Financial Services Practice

How banks can build their

future workforce—today
During the pandemic, some banks have learned to reskill, at scale.
Here, they share their secrets.

by Han Hu, Quentin Jadoul, and Angelika Reich

© Fancy.yan/Getty Images

August 2021
 When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early
2020, the global banking industry had already been
undergoing massive change. In the previous decade,
the branch footprint had shrunk by about 20 percent
in the United States and by 60 percent in Nordic
countries. Consumer needs were evolving rapidly,
as people came to expect more and more from their
online banking services. And as banks digitized
their front ends in response, they also established
next-generation technologies in the middle and
back offices to help save costs and provide
better services.
All those changes had lifted people issues to the top
of banks’ agendas. Our pre-COVID-19 research on
the future of work suggests that almost all roles in
bank branches will decline over the next decade.1
The average branch size is projected to shrink from
six full-time equivalents to four by 2030.
The global pandemic has accelerated those trends
and has added urgency to the discussion. In the first
several months of the crisis, banks’ HR leaders
successfully adapted their organizations and ways
of working; banks and their workforces responded
remarkably well. Banks quickly pivoted to a digital-
first model for sales and service, scaled up remote
advice, and reshaped physical distribution.
Accordingly, talent was swiftly redeployed from
teams with surpluses to teams with shortages.
Now, banks are sifting through the changes brought
about by the COVID-19 crisis to understand which
ones are temporary and which are permanent.
In late 2020, we spoke with several banks’ chief HR
officers (CHROs) about their experiences during the
pandemic. Unlike prior crises, banks have had to
make more creative use of various levers to deploy
talent dynamically and to build future workforces,
including reskilling (training an employee for a new
job), upskilling (training an employee on additional
skills in an existing job), and redeployment
(assigning an employee to a new task). Over the past
year, banks have been reskilling their workforces
1
For more, see “The future of work in Europe,” McKinsey Global Institute, June 10, 2020, on McKinsey.com.
2
2020 human capital management report, Bank of America, October 2020, bankofamerica.com.
2 How banks can build their future workforce—today
rapidly and at scale, taking advantage of the
efficiencies available from skill adjacencies (that is,
skill sets from previous roles that are
complementary to those required by new
roles). They are also building infrastructure to
support effective upskilling and redeployment
(including learning factories and job-matching
platforms). In this article, we share some of the
insights these banks have learned, and we outline
how banks can use them to take advantage of an
unexpected opportunity to build the workforce of
the future—today.
How banks have adapted during
the crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating
effects on people’s lives and livelihoods, and banks
have seen much of this in their work to support
customers during the pandemic. As a result, banks’
organizational structures have been affected in
three ways. First, the crisis has accelerated the shift
from hierarchical structures to agile ones, in which
individuals have autonomy, leaders delegate to
empowered teams, and relationships are less formal
and more flexible. For example, several banks have
started to organize their teams into tribes—small
groups dedicated to single tasks—trusting them
with the resources and approval rights needed to
accomplish each task. Agile teams are renowned for
creating high-quality customer experience,
especially in the omnichannel environment.
Second, banks have redeployed talent from surplus
to shortage areas to help save costs and bolster
reputations. Some of these redeployments have
required only minimal, quick training. But we have
also observed massive shifts, from closed branches
to customer-service operations. For example,
Bank of America redeployed more than 23,000
employees to support new business needs,
including implementing the company’s Paycheck
Protection Program.2
‘COVID-19 should not be seen as
an opportunity to think about the
next phase of banking but rather how
we deliver financial products to people—
this is an opportunity for digital but
also for new products.’
Finally, banks have offered training on new skills
that people can use in their current jobs (upskilling)
or for new jobs (reskilling). For example, banks have
upskilled financial advisers to better provide
services remotely, reskilled tellers to become
“universal” bankers, and reskilled other branch
employees to perform back-office roles. Universal
bankers have both sales and service responsibilities,
serving ably as both personal bankers and tellers,
among other functions. Our research projects
20 percent growth per year for universal bankers
through 2030.
Lessons learned: How to build the
workforce of the future
McKinsey research shows that redeployment with
effective reskilling is 20 percent more cost-effective
than “hiring and firing,” as it reduces the number of
new hires and the number of layoffs needed.3 It also
boosts an employer’s brand reputation by building a
healthy employee value proposition marked by
robust investment in people. However, to many
HR leaders, reskilling has always seemed like a
complex and lengthy process that requires a lot of
preparation and shows impact only in the medium
or long term, which has slowed its adoption by
large organizations.
3
Unpublished research that analyzed the costs of layoffs, hiring, and reskilling and that was confirmed with banking leaders.
How banks can build their future workforce—today
Our conversations with bank CHROs who have
thrived during this crisis yielded five lessons on how
to reskill successfully.
1. Upskill proactively based on strategy needs
and industry trends
Before initiating any upskilling or reskilling effort, it’s
important to know what the effort is for and what
skills are in scope. Based on forecasts of shifts in
the role mix, banks have focused on critical skills for
specific roles (for example, remote skills for advisers)
and for general needs across roles (for instance,
adaptability skills). Banks that have achieved
productive reskilling have designed the learning
objectives in close alignment with their strategy.
As part of a US retail bank’s restructuring, leaders
