How Can Change Management Further Payments?

Once you’ve decided to create a payment business, your organization will undergo several critical changes: expanded responsibilities, increased regulatory scrutiny, and external audits. Accordingly, a new to-do list will form: you’ll likely need to provide underwriting, assess risk management, improve your technological capability, and bulk up your customer service, to name a few new tasks. Of course, you’ll need to grow your team to do these functions. When managers get to the point of actually creating jobs and working out the “boxes and lines”–an organizational chart–they often plow ahead while ignoring several fundamental principles of organizational design.

This is a shame, because these principles will make the difference in the key markers of success: job satisfaction, low turnover, and a high performing team.

So, what are the principles that managers often miss? And how should you implement them?

1.Career Pathing

Career Pathing is the mapping of career trajectories in your organization. You’ll want the team you build to support the success of your payments business (or any new business, for that matter). It’s also important for someone at the bottom of the chart to have the appropriate skills and abilities for their position and be able to see themselves working up the chart.

Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith, Senior Vice-President of Global Research at PageUp, identifies three major questions to which the answer must be “yes”:

• Are there real career opportunities available within your organization?

• Are these visible to your talent pool?

• Are there support structures that facilitate internal career moves?

When career pathing is done thoughtfully, with the entire team in mind, employees experience more job satisfaction and you’ll have lower turnover.

2. Span of Control

As your team grows, the number of people your leaders manage rises. As a lot of companies learn the hard way, one can only manage a certain number of people effectively. An all-too-common story: a team grows, and it seems to make financial sense to simply put more workers under a high-performing manager. As the company’s capabilities get more complex, managers are juggling larger teams, team members are performing higher-risk tasks, and the manager is stretched thin. He or she begins making mistakes, and things start getting sloppy.

While there’s not necessarily a strict formula about a manager’s span of control, you should consider whether the work is highly skilled and complex, and whether it’s uniform. A guiding principle I recommend is the less skill the work requires, and the more uniform the work, the more people a manager can take on.

The opposite is true, too. The higher level of work you’re managing, the more complex and strategic–most importantly, the higher risk–the less people you’re able to effectively manage. As managers move up in the organization, they are often saddled with supervising strategy, escalation risk, and other high-concentration tasks. The percentage of time that they’re able to spend micromanaging is less, while the tasks they’re meant to be supervising are more and more complex.

The upshot here is that as a competent, even talented, manager rises in a company and oversees more strategic work, they’re able to manage fewer people. While this may sound like common sense, most companies don’t follow this guiding principle because they are trying to keep costs down by giving people more work. Overloading your managers may keep your costs lower in the short term, but in the long term, you’re putting your company at risk by losing effective oversight on complex issues. This is problematic at any company, but in the payments business, your risk goes up as your company grows. As you process more money in payments, you’ll draw more attention from regulators, increasing the potential for higher fees, penalties, and potential losses.

3.Taking Stock of Your Resources

The next principle to take into consideration is simple: you’ve got to take inventory of the work tools and skills you’ve got on your team today, and add those that are missing. Once you grow your team, you must commit to supporting them. Work tools you’ll need to be sure are in place include job aids, training, standard operating procedures, and policies.

Many decision-makers don’t prioritize training for their employees because it cuts into work time, threatening productivity on the surface. But regular and high-quality training pays off in spades, improving retention, effectiveness, and efficiency. Most importantly, the right training will reduce compliance risk and equip employees with the necessary skills to reduce risk in other areas. An added benefit is that employees will see that you value them and that they are worth the investment of training. They should be able to envision themselves having a long term career at your organization. In order to do that, they need to be able to see clearly how they might rise, and how the skills you’re teaching them will empower them to do so.

RPY can support you in implementing each of these best practices as you stand up your payments business. Our series of training courses will educate your team on everything from Anti Money Laundering (AML), ethics, customer service, and Unfair, Deceptive or Abusive Acts or Practices (UDAAP).