Transcript: How Flourishing Culture Facilitates Business Growth // Laura Jones, Shon Cass, Texas Security Bank

The Flourishing Culture Podcast Series

“How Flourishing Culture Facilitates Business Growth “

March 7, 2022

Laura Jones and Shon Cass

Intro: Would you ever ask yourself the question, how would a flourishing workplace culture impact the performance of my team or my organization? Well, today we'll talk with two business leaders who outline the steps they've taken to build a flourishing workplace, facilitating their bank’s growth from start up to $1 billion in assets in just 14 years.

Al Lopus: Hi, I'm Al Lopus, and you're listening to the Flourishing Culture Podcast, where we help you create a flourishing workplace. The problem employers are facing today is that more of our employees are quitting than ever before. Some people are calling this the great resignation. And now with millions of open jobs, how can churches, Christian non-profits, and Christian-owned businesses face this tidal wave of resignations while attracting new, outstanding talent? And we know that having a flourishing workplace with fully engaged employees is the solution. I'll be your guide today as we talk with a thought leader about key steps that you can take to create a flourishing workplace culture.

So, now let's meet today's special guests.

Along with serving Christian ministries, we work with marketplace organizations to assess employee engagement and the health of their workplace culture. In these organizations, excellence is a result of strong values and integrity in their leadership. And if you're a Christian leader in a marketplace organization, how do you value your employees and offer them opportunities for, let's say, uplifting growth or life-giving work? We'll explore flourishing in a business setting in today's podcast.

And I'm delighted to welcome Laura Jones and Shon Cass, senior leaders with Texas Security Bank located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. This bank has been serving businesses in Texas since 2008—yes, the financial recession—and has been intentional about developing a flourishing culture for their employees. So let's meet them and learn about how they're committed to growing in excellence and shared values in this marketplace organization.

Laura, Shon, welcome to the Flourishing Culture Podcast.

Laura Jones: Thank you so much for having us, Al.

Al: Yeah.

Laura: We’re excited to be here.

Shon Cass: Well, thanks for having us, Al.

Al: Yeah, all right. Well, I’m looking forward to our conversation and learning how you guys have done such a great job over the last three years in building the health of your workplace culture and even what the motivation is behind that.

So, let's start off with some background. Tell us about your role in the bank and how you got connected with us and the Best Christian Workplaces’s Employee Engagement Survey and assessment. Sean, how about we'll start with you.

Shon: Sure. Thanks, Al. So, I am an executive vice president. I'm actually one of the founders of Texas Security Bank. And we were introduced to Best Workplace through our membership. Mine and our CEO’s membership was C12 Group, which is a Christian leadership-advisory group organization. Craig and I have been members of that group for about 14 years, and this is one of the great things that came out of that membership was an introduction to Best Workplace.

Al: Shon, let me ask you, just generally, scope and size of Texas Security Bank, employees, and so on.

Shon: It’s a great question. Currently, I think we’re about 80 employees.

Al: Mm-hmm.

Shon: We’ve got a pretty aggressive growth strategy. For 2022, actually, we’ve got about 19 new positions coming on board, so we’re definitely in a growth mode. In assets, just at a billion in assets.

Al: Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah, great.

And Laura, how about you? Tell us a little bit about your role, and, I guess, we understand how you got connected, but let's talk about your role a little bit.

Laura: I am a relationship manager on the commercial lending team, and Shon and I both are founding members of what we call our Culture and Values Committee.

Al: Mm.

Laura: It's a team that we started about 10 years ago, I think, and what we do is try to follow the Care Matrix, which is another tool that Shon found through C12, where we serve the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of our employees, their families, and our customers. We, through the Care Matrix, are able to find activities and different things we can do to affect all those areas. And Shon brought the Care Matrix and the Best Workplace Survey to us through the CVC team.

Al: Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you.

