Latest / Beyond the Paycheck / The Financial Wellness Pilot That Cut Turnover From 50% to 14%
Transcript
- Beyond the Paycheck - Catherine Johnson === Kelsey Willock Jones: [00:00:00] Welcome, Catherine Johnson, EVP and Chief People Officer at Travis Credit Union. Thank you so much for joining us this Friday afternoon, especially so late in the day To kick us off, I'd love for you to share a little bit about your role, your background, and where you're calling in from. Catherine Johnson: Thank you for having me and the opportunity to share my background and some of the things we're doing at Travis Credit Union. As you mentioned, I currently serve as the Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer for Travis. Travis is actually getting ready to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary in September. Kelsey Willock Jones: Founded in Catherine Johnson: on the principle of people helping people. And we've been able to maintain that mission and build lifelong relationships with members to help them achieve our financial goals. We are the twelfth largest credit union in California. We have approximately two hundred and seventy thousand plus members, and we're just over five billion dollars in assets. As far as myself, [00:01:00] I originally hail from Maine, but I'm talking to you today from Vacaville, California. Kelsey Willock Jones: Wonderful. Congratulations again. That's such a incredible milestone. Very, very excited to learn more about all the amazing work that you're doing at the company. Tell me a little bit about the breakdown of the company. How many folks work at the company? What does a little bit of the population look like? Catherine Johnson: Sure. We have about 645 FTE, total headcount around 670 or so. I'm pleased that we're able to offer part-time jobs for folks so that they can balance other commitments they might have outside of the workplace. I'm also very happy to share that in terms of our demographics, we're about 62% female. That continues to grow. We also have some very highly tenured folks 40-plus years in tenure and also, of course, very new hires as well as we continue to grow. And at least in terms of the, higher tenured folks I joke because it's almost illegal [00:02:00] in California to stay that long at a job. But they've seen us through growth and expansion and they also have great institutional history that definitely helps our new hires when they join us. Kelsey Willock Jones: And clearly means something at the company is keeping them there. So wonderful to hear that kind of culture coming through. So before we dig deeper into the work that you do at Travis, I wanna back up a little bit. So can you tell me a little bit about your first job, if you can recall, and what you ~fr- ~spent your first paycheck on? Catherine Johnson: My first job was actually delivering newspapers after school. When we had the paper delivered to us, I was seven or eight years old. I thought, "Oh my goodness, that is cool." And it was only cool because it meant I didn't have to do my homework right after school. But it started teaching me a lot about work responsibility, customer service very early. Initially I saved what I earned. I didn't have an eye on something, but then [00:03:00] the year-end holidays rolled around, and I got some especially generous tips, which I didn't know were coming. And I decided to splurge on a bicycle at the time because, one, that was gonna get me to do my route faster, but two, now I had transportation as an eight-year-old. That first job, if I think back, it definitely started to shape my view on how I view compensation. A paycheck obviously for an eight-year-old wasn't about paying bills but it was about independence, the ability to make choices, and I reflect back on that bicycle purchase, and it was also the ability to create something better for myself, and at times at eight years old, that something better was a bicycle. And again, reflecting on that, the principle is not all that different for adults in that compensation rewards give people agency over their lives. Kelsey Willock Jones: It's also not every day that an eight-year-old has such foresight that investing in [00:04:00] themselves can lead to generating more money for yourself. So, I imagine that has continued to hold true in your career and the rest of your life. So can you tell me a little bit-- I loved how you had said, Travis has built itself off of a a workforce that is people supporting people. We're seeing a trend right now where companies are really focused on supporting the whole person at work. So can you tell me a little bit about what you're particularly excited about or doing that really shows up in supporting the whole person, whether it's mental, physical, financial, you name it? Catherine Johnson: I really like that question. For us, supporting the whole employee is about recognizing people do not leave the rest of their lives at the door when they come to work. We think about support across several dimensions: physical, mental health, financial security, of course career growth, belonging, and recognition. That, of course, includes competitive [00:05:00] pay and benefits, but supporting the whole employee doesn't mean that we can or should solve every personal challenge. But for us, it's the opportunity to reduce preventable friction, I would call it, in providing a better foundation so employees can make informed decisions for themselves and their families. One thing in particular that we're doing is what we call our knowledge base, and it's an educational platform aimed at really educating our employees' financial literacy while also supporting the financial well-being of our members. So part of that includes a financial wellness checkup. So these questions ultimately result in a curated set of steps or education. They also take a money personality quiz. So do you stash all your acorns at one time because you're saving for a rainy day, or do you tend to get your paycheck and then wanna spend in terms of [00:06:00] recognition? We offer with that an extensive library, whether it's videos, interactive quizzes, there's articles and tools. Of course, with the advent of AI, we're able to