Productivity
Category: Strategy Implementation
General understanding
The banking activity, especially at branch level, can be considered as an industrial process in the same way as for any type of economic activity. Because of that, the concept of productivity, in other terms the level of production by person, is an important one. The bank may establish targets and performance standards for its branches or for specific products.
Contacts, calls by salespeople
The standard here relates to the first commercial act vis-à-vis the customer. It is within the responsibilities of the salespeople to have a certain number of meetings with their clients, or to give them a call to propose them products or services. It could be very useful in a commercial strategy to determine a standard of weekly or monthly number of contacts between each salesperson and his (her) customers. Records will be kept and regular review of the actual figures will be done.
Sales by salespeople
Contacts with the customers should normally result, with a certain probability, in the clients subscribing to a product or service. Precise targets are also part of the commercial strategy, and performance standards have to be monitored.
Problems, that is a gap between the expectations and the actual results are the first indicator that the global strategy will suffer, the sales being at the origin of the global activity and profitability of the bank.
Sales by total staff
Instead of just following the results of the commercial staff, the purpose here is to use in the calculation the total number of staff. This is a way of analysing the role of the total number of employees, including the administrative and support staff. Putting objectives and standards on that ratio could lead managers to try to increase the productivity either by asking the salespeople to do more business or by working on a reduction of the number of non-commercial staff.
Sales by branch
This is a performance standard that is of a first importance for the branch manager, strongly implied in its branch objectives and results. It is moreover easy and efficient to have this manager on the front line to monitor the indicator, by a close follow-up of his (her) sales force action (contacts with clients, sales).
Details by sector, product, customer and employee
As for the other performance indicators, an efficient strategy implementation means detailed objectives and monitoring by economic and geographical sector or by customer category.
Finish the that by extra comments on productivity increases. Especially mention the development of IT to automate an increasing number of transactions in the banking industry, which is now the heaviest IT consumer of all industrial sectors.