Building the Rails for Employee Success and Longevity

Narrator: When your business is looking to hire, what skills and experience do candidates absolutely need? Do they have to have a college degree? Do they need to have five years of experience? Or… can they be trained in house? And once hired, do you offer upskilling that leads to a promotion? At Bank of America, they’re revolutionizing the talent game through their Academy. It’s changed how they source candidates and upskill employees. So not only are employees feeling more prepared to start in a new role, but the path to promotion is clear. It’s dramatically improved their retention rates and employee satisfaction. So today, we’re talking with John Jordan about how Bank of America is building the rails for employee success and longevity.

John Jordan: We’ve just continued to invest more and more into our people because we see the return on that investment. And the long term impact that it makes on the flexibility of our company and on the careers that our people have.

Narrator: John Jordan is Head of The Academy at Bank of America. And he himself has had a long career there, of nearly 20 years. Under his leadership, The Academy has received over 100 awards including becoming the first JD Power Certified Career Development organization. In his current role, John is responsible for serving Bank of America’s over 200,000 employees. He oversees employee onboarding, global learning and skill development for the company. And today, he’s sharing with us how journey mapping the employee experience sets candidates up for success, how to identify candidates who may have otherwise fallen through the cracks, and how they create a lifelong learning experience. 

On Cruising Altitude, we talk about employee experience lessons from leaders at companies with over 30k employees. A lot like reaching Cruising Altitude at 30k feet, things look a little different when you’re managing 30,000 people. On this podcast, we bring you insights from the leaders who inhabit that rarefied air. Today’s episode features an interview with John Jordan. But first, let’s take a break to hear a word from our sponsor.

John Jordan: I lead what’s called The Academy at Bank of America, and there’s really several elements of Bank of America’s Academy. We’re responsible for global learning across the company. And that includes over 200,000 employees. And the responsibilities that we hold are really focused on five key areas. One is onboarding. So we take it very seriously at the company that we onboard people very well. So we spend a lot of time within our organization, whether you’d be coming from a campus or from, uh, another job within the company or from somewhere else, we wanna make sure that people are onboarded well. The second thing is upskilling. So we spend a lot of time helping people get good at their jobs, but also get ready with the skills that they’ll need to be successful for a long-term career here at the company. And so we’ve done a lot of research in terms of what are the skills that are most important to help people to really be successful in their roles. Thirdly, we’re responsible for learning technology. So we spend, uh, quite a bit of money and energy around innovating and technology to help people get more practice reps and have more immersive learning experiences. Uh, fourth, we focus on community outreach and education. We work with nonprofits and community colleges and other places to help educate the communities in which we serve and in which our company exists. Uh, and then finally, really we’re responsible for culture of integrity within the company as a, as a large bank, uh, a large financial institution, integrity is a cornerstone to what we do so that we really try to tie a thread through everything that we do that brings everyone back to a culture of integrity.

Narrator: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s first take a look at employee onboarding from the beginning in the Flight Plan.

John Jordan: It starts from day one. When you come to the bank, it’s so important that we set you on a good trajectory. So when you first join, we spend a lot of time talking about things like company and culture and mission. Uh, we connect them to employee groups and make sure that they’re very clear, uh, on day one, what the benefits they have. We wanna communicate three key things. We want to communicate that they’re cared for here at the company. We want to communicate that they can be successful here at the company. And we wanna instill a sense of pride that they’re working in a place that’s important and that matters, and that their role at the company will matter. Once they’re onboarded to the company and feel, uh, welcomed and feel like they’re, uh, able to be successful here, we spend a lot of time on very practical job training. Uh, we have within The Academy subject matter experts who really understand the jobs that they’re training for to help people spend, it could be as few as two to eight or six months in some cases, getting ready to be in the job that they’re gonna be serving. And we do a lot of practicing and certification, and coaching and connecting and making sure that people feel like when they’re talking to one of our clients, that they can be successful in that interaction from day one. So we blend some facilitated learning with web-based learning with more immersive learning so that people can actually practice skills using some of the new technologies that we’ve invested in. Um, but at the end of the day, we measure throughout the process, how’s the experience going. At the end of the process we ask them, are you ready for your job? And then with every cohort of employees that come through, we try to make improvements so that we’re always getting better with the programs that we’re offering. It takes a lot of work as if you’ve been a teacher, you know, it takes a lot of prep work. So we spend a lot of time looking at every role and function and where all the big entry points into the company to make sure that we’ve done a really thorough assessment of not only the skills needed for the job, but where does that job lead? And in some cases we may be interviewing someone for a job, but we’re also thinking about, Hey, can they be successful culturally here? Or they have the, uh, the aptitude to continue to grow within the company. Cuz we do want people who are career minded who want to be here. Tenure matters at our company. If you stay here for a long time, you’re able to do more things, provide better service for clients, uh, and a lot of other big benefits for us just creating that real, that great culture of the company. Uh, we try to customize it by role and by the skills that they need, we have learning plans for every role. Um, and then for every individual, we try to vary things up by offering a lot of different modalities. So we do offer the web-based. Some people learn by reading a manual, which is not me. I mean, I learn from practice. Uh, and so we also try to blend in, you know, not just reading and experiencing web-based learning. Uh, we try to have a lot of instruction and a lot of coaching and follow up. We have hundreds of academy managers on our team and those are those subject matter experts. So for instance, if you’re training for a job in one of our financial center, uh, locations, there’s an academy manager for that area that used to be a financial center manager, and they spend a lot of time just with the little things, making sure that you’re understanding the details of the job and where are the resources that you need and, and making sure that those details are taken care of so that when you jump into the job that you’re comfortable and can start running from the early days versus really struggling and thinking about doing something.