On our Employment Engagement Survey, your organization has shown that your employees have a high level of trust in leadership and consistently strong commitment to your mission, I'm sure your vision and values. So what are some of the steps that you've taken to build this healthy culture? Laura, why don't you go first? And maybe you'll tell us a little more about the Culture and Values Committee, but, yeah.

Laura: Well, the Culture and Values Committee is actually a team of people throughout each different area of the bank, and it's a volunteer position, and it's just people who care and want to continue the commitment to our TSB, what we call our TSB family. And we have 10 values that are very important to every one of us here at the bank, and we focus on one value every month. We open every meeting with our value, we discuss them, we talk about why it's important, we give examples of it, and our leaders are very committed to this. Their commitment to communication is very important to all of us, to share everything from the top down, what's going on, where we are, what our plan is, what our strategic plans are. And so it helps solidify us as a family.

We also follow the traction model, which keeps everyone on the same page through this communication and the traction model. I’m going to let Shon talk a little bit more about the traction model on that.

Al: Mm-hmm, yeah. Shon?

Shon: Yeah. So, it’s hard to add to Laura’s comments. She’s right on the mark. But I think the key word that she mentioned is commitment. And one of the things that we believe in is, a strong culture doesn't happen by chance. It takes focus. It takes dedication. Basically, it takes a commitment. And from the very beginning of our organization in 2008, we as a leadership team understood that our culture, or better yet, our mission, vision, and values were a critical part of our long-term success. We knew that unless everyone on the team understood the mission, believed in that mission, and more importantly, believed in their part of achieving that mission, that we could never reach the level of success that we wanted. And as Laura mentioned, the Culture and Values Committee, C12, and our commitment to traction, the entrepreneurial operating system, have all been important parts of that commitment to building a strong, healthy, engaged culture.

Al: Yeah. And Laura, you mentioned at the beginning of every meeting—so, leaders are listening—so at the beginning of every meeting—talk about that—you'd focus on or you bring up one value and talk about it.

Laura: Yeah. We have a value that's for the month, and so for the month of February, our value is winning. And we define it. Everybody has it in their office. Everybody has it near their desk, and so everybody could do it. And so someone in every single meeting we have opens with that value. So it's reiterated throughout the month, giving everybody an opportunity to really own it and believe it and understand what it means to every single person within the organization.

Al: Yeah. Great. And I don’t know, maybe, Shon, how did you come up with these values?

Shon: Early on in the development of the bank and, again, through, not only at the time we weren't involved with C12, but we certainly have a Christian-believer background. And so as we sat down and started forming the bank, these values just really came out of our past experiences, our beliefs, on what are the key things, what are the most important things that we need to focus on in order to grow the organization? You know, ironically, these values have—they've changed very slightly since the day we started the bank, and we hold them very sacred. In fact, there's a process we go through to change a value. It can't just be changed. It has to go through a pretty deep discussion. And that's because they're not just values that we hang on the wall. We believe them. We live by them. We make decisions based on those values. And it really helps us run a more efficient organization knowing that we've got that baseline to work of.

Al: That's great. Thanks so much.

You know, Texas Security Bank has been participating in the Best Workplace Surveys for three years now, and even with the stresses of the past two years, you know, leading through a pandemic amongst other things, the employee-engagement levels have continued to improve, which is fantastic, considering the roadblocks that the pandemic has given and so on. So what do you attribute that continued growth to? Are there some specific steps or communication strategies that your leaders and frontline supervisors have used to keep employees engaged in this unusual season? Shon, how about your thoughts on that?

Shon: Yeah. It has been challenging, and I would say that everything that we've talked about to this point, our commitment to an intentional, engaged culture. But again, the last few years have been challenging. They've been challenging for everyone. They've been challenging for us as an organization. We're a commercial bank, and so we deal with a lot of other commercial businesses. It's been a challenge for them.

