CIBC Mellon has spent many years establishing a strong and resilient foundation, enabling it to rapidly shift 98 percent of its team to remote work and deliver stable execution through tremendous market volumes and volatility in March 2020. As volumes and volatility subsided from the record highs, we saw key metrics in both operational efficiency and employee sentiment continue to meet and in a number of cases exceed pre-pandemic benchmarks.
CIBC Mellon launched a strategic “Future of Work” initiative, engaged external consultants and took stock of how it could leverage its success to better position its clients and its employees for success through the challenges of 2021 and beyond.
2020 was a year of unprecedented challenge and change, with market and industry stakeholders forced to stay connected even while remaining apart amid the coronavirus pandemic. From potential mail disruptions to an enormous number of operational, documentation and tax processes reliant on physical processes and wet signatures, market players were forced to revisit and carefully assess operating processes and models in this “new normal”.
What factors supported a successful response?
CIBC Mellon’s resiliency and success in navigating this new working environment during the pandemic was driven by a number of factors, including a disciplined approach to business continuity, robust processes, resilient systems and technology, proven work-from-home capabilities, a client-centric focus, strong risk culture, an engaged workforce and the incorporation of insights from the company’s parent companies CIBC and BNY Mellon.
Resilient systems and technology
Even amid heightened pressure CIBC Mellon’s leadership team understood the importance of upholding the trust placed in the company, and the company’s operational and risk managers were careful to reinforce the importance of following existing processes. The company had invested in bank-strong technology, regularly reinforced the importance of operational execution, cybersecurity protection and strong controls and governance. There was a clear awareness of risks – for example noting that one of the largest sources of potential security vulnerabilities is well-intentioned users short-circuiting controls while seeking to deliver for clients. The company undertook strong security programming, from employee education and awareness efforts to strong data security measures over endpoints (for example, always-on VPN and the closure of USB ports).
The company also recognised the importance of planning. Since achieving certification to the ISO 22301 Business Continuity and Societal Security Standard in 2015, the company has conducted regular and robust reviews, carried out annual “tabletop” exercises in which executives and leaders respond to a simulated crisis, execution as well as the establishment of split operations across various offices. The company also benefited from real-life experience, having been forced to execute its business continuity plans after flooding rendered the company’s headquarters accessible for a full week in 2018 – through which the company delivered seamlessly. Throughout these experiences, the team also recognised the importance of continuous improvement, documenting and addressing opportunities and closing gaps.
Proven work-from-home
Even prior to the pandemic, CIBC Mellon recognised the importance of work-from-home (WFH) to business continuity programming as well as the merits of WFH. CIBC Mellon launched a formal work-from-home program for employees in 2017, enabling employees to work from home regularly. With operational teams regularly using remote work capabilities and desk sharing, and with workflow systems and automated processing in place, the company was able to rapidly mobilise its team to achieve 98 percent working from home. The organisation continued to engage with clients and provide support – as well as navigating challenges. For example, the company’s call centres were only designed to operate in-office, and the company took the people-centric step of temporarily shifting call centre operations to email and call-back services until the company could implement a call centre technology designed to route calls to remote teams. Likewise, the company came together with industry associations, clients and other stakeholders to focus on the many paper processes and wet signatures associated with such processes as pensioner payments, tax reclaims and other market documentation. While the industry as a whole still has many paper-driven processes, the pandemic experience has certainly created strong impetus to continue to move these to electronic formats. No doubt this pressure will continue in the months and years ahead.
Global enterprise perspective
One of the key benefits to CIBC Mellon were the insights and lessons learned from across its global enterprise. The Canadian joint venture has two parent companies, and benefited from their insights across domestic and global operations.
Key achievements
CIBC Mellon has realised several key achievements during the pandemic. We are proud that we have maintained our risk culture, operational control – implementing and tracking more than 80 process exceptions. The centralised tracking of control exceptions was not the only key to maintaining strong governance, but it enabled efficiency: rather than each group individually solving for the control requirements around accepting electronic approvals or adapt a paperless process, once the challenge was surmounted the central exception tracking enabled rollout of those exceptions to other groups facing the same challenge. Like many other aspects of asset servicing, the power of scale made a difference. One critical aspect was both a key achievement and a major success factor: staying connected and keeping communications channels open even as we were physically separated. The company’s teams actively engaged with clients and employees, keeping them informed – for example, frequent employee, management and leadership meetings, detailed and regular client updates across multiple formats, and regular employee calls and messaging.
As we transform into the future ways of working, we are implementing technology and collaboration tools. We are proud to maintain and strengthen our positive employee culture and engagement.
Navigating to future ways of work – strategic framework and initiatives
We have put a strategic framework in place for futures ways of work, with key desired outcomes.
CIBC Mellon operates within flexible working models and spaces to enable organisational resiliency and enhance employee satisfaction and engagement. We recognised the need for a connected and engaged work environment, bringing together employees and clients and leveraging the depth and breadth of all available collaborative capabilities. Employees are at the heart of great outcomes, so the team also recognises the need to support an enhanced employee experience through work/life flexibility.