Narrator: Of course, leading The Academy for more than 200,000 employees comes with its own unique set of challenges.

John Jordan: There are a lot of challenges and I think one of the biggest challenges is just the diversity of the roles and functions that we have as a company. With 200,000 jobs, we have people who have to be experts in technology and experts in client services. We have to have great managers and people who understand where the future of digital is. So to me, that is the core challenge. We try to make as much as we can common across the company. That’s that onboarding experience. We want everyone to feel a part of the culture, no matter what the actual function that they’re doing, but then we have to get really detailed. We need the best technologists. So we have to have the best technology education. We need really, really great people at client services. So we’ve gotta spend a lot of time, you know, researching and understanding what are the things that are gonna help people practice the skills around client services. How do we create empathy in our workforce? I mean, it is difficult to train at a big scale. And particularly when you’re training on thousands of different subjects, all at the same time, every single day. it’s really quite a large operation. Uh, we’ve got lots and lots of people decked against it. And, um, and I think that is where the core of the challenge is.

Narrator: And that’s not to mention that Bank of America is basically constantly hiring. And with constant hiring comes constant onboarding. 

John Jordan: One of the things that we did with that onboarding space, so when we started to focus on onboarding, we were hiring 350 days of the year. You know, someone could start on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And so the, the ability to manage all of those different start dates was quite challenging. So, what we’ve done is by role, we’ve tried to create cohorts where everyone who’s starting in that particular role and that particular geography starts on a Monday and they’re all together. And so that cohort model looks like when, you know, it can flex, it can be a very small co cohort. It can be up to 30 people in a cohort if it’s a large hiring, uh, in maybe a call center or something like that. And so when they come, they go through an onboarding experience that is very standard. We’re, we’re making it more and more standard across the enterprise. So, if you’re in Charlotte, North Carolina, you would join a cohort of people in Charlotte. You’d have a common day one experience where you’re welcome to the company. Then you’d break off, uh, during that early time into your job specific cohort. And then you spend a lot of time with an academy manager on my team and they spend time coaching and certifying and making sure that you’re clear on your learning path. And so part of your day may be spent doing two hours of web-based training. And then an hour of role play with one of your peers, and then you may go observe someone who’s doing the job and just watch and see, shadow them. Uh, you may then get on your computer and practice opening accounts. We have a simulator, uh, we call it our academy client engagement simulator, and that helps people practice the systems that they use, uh, those systems when you’re dealing with any retail individual. And I’m sure you’ve had this situation, when you sit down with someone, they say, oh, I’m sorry, I don’t, I’m new, I don’t know how to use the system. We never want our employees to feel that way. We wanna make sure that they’re very comfortable with the system. So they may be spending some time just practicing, opening up a new deposit account or, you know, helping service someone’s account when they come in. Um, at the end of their, call it eight week session, they should feel very comfortable that they’ve observed a lot of the behaviors that are important for them to be good at. They’ve practiced the technology that they need to use. They’ve been certified, they’ve done role plays so that when they have those early client Interactions, that they’re ready to do it. And all of that time is protected for them. So they’re not forced into situations that they’re not comfortable with. They’re protected in that they’ve got training, they’re dedicated to training, uh, and they’re in the financial center. They’re part of the team, but they’re spending time making sure that they’re ready to go by the time they actually talk to a client.

Narrator: The way training at The Academy is structured is by lines of business.

John Jordan: Really at the start of the process is the line of business. They determine what do they need if you lead one of our lines of business, um, let’s take our preferred line of business. That’s the individual who leads all of the financial center channel. So he’ll look across his network of needs and say, these are the things I need to make sure that we’re able to accomplish. Then within my organization, I have someone who’s dedicated to that preferred line of business. And this individual takes those needs, digests them, and really maps them to learning plans, to make sure that we’ve got a really job-by-job robust approach that, again, it creates consistency across that entire landscape. It creates career paths. It takes a, um, a modular approach so that if someone starts in one job and then move to another, that those building blocks remain constant or are common so that they’re able to have less, um, friction in a career path. They’re able to move from one spot to the next. And then the actual delivery of the training is typically done by a combination of academy managers on my team. So those are those subject matter experts, professional facilitators, who really cover subjects that cut across the board. So they may be a facilitator that covers technology and they facilitate training for a lot of different jobs. They’re not specific to a particular function. Um, and then we have a lot of people who focus on designing new web content or training content. It could be anything from digital content to virtual reality. And those people put those programs together in a hopefully a world class way. And then we get feedback on it and make adjustments throughout the program.

