Nearly all branch employees responding to a recent survey said they would prefer to use a mobile app to manage their schedules, including swapping shifts and communicating scheduling preferences.
According to the third annual Zebra Reflexis International Branch Banking Employee Survey, one-third of survey respondents said current scheduling processes made them less satisfied, while 20 percent of respondents had considered quitting their jobs due to scheduling issues.
The study was conducted in February by third-party research firm Momentive and included feedback from more than 1,300 bank branch employees in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy and the Netherlands. Zebra Technologies offers a platform – Reflexis for Banking – that provides workforce management and communication tools.
The survey found that 95 percent of respondents preferred a mobile app to manage their schedules, a nearly 10-point increase from last year’s study, Zebra said in a statement, while only 38 percent of respondents reported being able to swap shifts from their mobile devices.
Having greater flexibility and control over their schedule was important for most respondents, with 95 percent saying this would make them more likely to stay with their current employer.
The survey also found that the majority of branch leaders spent between nine and 10 hours each week assisting with the schedule, with 60 percent using in-house or manual scheduling processes.
About half of branch leaders said they did not have customer appointments fully integrated into their forecasts, Zebra Technologies said, possibly leading to longer wait times and unprepared staff.
“More than three out of four banks (78 percent) don’t have a software solution to assist with task management and employee scheduling,” Brian Wallace, general manager of banking at Zebra Technologies, said in the statement. “Using intelligent software to digitize key processes across their operations, banks can increase the efficiencies of their workflows, reduce cost, risk and errors and enable their employees to have more time to build essential relationships with their customers.”
The survey also asked branch managers about risk and compliance and found that sharing customer information on non-sanctioned channels was up 10 percent from last year, with 61 percent of bank employees sharing customers’ personally identifiable information outside of bank-approved communication channels, Zebra said. Among all survey respondents, 40 percent reported using non-sanctioned communication tools such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and texting to collaborate with colleagues.