But as I think about this question, I would say that I would probably attribute a lot of our success in the recent years to the Paycheck Protection Program, or the PPP, loan program. And why is that? Well, as a commercial bank, we pride ourself on building strong partnerships with our clients. And we knew early on that we had to really step up to participate in this program at a high level. And our CEO, Craig Scheef, I give him a lot of credit. He was very instrumental in developing a plan that leveraged every single team member, in some form or fashion, in that process. And so what I mean by that is that lending is a part of our business day in and day out. But during this Paycheck Protection Program, we knew in order to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish and serve the customers that we wanted to serve, everyone had to participate in that lending program.

So, all the way down to tellers were trained on how to participate in a piece of a particular program. And so he communicated the plan, he communicated the importance of the plan, and he communicated very clearly why our participation in that was critical to our mission and to potentially the survival of our clients. I will say that in my 25-plus years in banking, I have never seen a group of people come together and work together towards a common goal as our employees did. And so I believe that played a tremendous role in the engagement. And at the heart of all of this, goes back to that clear, concise, and consistent communication, and that communication was coming from the top down and the bottom up. It was just very fluid communication, everyone having to work at a fast pace and a high level. You know, I am biased, obviously as a founder, but I was just astounded by the collaboration and the cohesiveness of this team.

Al: I really like that, Shon. And so every employee understood what their role was in this and, of course, the life-giving work in a sense as they were helping to really sustain people's lives through this program, weren’t they.

Shon: Absolutely.

Al: Yeah. Right.

Shon: Absolutely.

Al: Wow, that's encouraging. Yeah.

Laura, how about you?

Laura: Well, I’d reiterate everything that Shon said. He hit the nail on the head. The PPP program was definitely what brought our team and kept our team together when we were all working remotely. And it has been quite the challenge over these last two years: people working hybrid, working remote, working in the office, but kind of behind a closed door. So it's been a bit of a struggle. And we have, through our CVC team, we have tried to commit ourselves to providing opportunities for us to kind of stay engaged, whether that be, like, we did our 2020 holiday party. We did not remote, but we all sat in our cars and went to a drive-in theater. We rented out a drive-in theater and had everybody show up, and try to do things like that. We do stuff virtually to try to keep team members engaged and seeing each other. It's getting a little bit better as time goes on. But with Zoom and Teams meetings, it makes it much easier for us to see each other face to face, whether we're not physically in the same location. And that does help foster a sense of team.

Al: Yeah. What an innovative idea. Gosh, that’s the first time I've heard of, you know, during COVID, going to the drive-in theater to have a holiday party. Congratulations.

Laura: Thank you. It was the brainchild of our CFO, who brought it up, and we were like, “Yeah, that's a great idea. Let's try to do it.” And we were able to pull it off, and it was really a lot of fun.

Al: I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.

Female: As we come through the COVID-19 crisis, leaders everywhere are asking, how do we understand the tensions our employees are experiencing coming back to work? How do we keep our employees engaged, hold on to our best talent, and position ourselves to thrive as an organization going forward? If you're looking for a way forward, the Best Christian Workplaces Institute can guide you onto the road to a flourishing workplace.

The first step to begin the journey is our well-known Employee Engagement Survey. This proven online tool pinpoints where your organization is already strong and where you can improve your employees’ workplace experience, resulting in more productive people. That's right. You'll have more engaged, productive, and fulfilled people. Time-consuming guesswork won't get you there. Instead, let us help you with a fact-based, hope-inspiring action plan that only our Employee Engagement Survey and skillful coaching can provide. Sign up now to begin the journey to build a flourishing workplace culture and a thriving organization. Find out more at bcwinstitute.org.

Al: And now, back to today’s special guest.

Well, I'll have to say I don't know that I've heard of many CFOs coming up with those kind of creative-people activities, and good for your CFO. Yeah, that's just great.

Well, you know, your organization continues to grow and expand, and it's really been exciting for us to see, and Cary Humphries, I know who's worked with you, I mean, to see the expansion in a competitive labor market. I mean, banking isn't new, and there's a lot of them, and here you are. You started a bank in the depth of a financial crisis, and you've continued to grow significantly. How do you make sure that new team members that you bring into your culture—and you're going to have lots of them, as you've already described here, in the next few months—what kind of onboarding process helps employees understand your mission, your vision, your values of your organization. Laura, you probably have something to do with this. Why don't you start off for us?

