A clear and demonstrable link between business strategy, people practices and member outcomes at Mine Wealth + Wellbeing have led to improved fund performance, increased funds under management (FUM) and higher member retention levels, according to its head of people and culture, Melissa Baker.
Mine Wealth + Wellbeing, which is the industry super fund for black coal mining industry, has grown from $3.5 billion in FUM and 51,000 members in 2005 to almost $10 billion in FUM and more than 71,000 members today – despite a significant contraction in Australia’s coal industry in recent times.
The fund works to a rolling three-year strategic plan (which is reviewed and revised annually, if necessary) against a broader five-year window to prepare for longer-term trends, according to the fund’s head of people and culture, Melissa Baker.
Key elements of Mine Wealth + Wellbeing’s strategy include developing and sustaining sufficient scale; maintaining and improving its customer-first philosophy; and offering products and services that genuinely add value for customers and improve their retirement outcomes, she said.
The fund places significant emphasis on a customer first philosophy, and it employs a live net promoter score (last calendar year this score stood at +44) which is continually monitored to assess customer service in its contact centre, for example.
Baker explained that finding and keeping the right people (its employee retention rate was 93 per cent last year) has been critical in delivering on the commitment to customer service and the fund’s wider commercial success.
Potential employees are assessed for technical skills, culture fit, and – most importantly – values alignment.
“Technical skills are a start, but that will just get you the invitation,” she said.
“Most candidates have a people focus to some degree as part of who they are, and people can be taught to hone this skill.
“But what we are looking for is people who have this focus as part of their fundamental values.
“You can go laterally and work in a different job family, get experience there and then go up a level of work”
“So in the interview process, we have a lot of questions around scenarios. These are not textbook scenarios.
“They will tell you a lot about someone’s behaviour and the choices that they make. Do they choose the customer over the business process or do they choose the dollar outcome?
“It’s not about being judgemental, but rather to see what their preferences are.”
Mine Wealth + Wellbeing has customer-first competencies built into all of its job descriptions as mandatory competencies, and Baker said there are five core competencies around customer understanding, and five further levels within each of these five competencies.
“This helps us with understanding what levels of customer understanding are required, so someone in the contact centre, for example, needs a high level of customer understanding,” she said.
“On another level, we use these competencies to help build capability and develop talent in the business through creating a pipeline based on who exhibits particular competencies really well.
“And then we are able to utilise these people to champion different competencies.”
Having such a highly refined level of detail around customer service also supports the fund’s attraction and selection processes, and a member of the people and culture team participates in all interviews.
While Baker acknowledged that some businesses don’t do this as it can be a labour intensive exercise, she said this helps ensure there is consistency around values and culture fit in hiring and overall engagement (which stood at 90 per cent in last year’s Great Places to Work survey, and the fund has been in the Great Place to Work Institute’s top 50 best companies to work for over the past seven years).
“Technical skills are a start, but that will just get you the invitation”
At the same time, she said diversity is also important as this is important in bringing different viewpoints into the business to help drive innovation.
Another important strategy for Mine Wealth + Wellbeing’s people and culture team has been its focus on job families and critical sets of skills and competencies the business needs in order to be able to achieve its strategy.
The job family methodology is then dovetailed with levels of work, from level one (such as administrators and coordinators working to one month time spans), to level two (generally technical specialists or frontline leaders operating at a six month timeframe), level three (usually manager type roles with A to Z responsibility of a business unit, operating to a one year timeframe), level four (executive level roles operating to three year timeframes with significant responsibility around strategy) and level five (CEO, on a five year time horizon).
“When you overlay job families with talent life cycles and levels of work, we can really clearly see who’s responsible for what activities in what timeframes and how it fits into the people strategy,” said Baker.
“I think this helps drive our capability and it has been really pivotal in getting a clear line of sight between roles, and also providing people with a map of career opportunities. So, you don’t have to go up rungs and levels of work.
“You can go laterally and work in a different job family, get experience there and then go up a level of work,” she said.
“It also recognises different people have different capacities in terms of their thinking.
“So, at level three, four and five it’s really important that people have advanced systems thinking and be able to see multiple outcomes.”
For the full interview with Baker and story on how Mine Wealth + Wellbeing is taking an integrated approach to growth, see the current digital edition of Inside HR magazine.
