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Nationwide has launched a groundbreaking HR tool that proves a direct link between HR and sales.
The building society's planning and development team discovered the link between people management and its product sales after analysing data from a mix of HR indicators, a staff attitude survey, sales figures and extensive customer research.
The findings are already being used to overhaul the company’s training strategy and John Wrighthouse, Nationwide's head of planning and development, claims the project represents a significant step forward in the use of HR metrics.
“People talk about metrics and the links between staff and customer satisfaction, but we’ve found a direct link between HR measures and sales.
“I went to the board last month and I was able to show them the value of personnel and the effect HR measures were having in numerical and financial terms,” he said.
Nationwide has been collecting data on HR since 1993 in areas such as staff retention, training and length of service but it is only over the last year that it has carried out more detailed analysis to demonstrate HR’s impact on sales.
Wrighthouse said HR will be able to use the figures from the project, called Genome, to justify investment in areas that might not otherwise be considered to add value.
The company has already made changes to its training courses for area managers in response to Genome data showing that a 1 per cent increase in staff satisfaction with training and development equates to a 2.3 per cent increase in sales of personal loans.
“We found that if our branch staff were satisfied with training, for example, they sold more personal loans and according to the findings if we increase our average length of stay we can expect sales to rise by as much as 11 per cent,” said Wrighthouse.
