Welcome to: The World's Greatest Bank

Today, not only is Umpqua 13th on Fortune’s list of the Best Companies to Work For, it has also been voted the top bank in Portland for the last three years and is 5th in market shares alongside big players Wells Fargo and Bank of America. But back in 1994, when the bank was a mere six branches, CEO Ray Davis got all the managers together and told them, ‘We’re creating something new here. I want you to think outside the box. I want you to put Umpqua on the map. Do something extraordinary.’

“I think the story that best exemplifies that is what happened after that meeting, when Ray got back from a business trip he took to New York,” Barbara Baker, EVP for Cultural Enhancement at the bank, tells me. “He's driving down the road and he sees this huge banner saying, ‘Welcome,’ he drives another third of a mile and a second banner says, ‘to the,’ and he drives another little bit and another banner says, ‘world’s greatest bank.’” In case you hadn’t guessed, the final banner led right to one of Umpqua’s branches.

The branch manager responsible, who today is SVP of the company, had some explaining to do. Ultimately though, he’d done exactly what his CEO had asked him to – he’d done something crazy. These days, the message on the banners has become a tagline for the company. “It’s more a state of mind,” explains Baker. “We don’t use it very much in our advertising, but it is present. If I answer the phone, I’m going to say, ‘Welcome to the world’s greatest bank.’”

Responsible for all the traditional HR jobs at Umpqua: payroll, benefits, employee relations and recruiting, Baker is also responsible for Umpqua’s world class training program, located in southern Oregon, five satellite training programs and, finally, culture. The culture of Umpqua may be at the end of a long list of responsibilities, but the list is definitely a victim of ‘last but not least;’ in fact, Umpqua culture should be top of the list in terms of priority.

“We don’t look like a bank inside,” Baker revels. “ We want to look like the lobby of a fine hotel. Everything's clean, everything's slick, you're not going to see a lot of posters all over the place, you're going to see a TV or a media corner. We have areas where people can come in and check their email. And way in the back, you might find teller row, which really doesn't quite look like teller row.” She adds that you are even going to get a tray with a chocolate on it at the end of your transaction. Umpqua, Baker notes, is all about the brand. The company doesn’t even refer to its branches as branches, but stores. “We actually have people walk into our stores, step back out again, look up and then come back in. ‘Am I actually in a bank?’”

Making a mark

Key to Umpqua’s success is to give customers a differentiated, unique experience. This is how Baker qualifies her role: “If I'm giving our associates a differentiated experience, we just happen to think they're going to go on and give it to the customer. My role is to make sure that all the associates at Umpqua are getting an experience that recognizes their lives outside the bank, that they want to be connected to their communities and support their families – or whatever their lifestyle is.” This may sound like a mean feat, but Baker is definitely the woman for the job.

With over 25 years of HR experience, and all but six years of these in banking, Baker has a strong background in employee relations. “For almost my entire career, I have worked on acquisition and mergers from the HR perspective,” she adds. Her career began in San Francisco where Baker worked with a savings back, from there she came to Oregon as HR Director for First Interstate of Oregon (now Wells Fargo), where she held responsibility for five states. “I was in the merger and acquisition team with that merger into Wells Fargo,” Baker notes. “It was at that time I decided to take my skills outside banking to broaden my knowledge base.”

She returned to the banking sector six years ago when she joined Umpqua. “When I came here in 2002, the bank was just starting to grow and when a lot of my friends said, ‘Where are you going to work?’ And I said ‘Umpqua Bank,’ they’d said, ‘You're kidding me!’ or ‘That's so tiny!’ to which I’d always say, ‘Yes, but we're going places.’” And go places the bank certainly has.

“I think there's two things I'm particularly proud of with Umpqua,” says Baker. “First and foremost, we've been able to grow from $1 million to $8 billion and sustain the culture of the bank; that is extraordinary. The other is based on the feedback from a survey in 2003 about training. We set up our training program, and in three and a half short years we went from a ‘nothing’ training department to being recognized as the 56th best training company in America by Training magazine. That is astonishing.”