Narrator: So we’ve had an overview of The Academy. Let’s turn our sights to what makes Bank of America such an exceptional place to learn and grow in First Class.

John Jordan: I think the three biggest best practices that I would highlight is one, start with feedback from the employees. You have to really not start from a top down, but from really frontline individual, what do you need in order to be successful? So we survey someone before they start the job, make sure they understand the expectations during the training. And then a month after they’ve gotten through the training to say, are you ready for the job? And if not, what could we have done better? So that is an important best practice because it creates a, a real sense of ownership of training and accountability for our team. It says, Hey, if they’re not ready, we’re not doing what we need to be doing. So we spend a lot of time just on process improvement, listening to feedback, getting better, investing in change. The second big area I would say is the best practice is thinking about every process that you have as a company with real granularity, spend time journey mapping experiences that you want to have. That means onboarding through your training experience. If you’re not spending the time journey mapping everything from the email that they get when they get there day one, or the manager call, uh, to follow up or even that coaching session, then it’s probably not happening the way that you expect it to happen. We bring a real design mentality to every program that we have, and it’s not just the learning content. It’s the entire experience to make sure that we’re reinforcing things. Our culture, our priorities, our values, the values of an employee and how valued they are by the company, uh, to make sure that they wanna stay here and they want to grow here. And then the third big takeaway for us is creating real clarity in terms of not only the programs, but the path. So we spend a lot of time building career path tools that help people understand not only the role that they’re in, but how do they navigate this big company to land in another spot one day? I mentioned at the beginning, we have so many different roles. Uh, I’ve experienced this personally within my career where you may work in one area and have an interest say, I want to go work in marketing for instance, but I have no idea how to get there. Well, we’ve created a career path tool to help people understand that and they can very clearly see the building blocks and skills that they need to develop in order to navigate from where they are, to where they wanna be.

Narrator: Bank of America was recognized as one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” by Fortunemagazine and the global research and consulting firm, Great Place to Work®. The Academy plays a major part in that. Because it shows that Bank of America really invests in the growth of their employees.

John Jordan: I think that The Academy is an important piece of our entire philosophy around making this a great place to work. And part of our mission as an academy is making sure people know what a great place it is. Uh, onboarding is really critical for companies to be thinking about. My kids recently changed schools and I’ll tell you that their onboarding has been a little bumpy. And I think that every organization, whether you’re a school or college, uh, a nonprofit, you need to be thinking about how do you onboard people into your organization? And so at a big company, 200,000 plus employees, we hire tens of thousands of people. We’ve spent a lot of time making sure that we’re talking about that it’s a great place to work. And we’re introducing people to all the benefits that we have. In the early days before we had an academy really dedicated to this function, a lot of people didn’t even know the investments that were being made into them as individuals. They didn’t know the benefits that they had. They may not understand the employee network system that we have. And so a lot of the work that we do is to introduce them to that. The other things that we do I think have been important is we really show that we prioritize people’s skills and that we are invested in a lifelong learning experience. We really want people to be here to feel like, you know, it’s not just about where I got my degree or where I graduated from high school. I mean, that can be decades ago for some. We want them to feel like they’re currently being invested in and learning new skills because everyone wants to improve themselves. Everyone wants to get better at their job. Be better at serving clients, or accomplish a career aspiration. So as an academy, we try to make sure that we’re building great programs, world class programs, not just, you know things to check a box, but things that really are tangible and that matter, and that are making an impact. And I think that brings people a sense of feeling invested in and supported and so that they don’t feel like they’re just being left to their own devices to be successful. They feel like the company is actually making it possible and investing real, tangible assets to make their jobs better and to make their careers more successful.

Narrator: And at Bank of America, they celebrate the successes of their employees.

John Jordan: We do a lot of recognition at the company in general. We have a global recognition program that gives us the ability to recognize anyone for a job well done. And so we incorporate a lot of those things into our academy programs as well. Uh, we have a culture just within my team of a lot of recognition. We wanna make sure that we’re giving people a lot of, uh, recognition for spending their careers investing in other people. And so we do a lot of things just to make sure that they feel, I mean, we talk about how teachers, we want them to be valued. Well, I want my academy teachers to really feel the value of the impact that they’re having. So we do a lot of work to just show them, uh, how valuable it is. We highlight a lot of stories of people who’ve gone through successful career aspirations or achieved things they never thought were possible. Um, those kinds of things are really points of pride for our team. And it also inspires others to try to do things that maybe they were afraid to try before. Uh, when they see someone with their background or someone that they were sitting next to going through a program and, and really taking that leap and moving into a different career area, it creates confidence and it takes away fears to really help people feel like they can jump and accomplish the dreams that they have.

