Cultivating Culture: F&M Trust's Employee Engagement Journey with Dr. Karen Carmack

Better People Podcast

Dive into the incredible transformation of F&M Trust with Dr. Karen Carmack, as she unravels their path from low morale to record earnings through a robust employee engagement strategy. Discover the power of listening, strategic initiatives, and transparent leadership in propelling organizational success.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Better People Podcast:

• Impact of voice on employee morale.
• The strategic plan led to an engagement initiative.
• Surveys shed light on cultural shifts.
• Leadership training drives improvement.
• Financial success is tied to engagement.

Resources:

• F&M Trust
• MidAtlantic Employers’ Association (MEA)

Connect with Dr. Karen Carmack:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our host, Holly DePalma

• LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 3:33 - Well, prior to that time, we weren't doing any kind of assessments. We were experiencing turnover, and we were experiencing turnover of more of our key personnel, which was concerning. We were also getting feedback, and you can just feel it in an organization. It becomes palpable that, you know, employees are dissatisfied. And it wasn't a very good feeling. So we were trying to figure out what we can do to improve that. And that's why this focus on employee engagement got on the board. I think initially, you know, we were thinking about, okay, let's find out what satisfies our employees. But I think as we work through it, we took it in a whole different direction, which really had a broader impact on the organization.
• 6:26 - And once I got the charge, I thought, okay, all right. Who needs to be involved with this? Obviously, I was thinking we needed some broad perspectives and also broad representation from within the organization. So what I did is I looked at our employee base and I said, okay, we need the different geographies of our organization represented. We need different levels of hierarchy within the organization and different departmental representation. So I ended up through that process identifying an initial group of 14 employees that I tapped and asked if they would be willing to jump into this with me.
• 14:13 - There were initially, and maybe there's pockets of it today, but initially I think people were wondering, are they really serious? Do they really want our true opinions around what's going on? I think there was a little bit of skepticism initially, but thankfully they took the plunge with us and gave us some feedback.
• 23:43 - We were just a couple of points away from where we would wanna be there. I can't say that was the way it was for the first survey. Our scores weren't all that great that first year, but that in itself was a gift because it gave us all the feedback that we needed to do all the things that we've done over these years. But the true bright spot within all of it has been our leader engagement survey and the scores that we've had within it, because that first year that we did it, we saw a need for improvement.
• 34:48 - And so, you know, the beauty with all of this in parallel that I haven't talked about yet is that our financial results have also improved significantly. We've had record earnings during this period of time. You know whether you can completely correlate it to this effort entirely, you know, there probably are other factors, but I firmly believe that everything that we've been doing to get employees aligned with the culture, aligned with the mission engaged, and getting that discretionary effort has helped us reach some of the goals that we have and blown some others out of the water.