Paper on Challenges and Solutions: Navigating Human Resource Dynamics in Athena Bancorp's Growth

Introduction

Business-oriented people have various traits that are common to one another (Schlesinger & Abbot, 2019). Often, they remain confident and optimistic about what they are about to do; they do what they did. Additionally, they portray self-discipline while they are open to new ideas that they transform into business activities. Beth Daniel is a fascinating businesswoman and a banking professional. Since she founded Athena Bancorp in 2016, Beth has had passion, strong ethics to work, creativity, and competitiveness that helped the bank to grow from 5 branches (2016) to 15 branches in 2020 (Schlesinger & Abbot, 2019).

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The drastic growth is a product of her business belief that community banking could revitalize areas where they undertook businesses. Additionally, Beth remained to hold the idea that the United States' Financial Systems, ill-served some portions of the American population. As a result, Beth's desire remains to help the ill-served portions of the United States population while building a business characterized by growth and profitability.

Beth Daniel's Philosophy on Banking

Besides all these, the growth of Athena Bancorp was due to Beth's philosophy. She believed that the banking industry's failure as termed 'Big' resulted from customers' lack of centricity (Schlesinger & Abbot, 2019). In her discretion, Athena Bancorp’s Bank employees need to spend much of their time in roles that directly relate to their customers. It is Beth's great belief that customers are the most valuable asset in banking. A conducive environment needs to be created for them by providing immediate feedback in case of inquiries. Above all, customers' education by managers on the system of banking was important to reduce scary in the industry.

The Importance of Human Resources in Athena Bancorp

Atlas Staffing (2020) provided that businesses need to focus on adequate human resources for some reasons. They are responsible for the creation of workplace culture while they emphasize on employees' rules on employment. Additionally, they help in the understanding of the diversity of workplaces. Finally, human resources eliminates the uncertainty of employees and strengthens the importance of employees' training and development.

Attaining the centricity of customers in Athena Bancorp require the involvement of Human Resource. Customers' experience and satisfaction occur when customers' needs, tastes, and preferences are adequately addressed. As a result, it requires highly qualified and experienced banking professionals to staff all the branches of the Bank. Human resources is responsible for hiring staff in adequacy, thus reducing the staff's over-working, which results in low employee morale and eventually, increased turnover. In such a case, productivity by the staff is usually low, meaning that Athena Bancorp cannot achieve excellence due to unattained goals and objectives. It is therefore important to appreciate the importance of human resources in hiring experienced staff to better serve the Bank's customers who in turn get satisfied as they contribute to the attainment of competitive advantage and customers' centricity strategies.

Critical Human Resource Activities to Focus on Human Resources

Human resources conduct several critical activities (Agarwal, n.d.). Staffing activities by human resources entails identifying talents through recruitment and fulfilling talent needs, contract termination, and the maintenance of hiring practices (Lumen Boundless Business, n.d.). They also negotiate salaries and benefits of the employees on behalf of business entities. In addition to this category of activities are compensation and development activities. Human resources set levels of compensation to match markets while negotiating the rates of the insurance of health and the plan(s) of retirement. Furthermore, they train recruits for their respective roles and provide internal training to keep their employees up to date in their work areas. Other activities conducted by human resources include health and safety and employee-labor relations.

Challenges That the Human Resources of Athena Bancorp Currently Face; Signs

There are numerous challenges that human resources face (Atlas Staffing, 2020). Such challenges may include adapting to innovation, workforce and development training, and compliance with both the laws and regulations, in Centralia. In this regard, Athena Bancorp is in both drastic growth and expansion. As a result, a challenge in managing changes is currently being faced by its Department of Human Resources.

The business's strategies are also changing in addition to relevant internal processes and structure. Athena's growth, followed by little staff addition, caused under-staffing, overworking its staff, lower employee morale, less productivity, and increased turnover. Generally, the growth compounded the problem related to staffing (Schlesinger & Abbot, 2019). The employees' engagement declined consecutively in the last quarters of previous quarters of 2020. As a result, employees were pushed to the breaking point, characterized by numerous tasks and work pressure (Schlesinger & Abbot, 2019).