Narrator: Something really unique about The Academy is that they don’t just teach employees hard skills, like how to use their software and answer customer questions, but soft skills too. Like problem solving, public speaking and intercultural fluency.

John Jordan: We are serving 70 million clients. Uh, we serve all of America and really globally, we serve so many clients. And our company is a reflection of the world that we’re serving in. So we’ve got a very diverse company, uh, people from all different backgrounds, folks who, um, come from different educational backgrounds, different parts of the country, different ages. So we’ve spent a lot of time trying to teach people about other people. Uh, we have an entire, uh, curriculum around life events and helping people who may be right out of college in some cases, understand what it’s like to buy a house or get divorced, or, you know, lose a loved one or care for someone. Um, it’s those kind of life events that people haven’t experienced. We’ve spent a lot of time helping individuals understand. What are you thinking about? What are you going through when you’re in that life event? We’ve got great programs, uh, to help people just understand people with different racial or ethnic backgrounds or, um, all of the different dimensions of diversity so that people can just put themselves in someone else’s shoes for a bit, because they’re going to need to understand it from a client perspective, but we also want great teammates, people who understand and are willing to work well to get things done here at the company. I’ve been here for 20 years and there’s nothing that I’ve done that hasn’t come through teamwork. I mean, there just, it’s very hard to do anything individually here at a big company like this. So it’s important that we foster that empathy for one another and understanding for the things that we’re all going through, everyone’s going through hard things. Everyone has hopefully good things going on in their lives as well. We try to celebrate those things, uh, so that we just create that culture that, uh, everyone can thrive in.

Narrator: The Academy also takes into account the different learning styles of each employee. So they take multiple approaches to teaching a skill. Maybe they offer a textbook lesson for people who absorb information best by reading it. Or they run employees through a simulation to learn by doing. The goal is to meet employees’ learning preferences to help them internalize information the most effectively, so they feel prepared to handle their very first customer interaction.

John Jordan: There’s a couple of different things that we try to do. Um, and so just take an employee that joins the company. They’re gonna go through some standard, training, right? We mentioned that for their job and that’s fairly standard. We offer different modalities to help them. Every individual learns from a different way. So we try to surround sound, train them in a lot of different ways and they’re gonna pick it up from one of those ways that we train them on. But then after that you can kind of create your own path. So I mentioned the career path tool that we have. You can understand the skills that we’ll take to get from one place to the other. Uh, we have a learning, uh, environment that allows you to really research and take classes on your own. We have a reimbursement program where you can go and take college classes and be reimbursed for them. Uh, there’s certifications that you can get. We have professional designations and licensing if you want to be a financial advisor. So we try to offer lots and lots of things for employees once they get here to tailor where they go. And again, it starts with that path, understanding what is with real clarity, what do I need to get from here to there? And let’s not add things that you don’t need. Uh, there are certain jobs in the past where it may say, oh, you need a college degree for this and we really didn’t. So we stripped out all of those requirements that weren’t really requirements. And we said, well, these are the skills you need. Uh, these are the places you can learn them. We have academy programs, you can get them from college and universities. We have certification programs, and then we help them to map their way to do that. We offer programs and we offer time for them to actually go do that if they need to. You know, , I think that in a big diverse company like this, you’ve got to be able to do lots of different ways, based on geography and, uh, the type of jobs that people have. But I think based on feedback and listening to the employees, we’ve been able to do a pretty good job. We’ve got a million miles to go in a lot of ways we still need to improve, but I feel like we’ve built a good foundation and on which we’re gonna, hopefully grow.

Narrator: And of course John and his team are tracking employee progress.

John Jordan: There’s a couple of ways that we measure. First of all, the feedback. So we listen to them and they tell us, how are we doing? Um, second of all, we,really monitor productivity after you graduate and the success rate of those cohorts that are going through. So if we have 30 people that go through a cohort, we monitor them after they graduate from the program to see how are they doing? Um, do we see higher turnover within this cohort? Are we seeing, you know, a high promotion rate? We really wanna see what happens after the training to make sure that people are productive and that they’re sticking around and they’re growing with the company. We also look at promotions and internal mobility. Uh, when we first started The academy, would say we were probably hiring 30% internally and 70% externally for roles. So the way that I would describe it is it was almost like a free agency model. When we would lose a specialty person, someone who did credit or a financial advisor, we had to go out into the marketplace and hire someone from one of our competitors or from one of the other, uh, companies. Well, since then, we’ve been as high as 60 to 70% now, internal hiring meaning for every role that we have, we’re looking internally first because we’ve built programs to help upskill people in order to do that different job. So that was a big philosophical change. And now we really look at for our most important jobs, the most strategic roles, what percentage of those roles are being filled internally. And that’s a real, uh, I would say a great success metric for us to watch because it helps us understand, are we pulling talent through the system? Are we helping people from an entry level move into more advanced roles? And again, accomplish that goal of having a career here versus just an entry level job.