more personalize that based on those financial wellness checkups and their interests. The tool also offers gamification, if there's a better way of saying it, I'm not sure, to make things more interactive and rewarding. Versus just sitting, watching a presentation, they in fact are doing more hands-on involvement in planning for their total well-being. We also keep the content updated so that they have new information and content that may be relevant. For example, if there's a new regulation around a certain payroll tax, we want them to know as part of their financial plan how they may plan for that. So looking in totality, I would say competitive pay, competitive benefits and education are areas [00:07:00] that we shine in when we think about looking at the total employee. Kelsey Willock Jones: Sounds like such an incredible tool. I'm wondering if Travis makes that available to their clients as well, Catherine Johnson: We do. We do. We spent a significant amount of time, about six months, rolling it out to employees first for the pilot. And it really was intended, we want to get their feedback from it. How is it working for them? How are they putting the plans in place, and are they seeing those plans start to work? So the twofold outcome of that was not only whole employee focus, but it was also the ability for our employees who may be member-facing, interacting with folks daily, that they have confidence in the tool as a result of how it's worked for them Kelsey Willock Jones: Where do you think companies are falling short in supporting the whole person right now? Catherine Johnson: Oh, that's another great question. To me, it's around benefit offerings. Again, I think we're incredibly competitive, but [00:08:00] I am biased. One of the things that I think employers may miss is offering a catalog of benefits every year in anticipation that ~catalog is go--~ the benefits, ~I should say,~ are going to mean the same thing and have the same value to every employee. For me, it's the opportunity to offer more personalized benefits for employees that may be at different life stages of their life. One example that comes to mind for me is around dependent care, and early on, the dependent care was really focused on children. Now we have this generation which is taking care of perhaps both children and parents, and so just having dependent care focused on children as an offering is not necessarily meeting the needs of a more highly tenured worker that is caring for an adult and providing caregiving services there. So as Travis goes forward to continue to offer more [00:09:00] wholeness in terms of caring for that employee, we're also going towards more personalized options that can be chosen based on the employee's situation or their stage of life. Kelsey Willock Jones: Especially in the advent of, as consumers, everything is personalized to us, whether it's logging Catherine Johnson: correct Kelsey Willock Jones: into Instagram or the ads we get. It's ~no,~ no wonder that, companies do the thing. But many ~m- ~like you said, falling short because it can be a challenge. The norm is, send out the big flyer at open enrollment and call it a day. But as consumers evolve, so does the workforce. So I love that, um, topic you brought up. So can I go back to the financial wellbeing tool that you had mentioned? Financial wellbeing tools and others similarly in supporting the whole person don't always have this kind of obvious ROI. How do you think about making the internal case for investment in tools like these when the spreadsheet might not obviously support them? Catherine Johnson: Great question. [00:10:00] One of the challenges that we had initially when I joined was turnover. This was late 2022, frontline positions, commonly our teller positions, our contact center positions. At least it's not just limited to the financial industry, but those tend to be higher turnover positions as well. Part of the experiment with piloting it with employees was also were we going to get longer retention from those frontline employees because they felt more cared for? Ultimately, you do the math, there's a cost to having to backfill, retrain, get someone on board with the culture, and we wanted to keep them past that first year. We did that. We initially started at fifty percent of first-year turnover in those positions. We're down to fourteen percent now, which I'm very proud to share. Absolutely [00:11:00] took me a while in terms of business case, to your point with the spreadsheets. What are we trading? We're gonna invest in this app. What are we gonna get back for it? Employees feel better? Sure. Are employees going to be retained? Hypothesis number one. Are we going to retain and then add more members? Hypothesis number two. And those both have turned out to be true. And while it's not actually a dollar, a check being mailed to us from these, but they're great cost avoidance activities. Kelsey Willock Jones: And I love how you position it in a way of this isn't a guarantee. This is an experiment that we believe these outcomes could be true, and if they are, they could be immense value to them. But we've gotta give ourselves the opportunity too, to run that test and perhaps there's other things that we could learn from it. But it doesn't need to just be ~this,~ this one angle. Catherine Johnson: Yes, and I would add to it, part of my pitch was we do a very similar exercise when we wanna test a new [00:12:00] product. Is it a new certificate of deposit at a certain rate for a certain time? And it might get tested in a certain market, and then it's a go, no go for the remainder of the markets. Once I put that overlay on it, the leadership team was like, "Okay, we do it in other aspects of our business. We'll do it here." Kelsey Willock Jones: I love that. Figure out what's working in different other angles and other business units and apply that playbook. Can you tell me about an experiment in your benefits strategy that you ran that didn't go the way you expected and what you learned from it? Catherine Johnson: Ooh, that's a great one. Early on, many companies, have tuition reimbursement opportunities for education certification licenses that are