Top HR Challenges in Financial Services Sector
The HR Challenges in Financial Services Sector have been a challenging task for organizations.
The employees working in the sector are highly skilled and talented individuals who require high-end facilities to work with best practices and technology.
HR plays an important role in this sector by managing employee relations, and employee engagement along with organizing various events, workshops and training sessions to keep their employees updated on the latest trends.
Managing multi-location employees
The financial services sector has multi-location, multi-branch operations and managing employees spread across multiple locations is a challenge faced by many companies.
This is especially true in the financial services sector, as employees are often assigned to work at remote offices and branches.
Keeping track of employee attendance, leaves and productivity becomes a significant problem in this scenario, as it can be difficult or impossible for managers to monitor the performance of their remote staff.
To address this issue, you should use an HRMS solution that enables you to manage your entire employee database centrally and gives you access to real-time information about their activities.
This will enable you to manage multiple locations from one central point so that all your facilities operate smoothly without requiring additional effort or resources – leaving more time for planning ahead instead!
Managing field executive
A field executive is an individual who is responsible for the day-to-day operations of a financial service organization.
They are the largest pool of talent in the financial services sector and account for nearly 50% of the industry’s total workforce.
Field executives are hired on a contract basis or directly on payroll to perform tasks ranging from sales of financial products, to document collection, and issuing loans for banks.
When it comes to HR management in banking and other sectors, this presents some unique challenges:
- Keeping track of their work and performance.
- Tracking and validating their local conveyance expenses (travelling expenses).
- Managing their daily attendance and leave.
- Tracking their work and productivity.
Performance and productivity management
Performance and productivity management is one of the most challenging HR issues in the financial services sector.
The job of tracking the performance of field executives is complicated by the fact that they are spread across locations, often working on multiple tasks at once.
It can be difficult to keep track of their daily task and activity reports as it may be time-consuming to write down everything done every day without an effective tool.
Furthermore, many companies have a large number of sales representatives who use paper forms for recording their performance metrics.
This makes it difficult for management to track each sales representative’s progress towards achieving targets set by the company.
On top of it, they end up spending a lot of their productive time filling up daily sales reports or local conveyance expense reports.
Communication and engagement with remote and field employees
As field employees are spread across and it is difficult to communicate with field staff on the go as most of the time they are on the field.
Updating them about the new changes or new products or HR policy becomes a big challenge as they operate from remote locations and they generally do not come to the office regularly.
Keeping them updated about the latest changes and announcement becomes a big challenge especially if you are not having the tools.
The implementation of the right tool to be in touch with field executives will help the HR team to have a better communication channel with the employee so that they can understand the requirement and problems of employees in a better way.
Setting up an HR communication channel for field executives will help them to know their requirements and problems while working on-site.
Employee retention
Employee retention is one of the biggest HR challenges in the financial services sector.
The employee attrition rate at the field level is very high due to target-based and pressure-driven work culture, continuous training requirements to train on new products and technology, continuous appraisal process, demand for higher compensation etc.
Companies face difficulty in retaining qualified employees with high potential or specializations.
This also includes hiring motivated candidates who are energetic, flexible and willing to learn new skills for growth opportunities within the organization as well as outside organizations.
Most of them prefer moving out when they have higher chances of being promoted elsewhere due to better compensation packages offered by other firms operating across various sectors including the banking & financial services industry.
Conclusion
The financial services sector is a highly mobile industry, with many employees working in multiple locations.
This can cause problems for managers who need to ensure that their team members are on the same page when it comes to company strategy and goals.
It also makes employee engagement more difficult as they may feel disconnected from their fellow workers, leading them to disengage from work projects or activities that don’t directly involve them personally.
Management challenges include:
- Ensuring communications are consistent across all locations (and within your organization)
- Minimizing time spent on back-office tasks so you have enough time for face-to-face interactions with your remote team members