Narrator: A key to having employees consider a career at Bank of America is to do onboarding very well. Making sure new employees have everything they need on day one. That they’re expected and welcomed. And from there, journey mapping the experience and analyzing it on a granular level. 

John Jordan: We’ve spent a lot of time on onboarding in general. I would say, it used to be a very distributed process in that we let, you know, maybe every financial center would do it slightly different, every call center, you know, every place, every node in which we were bringing people in were slightly different. And it was not well designed. And so we’ve spent a lot of time in that journey mapping process and in the feedback process listening and, and learning from employees. And we’ve done a lot of things to automate our early onboarding process to make sure that it’s working, you know, that people are actually not having to do so many manual steps in order to get here at the company. Uh, we’ve focused a lot on things like technology access on day one. It used to be that, you know, maybe one out of every three people had access to technology the first day they started with the company. Now, where we’ve implemented our onboarding process, a hundred percent, almost a hundred percent of the time, you’re gonna have all the technology you need day one. And I just, that is such a critical, in today’s world, it is so critical that you have your email day one, and that you can access the training that you have. So we’ve spent a lot of time improving on very operational aspects of onboarding to make sure that the experience that they have is really a great one. Uh, we make sure that we orchestrate the emails that they get, that we’ve invested in having, uh, the managers send video messages or, uh, emails to them, just welcoming people to be part of the team. It’s all little things, it really is. But those little things have added up to a drastic improvement in terms of the experience that we’re hearing from people and a really good improvement in terms of the turnover that we were experiencing within our first year. So now when people come, much more often than not, they’re gonna stay with us and continue to build their career post training because they feel welcomed. They feel cared for, and they feel like they can be successful.

Narrator: All of that forethought and work is paying off. But challenges can still arise no matter how much you plan. Let’s talk about how The Academy at Bank of America handles challenges like the pandemic in Turbulence.

John Jordan: The pandemic taught us a lot and some of them were painful lessons, but really one of the best and most positive lessons was the flexibility of our workforce and our ability to take people with one set of skills and move them quickly into another function. What happened in the financial services industry when the pandemic hit was there was a massive shift in terms of traffic. So people who used to be going into financial centers are now calling us. Um, people who have a small business need to get one of the PPP loans to help them stay in business. So we did, I think, close to 20 years of business loans in the span of like two months. And so that meant we had to really staff up our capability to do that, to answer the phones, to take business loans, to make sure that we’re managing through the system. To audit those loans. I mean, we’re still very regulated. So we had to do really an end to end loan process and we took thousands of people and move them to a 24 hour a day system of accepting and processing loans. So hard to describe how disruptive that was and how much effort it took. And it wasn’t just our bank. It was all banks had to go through this process. Um, and so what we saw was, first of all, it was a time when we just said, okay, well you’re doing one job. That job, there’s no one in the financial center. So we need to give you something else to do that people want to help clients. So we would train them. They were able to do things like we’re doing over the web or over the phone, um, and help clients in a way that was really, really important during a time of need. And it brought just great employee satisfaction to be able to do something different, to learn a new skill and to actually still serve clients in a very unique way. And so it’s created this whole new philosophy around flexible work, meaning flexible functions at work. So you could be doing one function at work and based on a changing economic environment, all of a sudden that function’s not as necessary, but this other one becomes really necessary. And now we’re able to move and re-skill people and help them to actually perform that job in a very quick way. And because of the investments we made in the academy around onboarding and job training and the mapping that we’ve done around skills, we’re able to do that in a fairly efficient way. So we could say, well, these are a hundred employees over here, we don’t need that capacity anymore, but we really need it over here. We’ll take a hundred employee volunteers, train them and then have them perform this function for three, six months or whatever it might be. And then they move back to their role. So that’s an important thing, I think for all companies to be considering, because you’d hate, especially as a big company, to say, all right, well, I’m gonna hire up one for seasonal demand over here. And then when that goes away, I’m gonna let everybody go. And then I’m gonna hire a bunch of other people over on this other side of my business. And then when that goes down, we’ll let them go. Now we’re just able to hire for jobs here, careers here, and we’re able to move people around based on what our clients need. And, we learned that in a massive, in a scaled way. And, uh, I think it’s one of the reasons why the investment in The Aacademy by our CEO, by all of the line of business leader has only increased through the pandemic. We’ve just continued to invest more and more into our people because we see the return on that investment. And the long term impact that it makes on the flexibility of our company and on the careers that our people have.

Narrator: When they had to shift employees to different roles, a lot of the training could be done remotely.

John Jordan: So, you know, The Academy has a physical presence, so we do have locations, but a lot of the programs that we have are done where we are having a, a call over a video. Um, and so they will go through a program and they could be sitting in Plano, Texas. And answering phones with people who sit in Jacksonville, Florida. But we could put them through the same cohort if we wanted to. We’d have an academy manager that could train them both. And that gives us geographic flexibility as well as that functional flexibility. But yes, they would return to an academy program. They would go through the actual program in order to be certified or be ready for that other job.