Laura: I think even through the interview process, we talk about the values of our team, at our bank, and how important that is to us. We also provide new-employee boxes when each one of them comes in, and we have our values there, and they're kind of indoctrinated from the very beginning how important these things are to us. With our introduction of every single meeting, you get the importance of the value to everybody else.

And it's interesting because I just did, and it's kind of an aside, but I just talked with several team members in the last couple of days when we were doing some debriefing on our last Survey, and they were relatively new employees. And I asked them, had they ever done this type of survey? And, blissfully, they had at their other location—

Al: Okay.

Laura: —at their other banks. So it speaks well of y’all’s Survey, by the way.

Al: Great. Well, thanks. Yeah.

And Shon?

Shon: So, I would echo what Laura said, just indoctrinating employees, and maybe that's not the right word, but just from early on. But, you know, to take it a step further, and Laura touched on this, is even through our job postings, through our interview process, several years back we introduced another tool that we brought out of C12 called the Ideal Candidate Profile. And what that is is basically a job description on steroids. It not only outlines what the job’s specific duties are and maybe what the candidate's skill set should look like, which is what a general job description would do, but it also outlines what our values are and what we believe good looks like. So from the very beginning, we start to really indoctrinate the employee into our culture. It's not just, do you have the skills necessary?, but do you really understand who we are as an organization and what good looks like?

In addition, our website is not a product-and-service advertisement for the bank. And like a lot of banks, you go to their website, it talks about the accounts that they offer, the loans that they offer. And we have some of that.

Al: Mm-Hmm.

Shon: But really, our website, we redesigned it to really tell our story, who we are, why we chose to open a bank during a financial crisis. It goes back to that mission, vision, and values.

And one last thing I would add is that when our new employees start with the bank, not only do they receive that box, which kind of has a gift in it, has our values in it, has a letter from Craig talking about our organization and about the spiritual aspect of our organization as well. But shortly after an employee starts, another executive and I conduct a history class, if you will. It's an orientation, but it's not an orientation about their benefits. It's not an orientation about how they get paid. It's an orientation of who we are and why we started this organization. And then more importantly, we talk about what part they play in the next chapter of our story. And that's been a critical part of onboarding a new employee is really taking them back to the beginning of our organization, but then also painting a picture of what does the future look like now that they're part of the story.

Al: Yeah, I love that, Shon. Boy, that's fantastic.

Well, you know, you've shown improvement in many attributes of flourishing over the past three years, again year over year over year. You know, what's next for your leadership team? How do you stay energized? How do you keep looking for ways to continue to grow your healthy culture rather than just kind of holding ground? What are your thoughts on this, Shon? Why don't you start off?

Shon: So, it's a challenge. It's definitely a challenge for us. It's a challenge for a lot of organizations. And I think that the word I would use here is complacency. We've got to battle complacency and not let good enough be good enough. We have had relative success on the results of our Survey, but what we can't do is just sit back and let that be good enough. And so one of the things that Laura and I and the Culture and Value Committee do is we spend a lot of time in that data. We spend a lot of time looking at the positive results, and we spend a lot of time looking at maybe the not-so-positive results, and how do we build upon both of those? If we get a great score, that doesn't mean we're done. We've got to continue to work on actions that’ll continue to keep that score high or even grow it higher. And then if there's areas where it's not so high, then we look at action plans to do that.

But you know, one of our core values is growth. And I would say that as long as we continue to strive for growth as an organization, growth of our people, the growth of our clients, you know, hopefully there won't be a lot of room for complacency.

Al: Yeah. That's great.

And Laura, how about you?

