Best Banks to Work For

Want employees to feel empowered to make decisions to help customers? Rewarding that behavior is one way to reinforce the message. Here’s how one South Dakota community bank goes about it — in a splashy, Super Bowl-sized way.

The days of having an employee who happily works at the drive-through window for 30 years are over. So what’s a bank to do about its branch staff now? Bank of Tennessee has some ideas that it expects will appeal to millennials.

The new owner of this Miami bank might be from Chile, but it sure knew how to create warm feelings with the employees it acquired. Instead of cutting back on benefits, it added some new ones — including a cash bonus paid for life events like having a child.

United Community Bank of West Kentucky took the harrowing experience of one of its employees as an opportunity to improve the benefits it offers.

Culture is key at Washington Trust, as it is at many of the 75 banks in our Best Banks to Work For rankings. Having a custom word to describe its community-oriented philosophy helps fuel conversations about it, and letting employees personalize the meaning (no scripts here) fuels a sense of empowerment and enthusiasm.

Here’s a community bank that is growing goodwill with local residents — literally. The staff at an Independence Bank branch in Hopkins County, Ky., tends an acre of farmland before and after work, with their crops going to help feed the needy.

Safety first, counseling and maybe massages later. For most banks, the goal after a robbery is to restore normalcy. But how they go about it varies, from requiring employees to return to the scene to enlisting colleagues who have had a similar experience to provide support.

The 75 banks that earned a spot on our fifth annual ranking of the Best Banks to Work For could inspire you with their ideas for creating a culture of both positivity and high performance.

Acquisitions are disruptive by nature, but some banks excel at maximizing M&A value by minimizing friction. Here’s what the active acquirers among our Best Banks to Work For know that others might not.

The Best Banks to Work For study is a collaboration between American Banker and the Best Companies Group, which conducts extensive employee surveys and reviews employer reports on benefits and policies.