Allied Irish Bank

Introduction

Creating a new set of non-financial measures was a central plank of an HR strategy designed to foster a genuine performance-driven meritocracy at Allied Irish Bank, Ireland's leading international banking and financial services company with 24,000 staff in 800 offices worldwide. As the Bank's Head of Strategic Human Resources, Mike Lewis found that making them stick was a gritty challenge. An important factor in his ability to do so has been adopting formal measures and indicators that allowed AIB to benchmark its people policies against those of global exemplars – and then publish the results to the Bank's stakeholders.

Non-financial measures at AIB: underlying assumptions

Lewis took over the top HR role at AIB in 1997. The influence of HR in the organization had declined, and HR was not represented on the Group Executive Management Team, or the divisional management teams.

AIB formally mandated Lewis to reposition HR to:

-  Align people and culture to the business strategy

-  Increase staff motivation and commitment

-  Shift the focus from administration to provide more strategic HR support to the business

-  Centralize HR activities to obtain the right efficiencies and consistencies in its operations

-  Increase customer and shareholder value (through all the above activities).

After conducting a formal consultative programme, which involved staff across AIB through a series of workshops and collective interviews, Lewis and his team identified a series of actions to achieve these aims. "We needed to improve our overall people management capability. We needed to support major change. We needed to grow talent and manage succession more effectively. And we needed to develop the role of HR as a strategic business partner," he says.

The three most important measures introduced by Lewis were:

-  A performance management process that measures and rewards financial results, customer satisfaction and staff engagement

-  A comprehensive annual staff survey that encompasses the whole organization, and that generates a People Focus Index

-  A People Focus Index (PFI) that allows the Bank's HR policies to be measured and benchmarked against those of high-performing global exemplars.

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