Ensure your community bank is inclusive

Recently, there has been an increased focus across all industries on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. The latter part of this equation, inclusion, refers to the goal of every single employee feeling able to bring their whole self to work—to feel valued and accepted just as they are. This could be as simple as ensuring there are meat-free options for vegetarians at every company event, or as involved as establishing culturally specific employee resource groups.

If community banks put in the effort to foster a sense of belonging, the result is a stronger workplace culture, greater employee loyalty and, ultimately, a better experience for customers. So, how can community banks build truly inclusive cultures, where everyone feels like they belong? We asked three leaders in the field.

Making change, slowly but surely

Paige Kindle, marketing product specialist at $1.4 billion-asset Community Financial Services Bank in Benton, Ky., is one of these leaders. She realized her workplace needed to take a closer look at diversity, equity and inclusion, and she wanted to play a role in making that happen.

“We did take pride in the fact that we were majority staffed by females,” Kindle says. “We had plenty of women in leadership roles; we had a couple of women on our board. But that’s kind of where the conversation stopped.”

“I think a lot of people have this preconceived notion that DEI is just about race. And I’ve made a very conscious effort to explain to everybody that it so much bigger than race.”

—Paige Kindle, Community Financial Services Bank

Kindle wanted new hires to feel welcome, all team members to feel included and all perspectives to be heard. To that end, she and her colleagues set up an internal focus group that met monthly, starting in January 2021. It was conceived as a safe space for open and honest conversations about what inclusion might look like for the community bank, as well as a place to share life experiences. They adapted an existing diversity survey, filled it out themselves, analyzed the results and then sent it to the whole bank. It was a process that generated, according to Kindle, “some real raw and honest feedback.”

As a result of that feedback, Community Financial Services Bank is taking a closer look at organizations and underserved communities it hadn’t been involved with before. Last August, for example, it became the first financial institution in its region to take part in the Annual 8th of August Emancipation Parade. Held in Paducah, Ky., the festival celebrates the freedom of enslaved people in western Kentucky that has been a tradition since the 1860s.

“[We] all have different perspectives, we all have different backgrounds, we have different experiences, but how do we still value and welcome that in this space, and still get the work done in a respectful and equitable manner?”

—Misti Stanton, Mercantile Bank

The community bank has also taken a hard look at its workplace culture for opportunities to become better. In March, it brought in DEI trainer Justin J. Grooms for an in-person workshop. Grooms grew up in western Kentucky and understands the region’s political and religious climate, which Kindle believes was essential to the workshop’s success. As part of the process, the DEI focus group assembled a panel of team members including representatives of the LGBTQ community, biracial team members, a single parent, a woman whose husband is paraplegic, an employee with mental health challenges, veterans and faith-based individuals. “Our trainer facilitated the conversation,” says Kindle, “and it was just raw, honest, open dialogue about what their lives are like. It was eye opening for our team.

“It changed a lot of perceptions,” she adds, “because I think a lot of people have this preconceived notion that DEI is just about race. And I’ve made a very conscious effort to explain to everybody that it so much bigger than race. It is disabilities, it is veterans, it is women. It affects so many people, especially from a mental health standpoint, because I think we’ve truly learned over the past couple years that mental health does play a factor in your work, and we are moving past the stages of you leave your personal life at the door.”

Misti Stanton, DEI officer at $5.2 billion-asset Mercantile Bank in Grand Rapids, Mich., stresses the importance of not trying to create a DEI policy that is one-size-fits-all. “I think you run into trouble when you try to design something that fits everyone,” she says. “We all don’t fit in the same size chair. We don’t all like to stand when we work. So really, I think it’s about building the relationships internally with your colleagues to be able to say, ‘How can we create the best environment where we can continue to be the best bank we can? What does that look like?’

“And that means knowing that we all have different perspectives, we all have different backgrounds, we have different experiences,” she adds, “but how do we still value and welcome that in this space, and still get the work done in a respectful and equitable manner?”

A work in progress

There is, Stanton says, a beginning and a middle, but no end, to this work. It’s a work in progress. “We don’t expect perfection, we expect effort, we expect respecting who we are and how we do business. It’s about how we continue to bring that collectively together to do the things that we want to do, to make sure we’re creating opportunity for our customers and for our colleagues.

Stanton says the ongoing work of inclusivity is different than any other maintenance work, such as annual budgeting or assessing policies and procedures. “This is part of who we are,” she says, “and if you want that to be part of who you are, it’s a continual process. There’s no ‘we made it.’”

In short, Stanton believes, it’s about taking care of each other. “It’s about simply respecting dignity, and ‘I hear you, I see you,’ even if you don’t agree,” she says. “We have a job to do as an organization. And so how do we do that respectfully, even if we don’t agree?”

As with any change, whether cultural or procedural, the process of bolstering inclusivity requires patience. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Kindle says, “and you cannot change some people’s perceptions or their viewpoints overnight.” Instead, she suggests training team leaders to have honest conversations with their teams about what their personal lives look like. “You may think you know what someone’s going through, but you truly don’t know what their backstory is until they tell you.”