United Way: Helping Credit Union Employees Improve Member Relationships

Joanie Davis, Community Initiatives Director at United Way of Henry County and Martinsville, was looking for a way to train financial services professionals to easily understand the emotional and behavioral side of finance in order to better relate to financial clients. The organization’s credit union wanted to provide training that was new and out of the box, focused on understanding people rather than revolving around technical concepts and numbers. The United Way trained the credit union’s employees in professional development workshops using Money Habitudes to explore how habits, attitudes, values and emotions play into financial decision-making. The ultimate goal of the workshops? Helping credit union employees improve member relationships.

Outcomes

Since implementing Money Habitudes into the professional development workshop, the United Way of Henry County and Martinsville has been able to:

• Get employees to see how their own attitudes toward money may be impacting their behavior and attitudes toward credit union customers.
• Provide a common “money language” among credit union employees that has an emotional component to it.

How They Use Money Habitudes

• The United Way facilitated mandatory professional development “lunch and learn” workshops for the credit union’s employees at all of its branches.
• Hour-long classes were based on doing and discussing the Money Habitudes activity to determine each employee’s own money personality profile.
• The goal of the workshops was to get the credit union employees to better understand how they see and relate to money in order to better understand and relate to the credit union’s customers.
• Davis made a chart of all the credit union employees’ dominant Habitudes. As so many of the employees had similar money personalities, it opened up discussions about how employees often saw and reacted to money one way while their customers would make financial decisions differently.