Boosting employee engagement is a challenge that continues to evolve as new generations make their way into the workplace. Having data that can identify how to best boost engagement is incredibly helpful, but that data needs to be measuring true engagement. It’s also important that your credit union actually do something with that data in order to see results.
This is not softball stuff. When replacing an employee costs between 30% to 200% of their salary, you darn well want to keep them engaged with your credit union or organization.
Host Sarah Snell Cooke talked with Bluepact Strategy Group Chief Culture Officer Lynn Heckler live at the GAC a couple weeks ago. They discussed how credit unions can continue to maximize employee engagement through a data-driven approach to people. What’s that mean? WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW!
Did you miss our recent virtual roundtable, From Disengaged to Driven: Strategies to Energize Your Credit Union Team? Here’s your chance to catch Lynn and our other experts’ presentations!
Read the Full Transcript:
Disclosure: Transcript is automatically generated
Sarah Cooke 0:00
Hello and welcome to the 2025 GAC. I’m Sarah Snell Cooke, your host, The Credit Union Connection. I’m here today with the lovely Lynn, Lynn Heckler, with Bluepact Strategy Group, and she’s going to tell us about that, which is her new consulting firm. Lynn, why don’t you give us your background, and the company?
Lynn Heckler 0:21
Sure. So first of all, thanks for having me, Sarah. I appreciate it. And I really grew up in the talent space, and for the last 22 years in the credit union industry. And my background is really strategic, human resources, culture, talent management, all things people. I mean, I’ve really dealt with every piece of people strategy my entire career. So I retired back in March. I said I retired, and then I refired, took a, took a few weeks off, and then I’ve been working with a group of amazing women, and we formed a consulting firm called Bluepact Strategy Group. And essentially we are a woman owned business. There’s four partners, and we work at the intersection of employee insights and consumer or member insights. We built some proprietary tools to mine that data, bring the insights together, analyze it, and then help credit unions and other financial institutions create strategic roadmaps so they can align their brands and their internal culture. So I’m doing a lot of work on the people side. I have partners that work on the marketing side, and they can do everything from a rebrand to original marketing strategy and positioning, but most of the work that I’m doing is really on the employee and organizational culture side. So like, the kinds of things we’d get into would be culture transformation, employee engagement, work, employee experience, work, all this stuff I love to do. So yeah, it sort of, it’s sort of my dream job.
Sarah Cooke 2:08
And I could tell by the way you were talking on our round table the other day.
Lynn Heckler 2:14
That was so much fun. Thank you. Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
Sarah Cooke 2:18
Yeah, but I’m glad you were able to join us. Why don’t you give us, maybe the bullet points of what you talked about as far as organizations and how they’re able to help boost employee engagement?
Lynn Heckler 2:29
Sure, I’d be happy to so last week we did through CU Connection, a wonderful roundtable. And the perspective that I took, and there were others that took it from a different perspective, is really what are, first of all, what isn’t? What is employee engagement, and how can organizations best position themselves to maximize employee engagement? And honestly, the first thing I talked about was really understanding what engagement is and one engagement isn’t, and making sure that you’re actually measuring engagement when you when you decide to go down this path. So there’s a lot of instruments out there, but the reality is, there are some true drivers of engagement that are very different from employee satisfaction. And just make sure that you’re you’re working with an organization or a survey tool that measures true engagement. And the other things that I would mention are the reality is that it’s about doing something with the information that you get from your employees. So it’s one thing to survey employees, and it’s another thing to actually move the needle on engagement. And so it’s really critical to make sure that you’re doing the action planning at the departmental level, to move things forward from an engagement perspective. So those are just like some of the highlights of the things that we talked about.
Sarah Cooke 3:58
And there’s got to be so much complexity today, because you still have boomers working, you still have Gen X working for another 10 or 15 years, then you’ve got the millennials and the Gen z’s, and we’re probably going to come up with Gen Alpha before too long. How do you create engagement or engagement processes that build all those?
Lynn Heckler 4:21
So that’s a really great question, and some kind of the neat thing is, the survey tools that we’ve built take generational differences into account, and so we’re not we’re not working with like, anecdotal data about what boomers like and what Gen X and what Gen Y likes, we’re actually able to segment the data that we gain from your employee base and your consumers in a generational perspective. So the first study that we did was actually in the hospitality industry. Story, and it was about trust, and what trust means, both from an employer perspective, but also from a brand perspective. And we were able to take that data and really refine it in terms of what it means, what trust means to the different generations, and it’s very, very, very different. You know what, what trust means to a boomer versus what trust means to Gen X? So, so yeah, for us, it’s really…
Sarah Cooke 5:28
Gen X don’t trust anybody.
Lynn Heckler 5:31
I know! For us it’s really everything we do, everything we do is insights based and truly taking a data driven approach to people. And we found that it’s extremely effective.
Sarah Cooke 5:44
I’m gonna flip the coin on you a little bit. So employee engagement is kind of like one of those soft, fuzzy things. Yeah, it’s not, but it is. So how do you tie it into the financials when you’re trying to sell it to your C suite?
Lynn Heckler 6:02
So you’re not giving me any softballs today, right? I’m only kidding, Sarah. So, so first of all the the data exists out there, the research exists to be able to tie engagement to higher productivity, better innovation, better retention, all of that has been proven. So my advice is, use the data, use the research that exists out there. You know, Gallup and and a lot of the larger research organizations have made the business case for engagement years ago. You know, we know that that that information has been proven, you know, has been factually proven. So if I were, you know, starting out to try to make the case for improving employee engagement, I would go right to that data and use it.
Sarah Cooke 6:53
Awesome. So thank you so much for joining us. I’m gonna let you have the last word. What would you like to part our credit union audience? Words of wisdom you’d like to part with today?
Lynn Heckler 7:06
Thanks. So from my perspective, really, having been in the people’s side of the business for as many years as I have, I think that it is the overlooked and often the secret ingredient to success, credit union success, particularly merger and acquisition success, you’ve got to pay attention to the culture, to the employee experience, because that is what drives your brand. That is really what makes your brand and your credit union.
Sarah Cooke 7:38
And tells a story. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Lynn Heckler 7:41
You’re welcome. Sarah. Thank you.