job-related. The amount at the time was about $250 a year, and I thought, "Wow, that's well below what the IRS max is for non-taxable reimbursement." So I upped it, $5,250 per year. Initially, we had rounds of applause. I feel very [00:13:00] supported. I can continue my learning and education. Then things got really busy. We had great projects going on. We were expanding. Last year, and then moving into this year, I'm looking at what's the trend? Zero dollars for 2025 in reimbursement, and zero dollars so far year to date. So when we look at root cause, it wasn't that employees didn't feel the benefit was something that was not useful to them, it was because we weren't giving them the bandwidth to allow to use it. As a result of that, we're now in the process of going through some workforce planning activities where we can give employees bandwidth during the workday to pursue learning and development, whether it is part of that tuition reimbursement or it's more internally created courses. So benefit was great. Without a look on bandwidth, was a bit of a flop. Kelsey Willock Jones: I love that. I'm certainly seeing that in LinkedIn posts of [00:14:00] companies saying, "We're gonna spend an entire day learning about AI, 'cause we want you to learn about it, but if we don't give you the time to do it, then no one will be able to." And it's such an interesting concept in applying it to benefits. ~I,~ I hear constantly, "Our benefits go unused. People aren't reading the emails that we send and spend so much time." It's like, but if we took it from the angle of do we give them the capacity to actually engage? I love that. How do you stay current on all the new innovation and constant changes that are happening in the industry? Are there particular conferences, peer networks, startup ecosystems that you've been particularly excited about? Catherine Johnson: First, I would say I have loved reading since I was quite little. I would say my own children are very different. So utilizing the internet, for example, having curated notifications that might pop up works for me, at least from getting an initial understanding of what changes may be coming [00:15:00] along or changes that have already happened that perhaps I've missed. From a network point of view, one of the things that my actual vice president of Total Rewards has done was to curate a network amongst local credit unions in Northern California. Their focus being on Total Rewards also includes what are you doing around benefits? At the same time, we're also twice a year asking our employees: How are the current offerings working? Are you seeing maybe through a spouse, a friend, a partner, other benefits that they have that we should consider that would be of value to you? Some of those might not be talked about in the news. Recently, we had a few folks, we have a, again, I'm biased, generous policy in terms of bereavement leave, and the question came up: What about pet bereavement leave? That's a great example of something that's not going to necessarily be in the news, but could be shared [00:16:00] either through employee direct feedback or talked about when you look at that local Northern California credit union Total Rewards network that's been set up. So we're always looking for different ways to find different things that are unique, and are they valuable to our employees? Kelsey Willock Jones: And my last question for you, what is a shift in compensation and benefits that you see coming that most HR leaders are not ready for? Catherine Johnson: I'm gonna go a little bit back to one of the topics that I mentioned. ~One of the-- I,~ I feel that many employers, rightfully invest heavily in very strong programs. However, those programs can have some disconnect or limited impact when employees encounter these programs, these benefits, as a collection of documents that are disconnected, websites, phone numbers, eligibility rules. And looking only at utilization of current programs doesn't tell the entire story around [00:17:00] benefits value. Again, going back towards the voice of the employee, where they are in their stage of life or career, and offering not just that yearly book, but here's an option that you can curate for yourself. You may not want the pet insurance because you're allergic to cats, for example, but the dollars that you may have spent on that benefit, perhaps you put over towards elder care options. Not just dependent care, but elder care options. That's a big transition to make. I think it has to be carefully thought out, planned in advance, but to me, employers that aren't thinking about that right now, it will be a very unexpected shift when an employee comes and says, "Oh my goodness, my husband works at XYZ. They have shifted their benefits. ~Now it's-- ~we can curate what we need at a cost that we would've paid on just a standard benefit plan here." Do they disenroll from our [00:18:00] benefits? Our utilization rates then go down. Our premium rates then go up. So for me, having companies start to think about this now, using the voice of the employee and getting the feedback around benefits that they see others may have that might be more valuable to them, rather than disenrolling in the programs that are just offered flat. And as I mentioned, your costs ultimately go up. Kelsey Willock Jones: Such a good point, and it goes back to being a part of communities where that information can be shared that we might not see on the LinkedIn posts or the conferences that we attend. So Catherine, thank you so much. This has been a joy speaking with you. I've learned so much from you. I could certainly keep talking to you for at least another hour. But I'll be mindful of time on this Friday afternoon. Where can our listeners connect with you beyond this conversation? Catherine Johnson: They can find me, of course, on LinkedIn. If you want to go to Travis Credit Union and type in Catherine Johnson, happy to connect with [00:19:00] you there. Or also you can reach out through the Travis Credit Union Facebook page as well. Kelsey Willock Jones: Wonderful. Well, have a great rest of your day and thank you again for joining us Catherine Johnson: Appreciate it. My pleasure.