The Company

DE SHRM: We appreciate the opportunity to chat with you today about the role that human resources plays at Wilmington Trust. Let’s start with the company itself.

Would you tell us about the company today? It’s hard not to notice that, despite the consolidation in the financial industry, you’ve maintained your independence.
 
I. G. Howard: We have about 2,475 employees in three different businesses. Our executive leadership team, and I’m one of its ten members, and the board of directors, agree that it’s in the shareholder’s best interest for us to remain independent, and continue to be a very steady, growing company.
 
We have three different business units with very different kinds of opportunities that complement one another. When the economy is good, certain parts of our business benefit. When the economy is softer, other parts of our business benefit. The idea is balance.
 
Our objective is to grow steadily year over year. We’re not interested in the volatility that comes with growing 25% one year and losing 20% the next year.  We provide shareholder value through steady growth and paying dividends. The company has increased its dividend every year for the past 25 years. There are very few companies in that space.
 
We are by far the largest retail bank in Delaware and growing in the Mid-Atlantic region.
 
We’re also one of the fifteen largest wealth management companies in the United States.
 
The third business is the corporate trust business, in which we help large companies manage corporate assets effectively. In this small niche, we are one of the top providers in the world.
 
We have offices in California, Vermont, New York, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Georgia and Florida, and international offices in Dublin, London, the Cayman Islands and the Channel Islands. About half of our staff work in our retail bank, and the other half is the other businesses.
 
Your career

DE SHRM: Would you tell us about your background—how you got to where you are today?
 
I. G. Howard: I, like many people, didn’t come to human resources having planned to get here. I started out as an elementary school teacher and liked teaching, but really didn’t like the administration that went with it. So I went back to school and earned a doctorate in adult education, because I liked teaching and hoped that I would find an environment for adult education—without the administration. Somewhere along the way, I got derailed and ended up in a corporate training job.  
 
My career started in corporate training, using my academic background and my experience in education and translating them to the corporate setting. I spent three to four years overseeing management development and executive development. From there I moved for the company into a very small group of people dedicated to human resources strategy. And then I was exposed to executive recruiting and a little bit of compensation. Employee relations was integrated into several of the positions.

Inadvertently I was qualifying myself as a generalist, and eventually deliberately sought a generalist role. My career advanced from an individual contributor generalist, to managing a group of generalists, to head of human resources in insurance companies and banks and investment firms.
 
Wilmington Trust is a place that has brought all of that together for me. We are a bank and wealth management firm. The terms, the vocabulary and understanding of the client, the vision of how to approach the client and how to serve them are all familiar to me. It makes it very easy to think about how human resources needs to relate to the businesses at Wilmington Trust.
 
How long have you been here?
A little over four years. For Wilmington Trust that’s not very long at all. Our average tenure of employees is close to 12 years, and our turnover rate for the last five years has been around 12 percent. For a company that is in large part retail bank, that is a particularly marvelous track record.
 
Tenure of just four years makes me still a wet-behind-the-ears kid in this institution. Our longest serving employee has about 63 years of service, and we were discussing recently what milestone gift we want to give to the group of people who are celebrating 50 years in the next year or so. Wilmington Trust really has quite a different kind of workforce than a lot of other places.
 
The culture at Wilmington Trust

DE SHRM: Apparently Wilmington Trust does not have the issue of breakdown in employee engagement and trust.
 
I. G. Howard: Well, every company has that issue. I wish that we were immune. One of the things that I have focused on since joining Wilmington Trust is trying to help articulate and bring to front of mind, for both human resources and leadership across the company, the notion of “the pact” with employees. It means that everyday we are buying from employees their creativity, their focus, their commitment to customer service, their specific knowledge and skills, their energy and enthusiasm. The company in return needs to provide a number of things, both tangible and intangible, such as compensation and benefits, career opportunity, training, access to new experiences, an opportunity for good working relationships that create positive social environment and, frankly a reputation. It’s really a quid pro quo. All of those things are what the company gives the employee in return, and that is “the pact.”
 
All or some combination of those things are important to employees, and when the company falls down on supplying its part of the deal, then employees may begin to fall down on supplying their part of the deal, and in fact leave us altogether. That’s how we keep a mental checklist of what are we doing. And not just do it, but make sure that employees understand that they’re getting “the pact”.
 