There’s a real sense of strong, sensible growth at Umpqua. Talking with Baker only highlights this further. “Every time we do a merger and acquisition, I have a whole team go in and before the names change on the door, we’ve gone through an extraordinary amount of training on Umpqua’s culture, our history, our value propositions and our products. So on Day One, we just feel that we are ready to be Umpqua Bank.”

Of course this beg the question, is everyone ready to buy into all that Umpqua entails? “You'll always have a few people that say, ‘This isn't for me,’” explains Baker. “We have had people leave and then a year later ask to come back. But we're not perfect – we don't keep 100% of the people.” Though saying this, Umpqua’s history is impressive regarding retention. Baker believes this success lies in the fact that the bank carries out due diligence up front and, before even considering buying a bank, Umpqua goes in questioning whether these customers are going to like Umpqua’s style and whether the employees are going to like their style too. “We do all that during due diligence and make sure that we have the best possible outcome for everyone,” notes Baker.

Take a moment

Umpqua’s style is predominately about fun. What’s more, becoming a part of that style is equally as fun. At nine am every day, every employee is involved in something called a ‘Motivational Moment.’ Even Baker herself, along with CEO Ray Davis and others on the executive floor, participate. “We do fun things,” Baker details. “It's just a chance for everybody to get together for five minutes and tell a motivational story.” By reading aloud letters from customers or bragging about fellow coworkers, Umpqua creates a unique space unlike any other organization, where every employee is included. Baker illustrates how it works by telling me about, what I think, is one of her favorite Motivational Moments on record: “We wrote down the keys to Umpqua’s culture – ‘I am connected, I am different’ – and we put them on white pieces of paper, wadded them up like snowballs, and then had a snowball fight.” Sounds pretty fun. Then, after picking it all up, employees got the chance to tell each other why they’re different, why they’re resilient, why they’re connected. “It’s just fun stuff. We’re not trying to cause controversy here; we just want to have fun with it,” Baker explains.

It may be a lot of fun, but by contrast, Baker is keen to point out that there is always a focus on how serious it is too. “I do an internal survey every year to see how things are going,” says Baker. “I don't like big employee opinion surveys where you answer 50-100 questions. It takes up a lot of time and employees have high expectations at the end of it. I prefer something smaller, so it is only 18 questions.” Baker says that these questions take a short time to fill out and receive a great percentage of respondents. “Really it is an interesting amount of information that sets the goals and the direction, at least from an HR perspective, for the company for the following year.” Combining this sense of fun with a serious edge is present through much of what Umpqua embodies: most notably when Baker talks about Connect hours.

“We let employees have an additional 40 paid hours, on top of their vacation, to serve the community.” The only requirement is that these hours must be done during bank time – not the weekends and not the evenings. When Baker talked about how her friends had been surprised to see her working for such a small company, these days they have the opposite reaction. “They say, ‘Oh, you work for that cool bank that has a great reputation for the community. Do you have any job openings?’ So we really take this seriously, and I think the community looks at us as something special.” The reality is that the 40 hours of community work each employee does thrills Umpqua customers. “Sometimes customers will walk in and say, ‘Where's John?’ Someone will tell them that he's doing his Connect hours, and when we tell the customer what Connect hours mean, they go, ‘Wow! Well, I won't mind waiting in line a couple more minutes if I know he's out helping the community.’” The community of Umpqua is very strong. If someone leaves the company because their spouse is being relocated, for example, an exit survey is carried out. “Nine times out of 10, the top reason they are sad they’re leaving is because of the people.” It is fair to say that Umpqua stores, and the employees working in those stores, consider themselves to be a family. “It’s a really tight-knit group. People cover for each other, especially when someone is putting in their Connect hours.”

