How Did West Community Craft A Better Approach To Talent Management?

The cooperative’s focus on staff excellence stems from a 10-year journey of improving processes and performance.

For more than a decade, West Community Credit Union ($463.7M, O’Fallon, MO) has been focusing on improving processes and performance. For a mid-sized credit union serving a mid-sized city in the Midwest, innovation in these areas helps it stand out from the crowd.

That’s why the Show-Me state cooperative participates in the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program.

Jason Peach, CEO, West Community Credit Union

“We use the Baldrige Criteria as a way to focus on continuously improving our products and services for members and strive for best-in-class performance,” says Jason Peach, CEO of West Community. “It’s not a side thing or a pet project, it’s how we run a great organization.”

Guiding operations, improving performance, and producing sustainable results requires a thorough understanding of West Community’s core values, strengths, and weaknesses. To achieve that, leaders there perform regular, holistic evaluations of every area of the organization.

This kind of ongoing improvement can’t be achieved in a single year, Peach says, so West Community focuses on processes and areas that have the largest impact. For example, using Baldrige criteria, the credit union has changed its approach to talent support. Ten years ago, the credit union didn’t have a strong system in place for career and succession planning. Today, employees can engage in credit union-provided industry learning to build out skill sets or meet with the CEO, HR team, and director of organizational development to discuss career pathing.

CU QUICK FACTS

WEST COMMUNITY CREDIT UNION
DATA AS OF 03.31.23

HQ: O’Fallon, MO
ASSETS: $463.7
MEMBERS: 32,602
BRANCHES: 10
EMPLOYEES: 129
NET WORTH: 7.6%
ROA: 0.01%

“We also encourage team members to become involved with the league on advocacy and use other resources to expose them to the industry,” Peach says.

On a larger scale, West Community is continually reconsidering its workforce capability, capacity needs, and how it prepares for members’ changing needs — regular reassessment that pushes the credit union to develop, implement, and refine processes.

“Baldrige asks you to answer questions, and in doing that, you learn a lot about how well you’ve developed processes as an organization,” Peach says. “You also identify gaps in certain areas. There’s always something to work on.”

Of course, the credit union’s process improvements don’t end after it rolls out a new program — that’s when it starts to measure effectiveness in different ways.

When it comes to its workforce and career development, for example, West Community now seeks voice-of-the-employee feedback and tracks internal promotions, retention rates, vacancy length, productivity measures, and more to hold the cooperative accountable.

Taking a systematic approach and committing to the Baldrige framework has helped West Community clearly measure how mature it is in its processes; determine whether processes are aligned with its mission, values, and strategic plan; and identify what feedback or other data will help it pinpoint how to improve.

The Malcom Baldrige National Quality Award is the highest recognition for performance excellence a U.S. organization can receive. Organizations are measured using the Baldrige Excellence Framework, which includes six process categories and focuses on five key results areas: product and process outcomes, customer outcomes, workforce outcomes, leadership and governance outcomes, and financial and market outcomes.

“Improvement doesn’t happen randomly,” Peach says. “Asking questions leads to ensuring you have all the key processes in place, which leads you to improve performance and engagement.”

The Baldrige program doesn’t tell organizations what to do, but it does push them to ask the right questions and develop answers that will lead to better outcomes. As far as what to do or how to do it, Peach says Baldrige provides the framework for understanding, but as it drills down into its operations, an organization might opt to use other process improvement methods or tools.

“The Baldrige framework allows us take a holistic view and ensures we don’t have any blind spots,” the CEO says. “It’s a great ecosystem that benefits employees and members.”

June 19, 2023
CreditUnions.com
Scroll to Top