mBank is an icon when it comes to innovative solutions. This is the first fully Internet-based bank in Poland that sets the direction for the development of mobile and online banking in today's world.
The bank's sources of innovation are a culture of direct cooperation, regardless of the level in hierarchy and employee development. For an employee, this means being able to talk to everyone, even the bank's CEO, and learning at an unprecedented level.
The assumption is simple. If mBank employees learn faster and more effectively compared to other banks, they will create better products. Therefore, in addition to independent learning, the bank focuses on peer-to-peer learning among employees because it is the most effective and daily-based exchange of knowledge.
On the scale of several thousand people, describing the expertise, experience, and simply knowing what one does at work, is a challenge. It is not easy to answer questions about the right people, such as "Who is an expert in React Native technology? Who from IT security has already implemented a project for marketing? Who can support a new project in factoring?"
Several hundred teams, tens of products and types of customers, lots of locations. How to navigate them more efficiently than using a chain of questions to workmates about whom they may know, who may know someone, who worked with someone?
Making the employees independent when it comes to seeking knowledge effectively from other employees means less time seeking information and saving millions of PLN.
The first step is to name the knowledge of people working in the bank. It’s not simple on a scale of 8,000 people, but the second step is even more challenging. How do you encourage employees to reach for this knowledge? Encourage one side to ask for information and the other side to provide this information.
This requires supporting the bottom-up processes of knowledge sharing that works on a scale of several thousand people.
Network Perspective fits well into the current bank’s way of thinking about how to investigate the future: how to replace traditional, centralized, and inefficient mechanisms supporting the development of people with modern technologies - more agile, scattered, and with a higher level of objectivism.
– Jakub Fast, Retail Banking Products and Customer Segments Managing Director, mBank
With Network Perspective algorithms, what employees do, and what they expertise in, is automatically extracted from cooperation data. This allowed the bank to name the scope of work and tacit knowledge of hundreds of people in a simplified but automatic way. How does it work? A list of teams a person works with tells a lot about the experience. A programmer who creates projects for the corporate client team has a different profile than the programmer working with the HR team. Although, they know the same programming languages.
Additionally, by completing the profile, employees indicated their competences: what their expertise is in, what products or systems they work on. But not only that. Using the same dictionaries, they also indicated areas in which they want to develop and teams in which they want to learn.
There are profiles of people and teams, departments, or locations built in the app automatically based on data on cooperation between people and teams and information provided by employees. But not only that. Imagine you’re searching the word “loan”. In addition to formal teams working on loans, employees see communities of practice. The profile of the community of practice presents people from IT, security, and every other area of the company with work experience related to loans.
The profiles of development groups are connecting employees who want to develop in a particular area. Besides, for each team, there is information about which people from the entire bank would like to develop.
The first results appeared already after 3 months. During this time, 22,861 information on the skills of employees and 550 indications on preferred development locations were collected.
Information about skills, plus knowledge automatically named from the cooperation data, enabled effective use of the search engine already after 3 months of implementation.
Experts from several hundreds of areas became automatically visible. People who willingly share knowledge were also promoted automatically.
This made the exchange of knowledge throughout the bank way easier. Askers more often held their answers, and people providing answers naturally shared information.
According to the opinions of employees who were asked, finding the people you need has become simple and way faster. And thanks to the role of brokers connecting teams, it is often even possible.
The rules of the game have changed. People supporting others felt appreciated, sharing knowledge became visible, and searching for information more effective.
mBank has included information from the Network Perspective in the internal training program, the program of employee mobility, and onboarding.
Finding people for internal training has become easier: trainers are searched among sources of knowledge, and participants are people who want to develop in a particular area.
Data from the app also made the organization of employee mobility programs much simpler. With one click, you can find a buddy and person willing to exchange information.
Information about which teams my team works with and how other teams work significantly accelerated onboarding.
For the new ones, like me, this is just an incredibly useful tool, to find myself and anyone in the company - System Administrator, mBank
The director who came to manage a team of 120 people, seeing in the app how his team works, and which employees are central, said that this information saved several months of onboarding. New specialists also appreciated this information.