wanted to foster the employee behavior and mindset
needed to support a customer-focused strategy. It
prioritized a set of critical skills, such as leading
yourself (entrepreneurship, self-awareness, and so
on) and engaging others (developing relationships,
mobilizing organizations, and so on). Ten thousand
employees took a self-assessment on the critical
skills and received a customized curriculum and
delivery plan based on the skill gaps shown in the
assessment. As a result, the bank was able to
reskill many of the branch employees into universal-
banker roles by equipping them with basic general
consulting skills, as well as enhanced technical skills.
3
 In another example, ING identified the “big six”
distinctive and foundational people and
organizational capabilities that the company felt
were needed to stay relevant—now and in the
future—to retain competitive advantage, and to
ensure trust from its customers, regulators, and
employees. The six capabilities (customer
experience, data fluency, leadership, nonfinancial-
risk management, cybersecurity, and operations
management) serve as a compass to steer the
company’s talent management where it will create
more value for the organization and for its
customers. ING’s HR business partners play a
crucial role in developing the capabilities by
facilitating strategic conversations with managers
and by introducing the big-six capabilities at key
moments of the employee cycle to help improve
business performance.
2. Use skill adjacencies for effective reskilling
Another lesson learned is to analyze skill
adjacencies before launching any reskilling effort.
Finding source roles with the closest skill match to
destination roles can minimize reskilling needs and
enable quick reskilling that focuses on missing skills.
‘At every level, we train people on the
most relevant of the six capabilities
and help them understand what is
the impact on their job. This has a lot
of implications, as people see the bank
is changing. Now, we can build the
bridge and help them understand
how to stay relevant at the bank,
and in the labor market.’
4 How banks can build their future workforce—today
One example of quick reskilling is microskilling,
which provides ad hoc training (a maximum of one or
two days) for specific skill sets.
During the COVID-19 crisis, we have seen banks
train tellers to become customer-service reps and
train customer-service reps to become universal
bankers, thanks to the skill adjacencies of these
roles: high-performing tellers possess the
customer-engagement and influencing skills that
customer-service reps require; and high-performing
customer-service reps have the understanding of
bank products and services that is needed from
effective universal bankers.
Maarten van Beek, HR director at ING, shared an
essential learning: “It is very important to look at
what people actually do and not focus only on job
descriptions or functions. We moved people from
the branches to the know-your-customer [KYC]
team because the underlying skills needed were
very close, if not identical. However, if you had
looked at the job description, you would not
have seen this; on paper, these people had
nothing in common.”
 With a reduced branch footprint, a midsize European
bank needed to restructure its branch workforce of
more than 3,000 people by shifting surplus tellers to
relationship managers. To identify skill adjacencies,
the bank deployed a top-down selection process
that used a survey to assess commercial skills.
Based on the survey results, bank tellers were
divided into three groups, with three types of
training. Most were in the first group; they passed
the minimum requirement and received basic KYC
and interpersonal training to handle maintenance of
the customer-relationship-management database,
KYC verification, and so on. The second group
consisted of people with higher commercial skills;
they received training in core over-the-counter
products, such as credit, debit, and current
accounts, as well as training to promote digital
channels. The third group included the top
20 percent of performers on the commercial-
skills survey. They received training on the entire
customer journey to sell a variety of products,
including becoming certified to sell insurance
and investment products.
By basing these distinctions on skill adjacency, the
bank was able to focus training on the highest-
potential employees and employees were provided
opportunities to explore various career paths. The
program successfully expanded the learning culture
across employees, extending the training on over-
the-counter products to other tellers.
3. Build a scalable learning infrastructure
When speaking with banks about reskilling, many of
them rightly emphasize the need for investing in
large infrastructure and systems. This would ideally
contain several elements, such as the skill inventory,
an internal talent market to encourage mobility and
reskilling needs, a central library to offer online and
offline training, and a learning factory to build
reusable learning content. New tools can help
companies build the skill inventory.4
4
For example, Skills Finder uses an AI-driven skill-matching algorithm to infer people’s skills, even when they are not explicitly written in
resumes, and to match people automatically with jobs where their profile is a good fit.
How banks can build their future workforce—today
To reskill its 3,000 tellers, the midsize European
bank built a new, digital corporate academy, where
learning materials were migrated and delivered
through digital channels. To make the learning
journey easier, it also transformed legacy learning
modules (for example, shorter, two- to four-minute
instructional videos replaced older, two-hour videos).
The European bank also developed a reskilling tool
to help match employees to new roles for when the
bank needs to hire internally. The tool allows the
bank to select employees by various criteria,
including skill, background, education, and
experience. Based on the requirements of the new
role, managers or HR can use the tool to select
targeted trainees and assign them the right training.
The earlier-mentioned US retail bank took another
approach and applied a future-skill framework, which
we call the DELTA (or distinct elements of talent)
survey, to guide individual skill assessment and
learning design. The DELTA survey is a self-reported
assessment of the future needs for 56 critical skills
across four dimensions: cognitive, interpersonal, self-
leadership, and digital. This reusable framework
creates an infrastructure foundation with skill grids,
assessment tools, and learning content. The bank