Narrator: There are times though where employees don’t retain information from training or need a refresher. 

John Jordan: I would say that we, we do have that case, where someone just didn’t pick it up for whatever reason when they went through their training. And so, there’s a couple of different things that we do. First of all, a lot of the programs that we have can be used as resources by managers. So they can say, well, um, this person didn’t pick this up. Can they jump back in on this training call with the next cohort, just to retake that class or be re-certified in that skill? Um, in some cases they can just take whatever the program is. So let’s take one of our practice simulators where maybe they’re having issues with the systems that they’re using. Well, they can just go and get one of those simulators and practice it. And, you know, they can use that as part of their just ongoing development. And the managers have full capabilities to leverage that learning if they need to. Uh, the other place that we really invest in is, and this is for client facing roles. We do a lot of, uh, recorded conversations to give people the ability to listen to how to do things well and, how how things don’t work well. So if there’s a certain client situation that they’ve just struggled with, they’re sort of tripping over their words or not handling a situation well, well, we’ve got a lot of recorded conversations so that they can listen to it and say, oh, you know, I wish I would’ve just said it like that. It would’ve gone much better. And that’s available to them at any time. They have a library of conversations that they can listen to. Because, sometimes, it’s just how you say stuff. I mean, it could be a tone of your voice, the words you choose, we call it the art of language. I mean, there’s things that will help people explain things in a clearer way or answer things in a clear way so that they can be successful in that conversation.

Narrator: But even given the extensive training available to employees, since they’re public-facing, sometimes they’ll come in contact with a situation they weren’t trained for. 

John Jordan: You can’t train people on everything. Because you do have, um, just normal human interactions. Things are gonna happen that are very rare. Um, and unfortunately you’re not prepared for. So A, we try to provide lots of resources because as we capture things, there are people who know about it and we try to capture those things so that people can look it up and say, well, what happens if this happens? It may just be a policy or procedure that we make sure that they have access to learn. But if there’s a, a big thing that keeps happening, in other words, we find that there’s just a gap, and it could be, you know, there’s a new scam Well, you know, that’s something new. No one knew that, you know, the bad guys were gonna do this scam. So we’ve gotta train people en masse on that. So that would not be like a new hire program. That would be something that we go out with in terms of just a change. Here’s something we need to train you all on because it’s something new. Or maybe even a better example is we launch a new innovation, a new product, something comes out, well, we’ve gotta train people on how to explain it to clients. You know, it can’t just be a pamphlet that you get and, and try to understand and we’ve actually gotta give you some training on where does this fit into your conversation? What client needs does this address? What client events may, uh, trigger the need for this type of solution. So those are things that we do ongoing every, I mean, really almost daily, I’m sure that we’re doing some form of policy change, product launch or something that’s just different that we need to make sure people are up to speed on so that they can be successful with clients.

Narrator: And sometimes they do decide to re-think training methods if it was found to be less or ineffective.

John Jordan: I would say that there’s been methods that we’ve used that didn’t work. So for instance, there were certain things that we were trying to train people on with a web-based learning. And we were finding that maybe the retention wasn’t what we expected. And then when we tried virtual reality with that same thing, their retention was drastically better. And so, you know, that’s part of the innovation process, is when we look at, what I would call failures and capability, or when people just aren’t able to do this function and we’ve tried training ’em, we’ve tried a bunch of different things and it’s just not working, sometimes taking a step back and looking at a different way of training that skill, using a different technology or using a different approach is how we solve that. And so I’d say we constantly find little things like that. That’s really part of managing this academy, is looking for breaks in the system, places where things aren’t working as well as we want them to, or people aren’t ready enough for a certain thing. Uh, so we’re always looking for problems so that we can help train with solutions and help people be, the heart of it is We want our clients to be happy, but we also want individuals to feel successful. And when you’re, something’s not going well, then we want to help fix that.

Narrator: But even while The Academy was making sure each employee was getting appropriate training, they were still prioritizing the most important thing – the health of every person involved. 

John Jordan: I saw really a lot of, different styles throughout the pandemic and things that worked and certain things that didn’t work. During that time, the main thing we as a company focused on was making sure people felt safe. And that they felt cared for. And they knew that their health was our priority, that their family needs were our priority. So I think that one of the most important times during a time of crisis is just communicating empathy and communicating understanding and care, because people are unsettled. I mean, if you think about the last couple of years, there’s just been a lot of unsettling things. I mean, a lot of people with high anxiety, stress for their family members, stress for theirselves, stress for their communities. I mean, there was just a lot of things on them. And I found that the leaders who were best able to communicate empathy and care are the ones who now, if you kind of fast forward two years from now, have raised up in the company and become even more impactful, more senior. And, um, it’s because they just inspired a lot of followership during that time. So that’s been, I think one of the interesting things to watch. Uh, we certainly have a CEO has incredible empathy. The, the management team are really focused on making this a great place to work every single day. And when you go through crisis, you really see that amplified. And why that priority, um, is so important for a company.

