The holiday season is in full swing, meaning employees are cashing in their PTO and vacation days before the new year begins. This can be challenging for managers as they shift resources and ask others to wear a couple extra hats for a few days. For financial institutions, however, a lack of resources can prove challenging with the daily demands of ACH, wire transfers, debit cards and other payment systems due to the client impact or time sensitivity of a task.
Worse yet, what if your financial institution only has one or a few individuals as subject matter experts for these payment systems? For example, that one person everybody calls for help on digital payments who is relied on heavily for any system conversions, mergers and acquisitions or has expertise other staff do not. What if that person becomes ill or takes their experience and knowledge to another job opportunity? Suddenly, you’re scrambling to find someone internally to replace them short-term and have realized that you have created what I call a “single point of failure” situation.
Here are a few ways to detect if you may have a “single point of failure” on your hands:
- Certifications and training opportunities have only been granted to one person.
- One individual is working a tremendous amount of hours during system conversion or mergers and acquisitions and seems to worry about taking any time off.
- Other departments, banking centers and clients only want to contact one person.
- One individual is directly managing multiple payments departments by themselves.
- Organizational chart lacks back-ups for your individual expert.
If the above sounds like a situation at your organization, here are some tips to consider:
- Review your payment systems for opportunities. There’s a good chance that a system may be lacking something or a particular feature has been turned “off” causing excessive manual procedures to be in place. “Single points of failure” (your individual expert on staff) often must create system workarounds and only they know how to update them.
- Increase payment certification and training opportunities for more of your staff and support them along the way. (EPCOR will gladly help you with that!)
- Cross-train to create adequate back-ups. You could create a badge system that gives employees credit for cross-training goals to help entice participants to become much-needed payment systems back-ups.
- If you’re a manager, have more faith in your direct reports. Delegate, delegate! Stop doing clerical duties assigned to the staff, as they’ll become too dependent on your daily assistance. Employees can perform more duties and have more job knowledge than you may think.
- Meet regularly with other departments and banking center management who are reliant on digital payment processing. There’s a good chance that they’ve become too dependent on the “single point” and have possibly given them extra daily duties to help them or their clients. Find out why they are so reliant on the individual, whether that’s a training issue with other employees, system inadequacies or the “single point” is the only one who wants to be contacted. Communicating with other departments and banking center management can create an understanding of each other’s needs and create a cohesive unit to join together in implementing changes.
- Document everything within your procedures with great detail. In case you have a “single point” situation and are struggling to cross-train or create back-ups, at least you have the procedures in place for continuity. If you let a “single point” leave and nothing is documented, this could impact the controls you have in place.
- Consider requiring (or at least strongly encouraging) vacation time with full disconnection from their workplace (phones, email, etc.). Nobody should worry about taking vacation days, and it’s also a perfect time to test your cross-trained back-ups on their job knowledge and abilities.
As a financial institution, work to avoid these pitfalls by building a team of specialized individuals to handle system conversions, mergers and acquisitions or complex payment questions, and provide a group email or phone number areas could call for assistance. What happens when that one important person gets burned out or leaves? Your house of cards could quickly fall apart.