used it to develop a set of decision criteria to prioritize
essential skills (saving other skills for a follow-up
curriculum) and built a structured approach to
evaluate and select training courses.
During 2020, many banks had to move quickly to
train employees and had little formal infrastructure
in place to do so. For example, at ING, like at many
banks, the process for onboarding and training new
staff typically took about a month. In 2020, the HR
team quickly set up a process to match people to
jobs and, by focusing on the most frequent and
on-demand abilities, set up a training program that
took only two days. Based on the learnings, the bank
is now upgrading its “talent fluidity matching”
platform—on which both teams and individuals
can interact and match—and is continuing to
expand other infrastructure.
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 4. Invest in a learning culture
All of the CHROs we interviewed underlined the
critical role that culture plays when implementing
quick and efficient reskilling. In their experience,
though all the measures presented above are
important, none is as crucial as ensuring a
homogenous culture. Indeed, given the pressure
imposed by the COVID-19 crisis, banks have had to
reorganize their workforces quickly. This has left
little time for employees to acclimate to a new
culture and to new ways of working before they
need to be productive.
However, creating a homogenous culture does not
often come naturally and usually requires
considerable up-front investment. Banks that have
done this well typically use a mix of capability
building and immersive experience, as well as a
consistent, inspiring communication plan that starts
with a clear definition of joint purpose and values.
One bank that upskilled 30,000 employees within
18 months designed a thorough communication and
engagement plan across nine channels, including
email, webinars, informational posters, leadership
forums, and the company’s intranet.
Communications are sent out weekly, biweekly,
monthly, or quarterly, and both senior leadership and
direct managers provide messages.
Building a homogenous learning culture also
requires a consistent, ongoing commitment. The
more that a bank conceives of it as a journey rather
than a one-time training, the better the results will
be. The leaders at the midsize European bank
understood that shifting roles would not be a short-
term effort and that it would require that employees
maintain their passion and energy. To help, the bank
deployed two tools. First, it established a buddy
program, in which product specialists were assigned
to reskilled tellers to help provide knowledge and
skill support. Second, it sent barometer surveys
every three weeks to gauge employee engagement
and their specific learning needs. These tools
helped employees feel that they were on a
6 How banks can build their future workforce—today
consistent learning journey, which in turn helped
improve morale.
Similarly, the US retail bank, which wanted to reinvest
in its employees, created a homogenous culture of its
own, with the twin goals of helping employees thrive
in the future workplace and helping the bank shift to
a more customer-focused culture.
5. Start with leadership and ensure sufficient
talent developers
These initiatives require committed leadership to
succeed. The workforce of the future will need
leaders who are similarly advanced—people who
create a positive and nurturing growth environment,
rather than simply telling people what to do, and
people who communicate with employees clearly
and transparently about the company’s change
programs. One executive at ING explained that
leadership “is about letting people see what are the
different doors and helping to open them.” He
added that it takes courage to start those initial
conversations knowing that a team’s best
employees might need to move to other areas. While
these conversations may not be perfect, he said,
they will go a long way toward helping employees
both understand their value proposition and think
about their future.
The success story at the midsize European bank was
also built upon strong leadership champions. During
the bank’s annual presentation to shareholders, the
CEO spoke about the importance of the learning
journey and the need to shift roles, and the chief
commercial officer highlighted the learning
programs in his business priorities. Both efforts
helped signal to employees that this was an
enterprise-wide strategic priority and that leaders
truly cared about talent development.
In that regard, it is also important to have “talent
developers,” people who are able to identify, assess,
and train employees as needed. These could be HR
business partners, functional leaders, or middle
managers. Talent developers help leaders translate
the direction of the business into talent requirements.
They can also help identify the right people for future
needs and, with support from learning and coaching
experts, can help them get there.
The financial-services industry has faced dramatic
disruption over the past decade, with significant
implications for the talent needed in the future.
Organizations that move early and decisively in a
crisis do best. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced
banks to challenge the status quo and to accelerate
moves. Talent leaders have been pushing for some
of these changes for a long time, such as
Han Hu is an expert in McKinsey’s Washington, DC, office; Quentin Jadoul is an alumnus of the Brussels office; and
Angelika Reich is a partner in the Vienna office.
The authors wish to thank Stefano Cantù, Tomi Eisenberg, and Bill Schaninger for their contributions to this article.
Designed by McKinsey Global Publishing
Copyright © 2021 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.
How banks can build their future workforce—today
dynamically redeploying employees to roles with
increasing demand, as well as providing employees
with diverse career paths and with corresponding
upskilling and reskilling support. Equipped with the
right mindset and tools, talent leaders can expand
on these changes and get ahead of competitors in
building the workforce of the future. Doing so can
provide banks with the opportunity to think about
not only the next phase of banking but also how to
deliver financial products to people. It can also
provide an opportunity to exploit digital capabilities
and to start thinking about new products, services,
and ecosystems. Today’s leading banks are already
building tomorrow’s leading workforces. Are you
ready to join them?
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