Narrator: But the management team couldn’t make Bank of America a great place to work without taking care of themselves first – practices or passions that help them feel refreshed so they can show up feeling good and ready to go. Let’s talk about those practices while we prepare for a Smooth Landing.

John Jordan: Everyone obviously has different things that help them. I’m a husband, I’m a father of four. So for me to feel healthy, that relationship needs to be healthy. Um, so I spend a lot of time with my family. I prioritize things like dinner and breakfast and driving kids to school or going to, you know, sporting events. I spent yesterday going to my son’s football game in the evening. And then later watched my daughter dance at a later game. We were out until 11 o’clock, but I was with my family. And that was a really important thing for me. And that keeps me grounded and connects me to my why, if you will. Um, and expanding on that why, I mean, I think that, uh, everyone has a passion. For me, it’s the special needs community. I have a brother with Down Syndrome, so he’s been a real inspiration for my life. And finding those places where you can invest in that passion at the same time you’re working has been a really important part of my health. And, you know, I’ve worked a lot with our employee volunteers and with some of our employee networks that are focused on the disability community. I’ve worked with various non-profits. That gives me inspiration, of, you know, not only my family, but the community that I’m serving in and a personal passion that I’m able to fulfill and, you know, when you work at a company that’s so supportive of not only nonprofits, but volunteerism, um, it really helps you find balance. Um, and you know, I could be coaching a kid’s team. It could be volunteering at your church. It could be doing something locally. There’s a lot of different things that people find, uh, value in. But to me, that’s been a really important piece of the puzzle. And then health in general. Um, I’ve spent a lot of time, uh, making sure that I have the right habits, eating and sleeping and exercising and spending quiet time, just thinking and praying and doing things that help give me peace in my mind and heart so that I can just, um, tackle the challenges of the day. I mean, we’re serving 200,000 employees. It’s a global job. You know, you’re, you’ve got the normal stresses of life going around you. So if you’re not healthy and balanced physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, all those things, then things can go haywire very quickly. So I do spend a lot of time just thinking about that and making sure that I’m, you know, tracking what I eat and making sure that I’m sleeping and I check my steps and making sure that I’m getting all my steps in those kind of things have helped me to kind of maintain, uh, over a marathon of a career.

Narrator: With nearly 20 years under his belt at Bank of America, John has found drive and direction from seeing the possibilities in his role. Looking to the future of what could be and how he could improve the Bank of America experience.

John Jordan: I was given a lot of advice when I started in this job. And some of it was people doubting, um, the possibilities, if you will. They kind of thought, yeah, that’s training. I’m not really sure. What can you change with training? It kind of corporate training is what it is. Um, so I think that the thing that’s helped me to be successful in this job and in a lot of jobs is create a vision. I mean, to really understand that if you want something to happen, it’s not going to start with just little incremental steps. It’s gotta start with a view of what could be, you know, five, 10 years from now. And I think by creating a vision for what we could be, it’s inspired a lot of people to jump on board and say, well, I wanna be a part of that. I wanna be part of a world class and awarded institution, something that’s really invested in other people and impacting the communities and enabling people to be successful. Um, so that was probably the biggest thing. And I don’t think it matters what your job is that creating a vision for that job is a really important thing. And it’s kind of a vision for yourself. What do you wanna be? What do you want your legacy to be in that particular role. And for me, I’m someone whose impact is really important for me, for others, it may be something else, but impact is really one of the things that is a core driver for me. So part of my vision has always been focused on the impact that we would have. And so I think that you have to understand your why, you have to understand kind of the function you’re in. Uh, but when you create a vision, then, um, it’s, you know, without a vision, you’re gonna pretty much stay the same. So I think that you have to challenge yourself and have the courage to not let your fears get in the way of that vision. Not let doubts get in the way of that vision, uh, but really take aggressive steps to accomplish it.

Narrator: As a leader, John says there’s a fundamental difference between being liked and being respected. 

John Jordan: Particularly, as you have increased responsibility, um, that question of liking versus respecting becomes more and more important. And, you know, you think about great leaders or great coaches, uh, or great teachers, sometimes they’re the ones who you really in the moment don’t like at all, but they’re the most honest with you. And so, as a leader, I’ve found it tremendously important to be very honest with people. And whether or not they like what I’m saying, I tell them the truth with dignity to make sure that they understand exactly what the expectation is, what it is that they’re missing, so that they can get better. And I think that if you take the approach where you’re going to treat people with dignity and you’re going to invest in them with truth, but also, um, to push them to be better at what they are, you know, think about a great athletic trainer. No one likes a hard workout in the moment. But you know, when you see the results, you start to look back and say, well, I really appreciate that. So that’s been something that, for someone who likes being liked, I’m very social, I’m very extroverted. I enjoy relationships a lot. Um, you know, taking that, that view that, Hey, listen, if, if I’m telling you the truth, it’s better for you. And it is more, uh, important for your long-term success for me just to be honest with you. And I think that that’s an important balance for a leader to be able to take. There’s some people who truth is really easy being liked they don’t care about. And so it just depends on which side of that coin you fall on in terms of which one’s harder for you. But, um, for me, it’s always been, you know, telling people hard stuff.

