quality of their work decline. This can lead to a reduced member base and declining assets, as well as increased employee turnover. Higher turnover rates eat into time and money resources for recruitment, interviews and training. Additionally, if you employ too many employees, efficiency, job satisfaction and productivity drop due to excessive downtimes; and expenses will be higher than necessary.
Every organization takes part in this balancing act. By benchmarking against credit union-specific data you will be able to gauge those areas in which you may be excelling or lagging behind.
So how does your credit union begin to properly benchmark their staffing levels? In general, the steps below represent the best approach:
Step 1: Gather all your staffing information for the current year.
Step 2: Locate additional information on the staffing practices in your industry.
Step 3: Calculate the various performance measures for your credit union that are used in the benchmarking study or information you are using.
Step 4: Determine which data comparisons are most comparable to your credit union.
Step 5: Use the information in the report to analyze your credit union’s strengths and weaknesses.
Remember, even a relatively simple analysis of your credit union’s own figures can yield important insights into your business. You don’t have to be a statistical expert to benefit from the information.
Michael Becher is Senior Project Director for Industry Insights, Inc.
Staffing represents one of the largest operational expenses for most credit unions, so proper management of this resource is essential to running an efficient organization. With your participation in our secure online survey now, CUES can help. The data collected will feed our newest online tool, CUES Interactive Staffing Guide, slated for release in March.