How do you know when the company is starting to fall down?
By and large employees will tell you. My email volume may go up and have specific messages about people being unhappy with things.
 
We do employee surveys. Based on the items that we can compare to in our first survey in 2003 and our 2006 survey, our employees are more positive about nine of the ten clusters of questions and factors. So that tells us that we are doing some things right, and we are communicating effectively. There certainly are areas for additional work and the survey will help us on that, too.
 
Part of it is our trying to keep a good ear to the ground and give staff opportunities to express their concerns both directly and anonymously. We have diversity coaches, for example, who are not human resource professionals. They are volunteers and their focus is to help increase thought about inclusion of employees and to serve as a sounding board to employees when they don’t know what to do or are frustrated. The coaches become a conduit, not revealing confidences, for concerns and feedback on things that people are appreciating.
 
We also have an anonymous opportunity for people to raise issues and concerns through a third party. It originally was put in place about three and a half years ago at the beginning of Sarbanes Oxley for people to report anything they felt was misdeed or mischief. In fact a very large percentage of the reports have been employee relations issues that people didn’t feel that they could go to a staff member relations person about. We then, through this third party web-based service, correspond with the employee anonymously.

We always invite them to come in confidence to a staff member relations person and get more face-to-face coaching, because it’s hard to coach someone by email. Most of the people do come forward because they feel comfortable. Again, these opportunities give us insight when there a concern or an issue.
 
And, of course, staff member relations tries to keep an ear to the ground by talking to people, having lunch with folks for no reason and being out there. We have individuals who, as human resource generalists, are identified to a specific work group. Their responsibilities include staff member relations and staffing.

Generalists are encouraged to spend as much time as they can with people in their work population. Because they are assigned to several hundred people, they certainly don’t have lunch with everyone in the group every week. But they do try and get out, not only responding to concerns and issues, but because their role is also part of staffing. That gives them a positive reason to be talking to people. It’s important to position folks as, “I’m with you through thick and thin.”
 

Human resources at Wilmington Trust
 
DE SHRM: On a strategic level, where does human resources fit in?
 
I. G. Howard: As you can see, our business is based in large part on expertise, and that means experienced knowledgeable people in the workforce. We are very much a company of knowledge workers, and our strategic positioning is very much one of service and relationship with the client.
 
It sounds a little trite these days, with everyone claiming that, but in fact Wilmington Trust is actually very well known for client service and relationships. Thus, the people are a strategic asset, and this company recognizes that fact. It’s easy to see that the tenure of people is an important business feature that we have. “The pact” I was describing earlier—getting folks to come and bring their creativity, their commitment, their willingness to continue to learn and stay up-to-date, be creative and client-service oriented—is a real strategic issue for us.
 
Is human resources positively perceived throughout the organization?
I hope so. I hope so. I’m sure there are times when people aren’t happy to see us because it’s not a happy time for them. But by and large I find the people in human resources are trusted, and to me maybe that’s a more important measure.
 
Trust is the foundation of positive perception. People come to human resources with hard things to talk about, and that can’t happen unless there’s some trust. Requirements for people in human resources must be confidentiality and impeccable character. They cannot be perceived in anyway as being dishonest or disloyal themselves, or likely to do anything for a reason that’s self-directed, as opposed to for the good of the employee and the organization. Employees must trust their motives.  
 
These things need to be in place before somebody will step forward, and we have lots of folks who come to the human resources staff with difficult issues or serious concerns. That would be my measure of how human resources is positively perceived—people are willing to come to them with tough issues.
 
What is Wilmington Trust’s most challenging human resource issue these days?
Because business is based on expertise, it’s attracting the right folks—attracting and retaining—but in particular attracting the right folks. It’s not that we’re trying to recruit hundreds of people; it’s more that we’re trying to recruit a few people with particular knowledge.
 
We are not a company like Citibank or DuPont with worldwide name recognition. When a headhunter calls with an opportunity at Wilmington Trust, and the candidate is relatively local, people know that Wilmington Trust is a great company. But if the person is a little farther out of the zone, people don’t know us.
 
