How Employee Work Teams Improved Decision Making in Our Organization, with Sheri Foster, Atlanta Community Food Bank
Sheri Foster: [00:00:00] The big thing about the work teams is the variety of perspectives. I’ve had the opportunity to work with many of these teams, and they have great, creative ideas, and they definitely see things from a different perspective than I do. So, there is an opportunity to be able to get ideas and to see things through a different lens, which is really important.
Sheri Foster: [00:00:23] I think that our leadership team is very accessible, and we all do get a lot of feedback from our employees, but employees also spend a lot of time talking to each other. So, our work team members are able to bring that information and protect it through our discussions, and that has also made a difference.
Sheri Foster: [00:00:43] I have a really good example of that. I had referenced one of the work teams that we have is our employee development work team. And so, that team is charged with helping us to create a real robust employee development, sort of career coaching framework. That, again, was feedback from our employee survey. And one of the things that they told me was we need to create a skills repository as part of our employee development effort framework. They said, “We need managers, employees to be able to have these really open, candid conversations about knowledge, skills and abilities, and to be able to track systematically the skills and proficiency levels,” and that sort of thing. And use that to create development plans, but also for the leadership team to be able to have a view and to the development of these people, so that they can consider them for next-level assignments.
Sheri Foster: [00:01:47] And so, they had told me that probably a year ago. So, we had our employee survey at the end of 2020, and one of our key outcomes from that survey related to employee development and our survey tool, which automatically generates action recommendations, the recommendation from that survey tool was that we create a skills repository. So, I thought, “Wow! I could have saved money on the employee survey and just ask the employees.”
Listen to Sheri’s full Workplace MVP interview here.
The “One Minute Interview” series is produced by John Ray and in the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® in Alpharetta. You can find the full archive of shows by following this link.
Renasant Bank has humble roots, starting in 1904 as a $100,000 bank in a Lee County, Mississippi, bakery. Since then, Renasant has grown to become one of the Southeast’s strongest financial institutions with over $13 billion in assets and more than 190 banking, lending, wealth management and financial services offices in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida. All of Renasant’s success stems from each of their banker’s commitment to investing in their communities as a way of better understanding the people they serve. At Renasant Bank, they understand you because they work and live alongside you every day.