Since the employees are understaffed, the available staff is made to work for longer hours than expected. As a result, Athena Bancorp's human resources receive numerous claims from its employees, requiring compensation for their time. This, therefore, sets the relevant department to remain in a continued struggle with how best it is needed to structure the compensation of employees. Additionally, the struggle is high in structuring big payroll budgets compelled by competitiveness with large banks. Better and fair pay to an organization's employees is essential for employee retention (Atlas Staffing, 2020).

A challenge in recruiting highly talented employees is human resources. The centricity of customers requires highly talented, qualified, and experienced staff to ensure that customers are educated on the banking system; thus, they obtain satisfaction. Talent attraction entails an enormous investment of both money and time. Therefore, this specific bank's human resources finds it challenging to balance between hiring such talented people at the right time and keeping its activities and processes running. The worst of this is that they cannot determine such staff's fitness and qualifications until they work with them.

Consequently, human resources experiences a more significant challenge to retain its experienced workers. This is driven by the fact that the bank’s human resources face stiff and fierce competition for talented and over-qualified employees in banking areas. Additionally, the bank is in the start-up stages; thus, it cannot afford either big retirement and expensive insurance plans and employees' budgets. Due to these, employees have negatively impacted its outcomes while their turnover rate increased dramatically.

Compliance with both the laws and regulations about employment falls among the human resource department's significant challenges. This is necessitated by rapidly changing laws of employment, and increasing struggle within the business. Employees tend to ignore such laws in the belief of their inapplicability to the banking industry. The human resource, therefore, is subjected to various audits and lawsuits as they involve their employees. Other challenges faced include leadership development and educating employees to understand their benefits packages.

Rating

By considering the above changes, I rate the challenge's seriousness as below the medium: 2 (serious). Athena Bancorp and the relevant human resources are far from overcoming such challenges considering the global economy's dynamic nature and the inflation rate.

A Plan to Address the Challenges

Atlas Staffing (2020) developed solutions to significant challenges facing business enterprises and especially, their human resources. When used simultaneously, such solutions serve as a plan that enterprises, such as Athena Bancorp, can use to resolve their human resource-related challenges. The human resource should ensure that it is always in compliance with all federal, state, and local employment laws, more so, those about hiring and the wages paid to employees. The challenge related to managing changes with the Bank requires a developed focus on communicating change benefits to all employees and setting inclusive meetings related to changes experienced. Team understanding of why and when changes occur increases employees' likelihood of getting on board (Atlas Staffing, 2020).

Additionally, Athena Bancorp needs a leadership development program as employees are part of their culture, improving their motivation, morale, and productivity. Furthermore, it becomes very crucial to recruit senior leaders to mentor their subordinates. Alternatively, online training is preferable for saving time and money. Overworked employees' compensation requires Athena Bancorp's human resources to develop an employee reward system for excellence. Programs aimed at providing incentives may significantly influence the employees' morale and motivation. Employing talented staff and employee retention requires respective staffing companies that offer qualified employees and staff onboarding. Above all, clear goals and objectives, once set, encourage employees, innovation, and business excellence.

References

Agarwal, R. (n.d.). HRM functions: 7 Major functions of HRM (With diagram). https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/retailing/hrm-functions-7-major-functions-of-hrm-with-diagram/48323

Atlas Staffing. (2020). 10 of today's common human resource challenges. https://www.atlasstaffing.net/blog/10-todays-common-human-resource-challenges

Lumen Boundless Business. (n.d.). The Functions and Goals of HR. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-business/chapter/the-functions-and-goals-of-hr/

Schlesinger, L.A. & Abbot, S. (2019). Athena Bancorp. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56256