Narrator: John is always looking for ways to elevate those around him, especially potential candidates.

John Jordan: One thing that we didn’t touch on very much, but I think it’s an important thing, um, that I, I feel remiss if we don’t get a chance to chat about it is the importance of identifying opportunities for those who, you know, may have been lost in the shuffle. We spent a lot of time thinking about, of all the programs that we’re creating, of all of the things that we’re investing in to help be successful, are we really looking under every rock, if you will, for great talent? And we had a massive campus program, like many companies, we go to college campuses and we hire from those college campuses. But the reality is most of the jobs that we were looking for didn’t require a degree. And so what was our plan to go out to the non-degree world or to our communities and look for talent? And so we launched our Pathways Program several years ago now, and that Pathways Program is dedicated to low to moderate income communities where, you know, they may or may not have access to higher education. But we’ve partnered with nonprofits like Unidos or Boys and Girls Club, or Year Up, um, some local community colleges, a lot of places that are invested in those communities to identify talent. And in the past, gosh, we hit a goal of 10,000 hires in just a couple of years. And then we upped the goal for another 10,000 and you know, this year we’re gonna hire, we’ve hired close to 3000 people from low to modern income communities and kind of the non-degree traditional background, which is more than our entire campus program. So I point that out because in today’s world, you know, it’d be easy for us to just look in the traditional sources for talent. And those are still great sources. But I would say that if you really build programs like The Academy has that creates a skills based learning plan and onboarding for anybody, then it opens doors to a lot of people who again, might have fallen through the cracks and it gives people a path where they may have been intimidated by a big company or a big bank in particular and say, oh, I need a PhD in finance in order to work at Bank of America. That is not true. Uh, you can come in, we will train you and you’ll be successful. And that gives us the ability to hire so much more broadly, and opens talent doors that we may never found before. And some of the stories that we’ve gotten from these individuals have just been phenomenal. And it’s, it’s an inspiring piece of the story of The Academy that I would love for, you know, your listeners to hear and for others to understand that anyone, any company can invest in that same kind of thing, but you’ve just gotta build the rails for anyone to be successful.

Narrator: And John has some lovely success stories of those candidates finding success and meaning at Bank of America.

John Jordan: There’s hundreds, to be honest with you, but we have classes of people who go through, um, Year Up or Unidos is another example, where, when you talk to them, you interview them, they would say, I was scared of banking. You know, I was scared of going into a corporation. And we’ve invested in job skills training before they even join the company to explain to them, how can you fit in a big corporation? It doesn’t matter if you work for us or not, but we wanna make sure that you know what it takes to be successful in a corporation so that they’re not intimidated by it. And they say, well, I can do this. Uh, and then when they join, they go through our normal academy training. They may join in an entry level type job, a relationship banker or something like that. Get great benefits, full pay, all of the things that we offer as a company. And then we’ve seen some of these individuals advance not only to manager jobs, but really senior manager jobs in a short period of time. I mean, they realize that they have the grit and determination and willingness to learn, and they have the local connections there and the communities in which we serve that allow them to thrive. They become community leaders in the financial services business, and they may have been coming from a spot where they, uh, never thought possible for them to be a leader within the community. And then while they’re here, they go back and get their degree. You know, they use our college reimbursement program. They go back and get a degree which opens up a whole another set of doors for them, uh, to work in jobs and technology or other more advanced specialty jobs. Sothere’s dozens and dozens of great stories, hundreds, thousands of stories. Um, we’ve hired almost 15,000 people through Pathways now. Um, and we’re really, really proud of the success we’re seeing from it.

Narrator: If you’d like to get in touch with John, here’s where you can find him.

John Jordan: I’d love for people to connect with me on LinkedIn. Um, that’s really where the largest presence is. Uh, I’d love to just see what people are doing and hear about some of the things that they’re learning on the job. Can follow me on Twitter at Johnny T. Jordan, uh, would love to, uh, interact with people there as well. And you can always find Bank of America. I mean, BankofAmerica.com has things about The AAcademy on our career site. Uh, you can see them there on the side, and we’d love to have people check out careers here and learn about all the different programs that we have to offer.

Narrator: So create opportunities for those otherwise lost in the shuffle, invest in your people, and build the rails for each employee to find success. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Cruising Altitude. This episode is brought to you by Firstup, the company that is redefining the digital employee experience to put people first and lift companies up by connecting every worker, everywhere with the information that helps them do their best work. Firstup has helped over 40% of the Fortune 100 companies like Amazon, AB InBev, Ford and Pfizer stay agile and keep transforming. Learn more at firstup.io