How to Encourage Innovation Beyond the C-Suite

Peek inside a branch of $1 billion-asset Olympia Federal Savings in Olympia, Washington, on certain days before work hours, and you’re likely to hear music and see a group of recently fed adults playing high-energy games. These are employees building skills like professional communication, networking and leadership while also mastering the bank’s consumer, business and loan basics.

They might be practicing asking customers questions like, “What is your future plan for your business?” while dancing in two lines to “Soul Train,” for example. Maybe they are running relays back and forth from a tablet of paper where they list ways a banking product could benefit customers, or even shouting common objections to a product as they toss the ball to each other in a circle.  

Olympia Federal’s C-suite didn’t come up with the idea for these 45-minute, voluntary “Skill Drills.” Rather, they were born in the mind of Kaitlyn Koeller, branch manager of the bank’s downtown Olympia location. She wanted to find an engaging way to help customer-facing bank employees hone their skills and product knowledge. “It is essentially the most non-meeting type gathering that I could possibly create,” she says.

The Skill Drills, held four mornings a month either in a branch or virtually, became reality in August 2024 with help from Koeller’s fellow branch managers and the support of the bank’s decision-makers.

Community banks that regularly solicit input and pursue promising ideas can reap plenty of benefits. They can put themselves in a better position to attract and retain employees, work more efficiently and even grow the business. We talked with four banks that prioritize employee innovation to learn more about their efforts.

Paths to innovative ideas

Being intentional about meeting with staff is one way executives can show that they value employee input. At Olympia Federal Savings, president and CEO Josh Deck holds small, casual gatherings called “Java with Josh,” where he seeks perspectives from individuals across departments, levels and tenures.

At one of these meetings, Koeller shared with Deck that she had been thinking about the bank’s need to remain relevant and grow business amid the economic changes of the past few years. 

“I had mentioned to [him that] we are having to figure out how to do something different, but all of us here are trained to do the same,” Koeller says, “so how are we going to change our knowledge base to be able to rise to the occasion of what is now required out of us?” 

Koeller felt Deck heard her and that it was the moment “the wheels started turning.” She was determined to come up with a solution. 

Would Koeller have felt comfortable presenting her thoughts to Deck outside of a Java with Josh gathering? She says yes, but she wouldn’t have bothered him. These dedicated meeting times created the ideal opportunity for her to share a viewpoint that would inspire her to create Skill Drills.

Today, Koeller says other managers have told her they’ve seen a rise in the skill level and confidence level of employees who participate in Skill Drills. 

“They are able to be more confident in presenting recommendations or helping people,” she says of the participants. Some have even gotten promotions. 

Laying the foundation for constructive conversations

At $2.6 billion-asset Emprise Bank in Wichita, Kansas, chairman and CEO Matt Michaelis hosts gatherings called “Conversations That Matter.” He began holding these voluntary, hour-long discussions with eight to 10 employees last May. They meet in person or remotely, and Michaelis hopes to ultimately meet with the bank’s entire team.

Conversations That Matter provides an opportunity for Michaelis and employees to connect and ask each other questions. “The stated intent for this was not to necessarily be an idea generator,” he says, “but I think the more trust, transparency, more of a relationship and openness there is, I would certainly hope that would encourage people to feel more confident in sharing ideas they may have around things that could work better in the company.”

He sees employee input as critical to Emprise Bank’s growth. “They’re with customers, they’re overseeing processes, they see where there are challenges, they see opportunities for us to do new or different things that would help our customers or places and processes that we could be far more efficient,” Michaelis says. 

The community bank also encourages employees to speak with their managers when they see opportunities to do things differently or better, Michaelis says. He wants team members to feel comfortable having those conversations, but Emprise Bank also has a robust listening strategy for idea submission that includes focus groups, listening sessions and its new annual engagement survey.

“You continue to test and learn and see what works and try something else,” Michaelis says. “Hopefully our team sees that it’s valuable and sees us continuing to make attempts and investments around ideas and just the general connection, communication, transparency, trust building, all of that.”

Easy avenues for thoughts and feedback

The annual employee engagement survey at $220 million-asset The Hicksville Bank in Hicksville, Ohio, has proven to be a useful way to get ideas to bubble up. For instance, employees have proposed that the community bank give staffers one paid eight-hour day off during their birthday month and eight hours of paid time each year to volunteer on their own. 

Bank management got on board with both suggestions and, when announcing the perks, made it clear they came from the survey. “We make sure to tie it back so [employees] know that we are looking at [the survey], and we do care what you say,” says Carley Harvey, assistant vice president and director of human resources for The Hicksville Bank.

Not all employees wait for the anonymous survey to pass along recommendations. “We find that a lot of people will honestly just come and tell us what they think or share ideas that they have,” Harvey says. 

She notes that having an accessible leadership team contributes to that comfort level. The Hicksville Bank’s management team regularly visits branches to speak with employees. Harvey and other managers are encouraged to do the same. 

“There is an emphasis on building relationships with people,” Harvey says.

Cheerleaders for innovation

At $990 million-asset Clear Mountain Bank in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia, a team known as “Embers” incentivizes employees to share input, figures out how to implement some challenging but promising suggestions, and comes up with its own solutions that can benefit the community bank. 

Embers began organically in 2020 as a group of four non-C-suite members from different areas of the bank who were tapped to vet vendors. (One member, Tim Broyles, has since become the chief experience officer.) Dave Thomas, president and CEO of Clear Mountain Bank, subsequently asked the foursome to meet regularly to explore ways the bank could innovate. 

It’s the Embers team that is looking into the new federal regulatory system for stablecoin cryptocurrency that was created by the GENIUS Act, for example. 

“That’s one of those innovative things and it’s like, gosh, a bank would never touch that,” says founding Embers member Chase Thomas, VP of finance and analytics. “But in the Embers team’s mind, we’ve got to talk about it, because we don't know if it is or is not feasible for us in 10 years.”

Embers also seeks to foster a culture of innovation in the bank. “We want everybody to be an innovator,” Chase Thomas says. Clear Mountain Bank has made it very easy to offer ideas.

Employees can share suggestions when Dave Thomas visits with different teams in the bank before or after hours. They can call Embers members with ideas or submit them to the community bank’s Innovation Hub channel in Teams. In the past three years, Embers has even held annual innovation challenges with incentives to participate, such as raffle prizes.

One idea that emerged from an early competition was to teach kids about personal finance. For a time, Clear Mountain Bank gave presentations about financial literacy in schools and partnered with a financial literacy app. 

Those efforts ultimately led the Embers team to recognize a new business opportunity. In 2023, the community bank launched a checking account specifically for high school and college students.

Another idea, which Chase Thomas introduced, has improved efficiency. With help from a vendor and interns from a nearby university, Embers has shepherded the introduction of robotic process automation (RPA) to the bank. Software bots are now handling some tasks that don’t require a judgment call, such as cleaning out old referrals that bog down the computer system.

Chase Thomas says the bots have enabled Clear Mountain Bank to save 197 human days of work since the program launched in 2022. He says, “We’re using [RPA] to free ourselves up to do something that’s more meaningful for our customers.”

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