Personnel
Highly skilled staff are one of the Bank’s core competitive advantages. The magnitude of changes to the Bank’s business that are envisaged in its Development Strategy compels fundamental shifts in employee skills, mentality and corporate culture. 2010 was a landmark year for the Bank in terms of innovations in employee compensation approaches, new opportunities for career promotion and professional development and improvements in the employee social security system.
In 2010, Sberbank introduced its new organisational structure across the management bodies of its regional head offices and branches. The focus of the changes was to formally anchor the responsibility of sub-branches and their managers for the relevant business lines. The reorganisation initiatives resulted in optimised headcount (involving mostly management personnel), and centralisation of the administrative and support functions. In 2010, headcount dropped by 3.6% to 240,895 staff — in line with the business plan. Building a long-term talent pool is a key contributor to the success of the Bank’s strategy. To evaluate staff potential, in 2010 the Bank developed a comprehensive system of performance assessment and promotion criteria for employees of various levels in order to assess their professional skills and personal competencies. The new technology was applied to assess the performance of management personnel at the Central Head Office, chairpersons of the territorial banks, and regional head office and outlet managers. The valuation helped to identify promising leaders, formalise succession planning and a talent development process in order to cultivate a healthy pipeline of future candidates from among the existing management ranks and strategic talent pool. Sberbank employs a corporate training system focused on the systemic improvement of key competencies, the development of skills required to improve performance in an employee’s current role and building a knowledge pipeline for the future talent pool. In 2010, the Bank organised a number of soft skills training sessions to facilitate the development of customer service, sales and negotiation skills. The Bank also actively uses distance e-learning systems. Employees are provided access to the Training & Development Portal, an online tool that allows the user to receive training or take a test. In 2010, Sberbank continued the development of the Corporate University in order to set learning standards and coordinate personnel training initiatives. In line with the Bank’s Development Strategy, Sberbank introduced new personnel motivation principles to be consistently applied across the organisation. The principles are aimed at creating a transparent and flexible system to ensure that an employee’s remuneration is directly linked to performance. The new motivation system applies a fundamentally new approach: employee remuneration should be more coherent, predictable and competitive (i.e. represent the market average in a given region).
In 2010, Sberbank launched a new corporate medical insurance programme for its employees. More than 85,000 people or 35% of the total headcount have been enrolled in the medical insurance scheme on a co-funding basis following a number of tenders that were organised to select voluntary medical insurance providers. For the first time, the Bank provided a full medical examination to promote the prevention and early detection of diseases among its employees (primarily, cancer and cardiovascular diseases). Over 95,000 employees took the medical examination in 2010.