Huntington Bank's CHRO has spent years building a 'colleague-centric' culture

When Rajeev Syal joined Huntington Bank as CHRO in 2015, he had one very large task on his to-do list: transform the bank into a "colleague-centric" organization. 

Nearly eight years later, he's still chipping away at that goal. 

"We can start and frankly end the conversation right there, because the work around colleagues will never be complete," Syal says. "We're on a journey, and it's one that evolves every year." 

For the 20,000 employees of the Ohio-based organization, which operates across 11 states in the Midwest, the ongoing cultural evolution has required buy-in from all of its team members, who are encouraged to support and check in with each other. It's an encouraged practice that started during the pandemic, but one that continues to build systems of support for colleagues.

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From a leadership perspective, Syal and his team used the challenges of the past three years to build a stronger Huntington for the future, bolstering the employee experience with supportive benefits for caregivers and mental health needs as well as expanded PTO policies. 

Syal recently spoke with EBN about creating a cultural makeover, the pandemic lessons that will help propel Huntington into the future, and what will keep the organization competitive in 2023. 

Back in 2015, how did you start to shift the organization's cultural focus toward colleagues? 
We had to establish a level set of principles across the company. At the time, we had 14,000 colleagues — how do those 14,000 colleagues think? Do we think the same? Differently? What do we think about our company? How do we express our culture, purpose, and values? Do we understand the vision? The first step to answering those questions was to have conversations and listening sessions to understand what our colleagues, tenured and new, felt about the company. We wanted to hear all voices before recasting our purpose and values. 

What did you learn from those listening sessions? 
We didn't actually have a unified purpose. We knew we wanted to do good, we knew that we supported our communities and we knew that we supported one another, but we couldn't really synthesize it. We also had a list of nine values at the company — things like trust, integrity. But they were all things that, in a professional environment, are table stakes. So we instead asked our colleagues, what do you need to have to work here? And they came back with: the Huntington spirit. And that we ended up defining as a can-do attitude, service, heart, and forward thinking. And those still stay true today. 

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So after years of working to grow this kind of people-focused, unified culture, you had to face the tumult of the past three years. How did you respond? 
I think we made it because of those principles we had developed as part of our cultural journey before the pandemic happened. We went back to them at every turn: looking out for each other, serving our communities, our businesses, our colleagues. A can-do attitude might mean one thing if you're working in a brand in a normal environment. But a can-do attitude in a pandemic might be calling a colleague just to see how they're doing. It was about looking out for each other. 

How did Huntington leadership encourage and empower the team to actually do that, and check in and take action and support one another? 
We had to create new and immediate routines. We had leadership team meetings twice a day — one at the start of the day, and one at the end of the day, both focused on what we need to do, what we're hearing from management teams, what concerns and fears our colleagues have. From there we created new programs that looked out for their mental well-being, their physical well-being, their families. We started offering child care, elder care, all these programs that were really implemented because of the pandemic. 

Are those programs still in existence today? 
They are. The pandemic changed the way we work, and it changed the way we look forward. Everything is a finite resource, so we knew that some things would be temporary, but we knew that others would be long-term. Other programs evolved — during the pandemic we offered emergency time off to create flexibility for colleagues who needed to support their family members, now we've blended that into incremental PTO for 2023, so whether you have an emergency or not, the time is available to you. 

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During this time, where did you as a leader turn for support? 
The peers that I have in regional banks and money center banks, we coordinated a group of about two dozen of us, and still to this day, every two weeks, we have a practice where the CHROs dial up, get connected for 45 minutes, and go through topical issues of the day. That was a precedent moment — normally you wouldn't call someone up at another bank and see what's going on. But while we don't share proprietary information, there are a lot of similarities in what we do. And it was a network and a respite for all of us to get our bearings and make sure we were getting peer feedback. 

As we head into 2023, how is Huntington approaching talent recruitment and retention. 
Our philosophy is to retain first, then attract. It's important to retain our best colleagues, and we do that through three different indices: culture, trust, and engagement. And we measure those through surveys, listening sessions and manager interactions. From there, we can attract people, because it comes down to what kind of company we are and if this is a place people want to grow their careers.