In a remote environment, employees have been able to maintain their productivity levels and meet or, in some areas, exceed their daily deliverable benchmarks. Employees have noted that the ability to work from home has led to lower stress levels and more time to engage with their family, developing a stronger work/life balance. Teams whose tasks are done later in the day are finding that previous challenges, such as transit and commuting schedules, are more manageable in a work from home environment. Internal survey results show the vast majority of CIBC Mellon of employees would prefer to continue working exclusively from home post-pandemic, and that overall sustainable engagement is significantly exceeding industry pandemic period benchmarks.
Looking ahead, CIBC Mellon will focus on achieving a flexible people and leadership development platform that enhances the overall employee experience and builds on desired CIBC Mellon behaviours. As we shift our operations to Future Ways of Work, CIBC Mellon has established seven strategic initiatives to guide our transformation:
- Adaptive leadership: Develop an adaptive leadership programme grounded in a refreshed employee value proposition and competency set; that focuses on coaching, communication and modelling of desired behaviours.
- Virtual training and onboarding: Invest in or build virtual training platforms for both clients and employees to support onboarding, ongoing training mentorship and job shadowing programs.
- Digital engagement tools: Invest in and deploy digital engagement tools with an adoption program to increase connectivity for both employees and clients, while strategically capturing and leveraging data and analytics.
- Remote policies and best practices: Define, implement, and update CIBC Mellon remote work policies, “office” requirements and best practices to leverage and promote internally employees and externally with clients.
- Location strategy: Determine and implement location strategy based on operational requirements and costs (i.e. low-cost locations, leveraging time zones).
- Workforce strategy planning: Determine required future workforce skills, define talent/workforce planning strategy and conduct organisational re-design to achieve global scale and footprint.
- Flexible office models and workspaces: Determine applicable working and office models for each location and the “right type” of flexible workspace/benefits, etc. required (i.e. collaboration rooms, hoteling, etc.) – implement incrementally.
Key questions and considerations for future operations
To inform CIBC Mellon’s strategic efforts, we asked ourselves a few key questions:
- Employee experience: How do we retain and strengthen our culture? How do we support employee wellness, engagement and productivity in a remote environment?
- Ways of working: How can we best use our physical office spaces – both amid and beyond the pandemic environment? How will clients’ interactions with us evolve?
- Work environment: How has remote working impacted the performance and interaction of our teams? What do people need at home to support long-term remote productivity?
- Talent management: How do we continue to recruit, retain and motivate great people? How does proven remote working and onboarding capability enable us to evolve our talent acquisition?
Some cautionary considerations as we navigate a remote work environment remain. For example, how will we retain our culture and connection, especially as we onboard new colleagues in a remote environment? Some industry watchers feel that remote engagement may not fully substitute for in-office strategic collaboration or long term performance – expressing concern, for example, that millennial workforces or those outside the direct supervision of a manager may be more prone to distraction or dereliction of duty.
At CIBC Mellon, more than 40 percent of employees are millennials – and yet our organisation has seen operational and employee sentiment metrics both rise.
A few other hard questions organisations may wish to ask themselves include: Given that so many of us are now working from home, how do we think together? Some teams are working more hours and putting out more effort. Are a smaller subset of individuals are the ones driving the performance gains, or are employees simply investing more hours? What is our risk of our top performers “burning out”, being unable to sustain this performance level, or departing the organisation for other opportunities?
While the company has not yet established a date for return, as we look at key considerations for a return to the office, we have established processes and plans for a safe, phased and partial return, prioritising the health and safety of employees and considering their experience and sentiment, while monitoring advice and best practices from health and government authorities.
We will be taking a tiered and gated approach to re-occupancy over an extended period, and our office occupancy will be below the pre- pandemic rate.
We will continue to suspend inter-office travel, external meetings, though select employees have the ability to opt-in to return to office-based on business or personal needs/sentiment.
Considerations for our future operations will be to identify opportunities to better utilise facilities and improve collaboration with our employees and clients, recognise that our team members may work remotely on a long-term basis, while sustaining and enhancing stakeholder relationships, and connect virtually.
Sustaining positive momentum
As we explore new ways of working, we are asking what the future looks like look and the ways in which we can build on the momentum that we’ve established across our organisations and within our teams.
- Sustain remote operations: Introduce new technologies, reinforce new behaviours – drive greater transparency, effectiveness and efficiency.
- Maintain connectivity: We will continue to put clients at the centre, keep communication channels open. We will better enable clients’ access to data, and we will be flexible, modular and faster.
- Democratise our teams and capture time zone advantage: Break the gravity of HQ. Strengthen remote onboarding, continue to grow our teams across Canada. Foster productive frontline innovation.
- Enable oversight and greater confidence: Support and sustain client oversight in a remote environment – and recognise evolving stakeholder needs.
2021 is shaping up to be a challenging year, but we are confident that with the right focus, an ongoing investment into great people and a clear vision – along with a willingness to continue to ask questions – we can help position our company, client and industry for success.