Perhaps most importantly for Baker, Connect hours are a key way in which she is able to ensure that associates at Umpqua are getting those experiences that recognize their lives outside the bank. “When we introduced the Connect program in California we were at a town hall and greeting the new employees,” she explains. “Ray, in his speech, talked about Connect. When he’d finished an employee raised her hand and asked, ‘Are you telling me that I can spend 40 hours volunteering in my kid’s school?’ And when Ray told her she can, she said, ‘Can I volunteer those hours in my son's classroom?’ And Ray said, ‘What other classroom would you rather be in?’”

Baker explains again that when people fill out Umpqua’s internal survey, while one of the highest rated things is the people they work with, the other is the Connect program. While doing their community hours, employees cover for each other and when they come back to the store they share their stories. Baker shares one particular story with me. She explains that one woman at Umpqua, in her 40s, who has never been married and doesn't have any kids, aunts, uncles, sisters or brothers, and so no real reason to volunteer at local schools for example, was wondering what she could do with her hours. The employee, who raises agility dogs, had found a program that was looking for a volunteer with a dog because a psychologist had found a group of disabled children that, for a multitude of reasons, were not talking would communicate with a dog. The employee got her dog authorized and volunteered two or three times a week and the children started talking to the dog, and then they started talking to the employee. “It is amazing the good work that she has done to help those children have the confidence to speak.”

Baker explains that Umpqua’s Connect hours are about finding things that combine your passion with helping the community in any way an employee can. Some of the stories Baker hears or reads about, she can only describe as heartbreaking. “It is great to see how much people care about what Umpqua does.”

Recognizing culture

Further to this, one of the biggest parts of Umpqua’s DNA is the extensive reward program. Every store has a checking account so that when an employee is working side-by-side with another Universal Associate, the term Umpqua uses for a teller or personal banker, and thinks they’re doing a great job, they can go and buy their coworker a Starbuck card for $10, a bouquet of flowers or whatever suits.

Recognition works on many levels at Umpua, from this simple method within stores, right through to Umpqua’s Celebration of Excellence awards. “Our Celebration of Excellence is like our Academy Awards,” jokes Baker. “In 2002 when I heard I was a presenter, I’ve to be honest with you, I thought, ‘Is this hokey?’” It is not hokey. Umpqua even gets the statues from the same place that the Oscars do. “It is brilliant. And such a hoot! People come dressed in tuxedos and long dresses, and there are presenters and there’s screaming and clapping when a coworker gets recognized for the great work they’ve done. It is amazing.” There are about 20 awards in total – Best Store Manager, Best Universal Associate, Best Loan Officer, Department Manager of the Year, Store Manager of the Year, and a whole plethora of other categories. “I just happen to present the Culture Award. The award that recognizes the person exemplifying our culture better than anyone else.”

Most of all, the people take it really serious at Umpqua. “I think what really gets me is when people fill out the application for Oregon's Best Company or when I do an internal survey,” says Baker. “You wouldn't believe how many times people put in their comments, ‘I am so proud to work for the world's greatest bank.’”

Catch the train

Barbara Baker on training, the Umpqua way.

“We have a training university in Roseburg, Oregon, but it’s not as cost effective to bring people from Napa CA or Bellview Washington to Roseburg. We like everybody to come into the university at least once, but we have trainers in satellite training departments and we take the training to the people. The other thing we found was that we were having too high of a turnover in universal associates, our combination teller/Personal banker position. So we developed an eight-week intensive course to train the UAs in product skills, culture and customer service.

The training program and its expansion and the delivery mechanism helped in sustaining the culture during a high-growth merger and acquisition over the last five years. Now on the horizon, we continue to have the challenge of maintaining the culture; so this year is everyone on my staff, whether you're a payroll clerk or you're in the culture team has committed that by the end of the year, we all will have done 300 culture visits to every store and department. I'm on the road right now, going out and canvassing the territory because you can't do it just once. If you don't keep it on people's minds, if you're not getting out there and visiting them, then the culture might wane, which is exactly what we don’t want. This year there is a big push on our culture orientation, taking it back to the people that haven't heard it for a while. We hear it every day in our work, at town halls and in meetings, but actually to visit in person is our big goal for this year.”