Depending on which business and role we’re recruiting for, we often compete with nationally or internationally known firms for expertise. We try to pluck out the one right person who is interested in what we have to offer—quality lifestyle, working at a company with an excellent reputation, of a size that gives an opportunity to make an impact, to know people and to be a real part of leadership in crafting ideas. That’s when we recruit for positions in Delaware.
 
If we’re recruiting for an office in California or New York, lifestyle doesn’t change, but we can say that you would be in a company that’s small enough where you can have an impact; you can be somebody whose idea is heard and can form the thinking of what needs to be done. Your clients will be brought to a place where they are somebody. We will know who they are, and they will have a team devoted to them. And that’s not just a slogan--we have relationships with our clients that last generations, and that’s what we want. The candidate’s reputation with his or her clients is enhanced by the experience they have with Wilmington Trust.
 
The human resources profession

DE SHRM: Let’s change direction, and look at the human resources profession. What do you see as the top three issues facing us today?
 
I.G. Howard: As I mentioned earlier, the first issue that’s facing both Wilmington Trust and my colleagues in most other companies, as well as recruiting, is the retention challenge.
 
Our second issue is the expense of employee benefits. The combination of health and welfare and retirement is expensive. Tax laws are constantly changing, which makes it challenging to represent your shareholders properly while at the same time help your employees. A related issue is how to package and communicate benefits to employees so they appreciate what that they have and take full advantage of it. We need to tie it back to understanding what the company is doing on their behalf—strengthen “the pact.”
 
We need to make sure that staff members understand what we’re doing. It’s money truly thrown out the window if people don’t understand what benefits represent. We offer some of the best health and welfare and retirement benefits, and it does us absolutely no good to spend that money if people perceive us as a company that offers only good benefits. It’s understanding what’s most important to them and valuable to them, making sure that those are areas where we have superior programs, and then also making clear that they understand those, that they’re using them.
 
And the third issue is the development of employees. The world is changing, and technology is big part of it. Technology enables productivity in the workforce. It helps them be aware of what they need to understand, such as the products we have to offer and how to best serve clients. The question is whether they understand the tools they’ve been given, and how to use them in their role. How do we encourage someone to take a class for personal development? We can put knowledge in front of people, but unless they really embrace it, understand it, consume it and digest it, you’ve not succeeded as a company in developing your workforce and enabling them to advance. I don’t mean their career path, but that they continue to be really effective in their job as the world changes around them.

What advice would you give to a recent graduate beginning an HR career today? 
As you consider a career in human resources, ask why it is it that you are interested in the profession. Is it because you like people? I guess there’s a piece of me that says that’s probably a necessary characteristic, i.e. that you find people interesting.
 
Be realistic about what you’re taking on. The role of human resources is a balancing act. It includes the responsibility that the company has to the shareholders and the responsibility that the company has to managers to help them make the business work well and be effective. At the same time it includes the responsibility to the individual employee that they are treated fairly and are heard. There is also a social responsibility that the company has as an employer to be a decent employer. Human resource professionals are in the midst of that. It’s a little bit like being in a Waring blender.
If people come into the profession because they like talking to people, they probably won’t like the job very much, because they’re really missing the second and third leg on the stool.
 
The second piece of advice is that there’s absolutely nothing you can do better to qualify yourself than to understand the business that you work in. Of course, staying current with and continuing to expand your understanding of human resources is important. But if you are the most knowledgeable human resource person in terms of employment law in the entire world, but don’t understand the business, you will be ineffective. You won’t understand what the manager is saying to you when they say, “I have this problem with this employee.” All you will understand is the legal restrictions about what that manager can and cannot do.
 
Closing

DE SHRM: Let’s change direction entirely with one last question. If you had an opportunity to choose an alternative path to human resources, what would it have been?
 
I. G. Howard: Well, aside from the fact that I am completely lacking the necessary talent, I enjoy writing, and always dabbled with the notion that somehow I would have a career as a writer, writing fiction—probably relatively light fiction. When I look at the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books in middle age, I see that there’s hope that I’ll have a second career!
 
DE SHRM: We have enjoyed talking with you very much. Thank you for providing us an insider’s view into Wilmington Trust, its human resources group and your views on the profession itself.
 
I. G. Howard: I enjoyed our conversation, too.