Laura: One of the things we pride ourselves on is we’re a work family, and everybody enjoys and generally enjoys working together. There's not a lot of competition between us. It's not, oh, my gosh, they're doing better than me. It's, hopefully, that makes you pull a little harder on your end. But we do enjoy and celebrate each other and constant shout outs and everything else for individual successes. And leadership really tasks the Culture and Values Committee with maintaining and continuing to work with Best Workplace Institute, and they give us the leeway to conduct focus groups or interviews or whatever to see how we can help improve the areas where we see a little bit of a challenge. So celebrate the good, and then try to work and improve the things that you can.

Al: Yeah. And growth is a value.

Well, gosh, this has been a great conversation. It seems like it's almost too soon to draw to a close, but we've learned so much already. And, you know, just looking over my notes, first of all, you're a growing organization, and one of the things that you've done is you've created a Culture and Values Committee. This is a group of people. It's voluntary. They come together and clearly you're working on these things. Another thing that struck me is that you have these 10 clearly communicated values that you start each meeting kind of talking about the value of the month. And winning is this month's value, and growth is another value that you've mentioned. And even how you've grown your culture as well as your business during the pandemic. The examples that you said of the PPP program and how you worked with small businesses and communicated to every employee what their role was in that process so that they understood their role was clearly defined and it gave them a sense of helping and the importance of their work, regardless of their position. But your onboarding process, that's something all of us can think about. What is our onboarding process? How do we propel our values going forward? because especially as an organization changes and grows like yours is. And so communicating those in the interview process. Having employee boxes, that's a unique, positive thing and how important that is and what's in that box. And again, every meeting you talk about a value, the value of the month, and your Ideal Candidate Profile, defining what good looks like. You know, Shon, that was really good. And then an executive briefing, you know, for all onboarding employees of what started the bank, what your values are, and kind of what part your employees play in that. Those are all just great suggestions. I know our listeners are listening. And then I love that, you know, we battle good enough. All of us struggle with that. Are we good enough? And again, each year, looking at the health of our culture is a battle of, well, it's good, but is it good enough, and what can we do to improve and focusing on those action plans? As you said, really bringing the work-family concept together, celebrating each other's gifts. Boy, we've just learned so much. Thanks so much.

You know, is there anything else that you would like to add that we've talked about or something that we haven't talked about? Shon, let's start with you.

Shon: You know, we have talked about a lot, and I'm so proud of our team. I'm proud of what we've accomplished. I'm proud of these Survey results. I'm proud of the work that the Culture and Value Committee does. And again, that's a volunteer group of employees that are working to build a stronger culture. I just look forward to the many more Surveys and sharing more success in the future. When we started doing these Surveys three years ago, the data is so important, and really analyzing that data, leaning into that data, communicating that data—I want to stress that—is, you know, we can't just do the Survey and keep the results to ourselves. We've got to communicate them with the group. We've got to explain to them the high points, the not so high. And I intentionally, I want to just focus—I’ve not said low or anything. There's no low results; they’re just opportunities, and so we've got to really communicate those opportunities. And I'm just excited about what we've been able to accomplish and look forward to more Surveys in the future and continuing to grow this great culture.

Laura: Well, the only thing I want to say is as we've taken this Survey over the last three years, it's really important to realize it's taken us a little time on the back end, those that are, Shon and I, when we go through these debriefings, to understand that data. And the first year, we were a little overwhelmed and trying to figure out how to really read it and understand it. But as we've gone along, it gets easier to understand. As our teams grow, we can break it down a little bit more so we can get a little-bit-more-refined information per team, so that makes it a little bit easier to address.

When we initially did this, we had to do, we did a focus group afterwards with a team member, one person from each team, because we were small enough that we didn't have a good breakout, so we weren't sure where all these answers were coming from. We're trying to focus it. And we can do a little-bit-more-refined interviewing or just chit chatting with everybody to see how things go and see how things are going and what they're thinking. So as we've gone along, and those that haven't taken the Survey, I highly recommend it. But the continuation is, like Shon said, it's important to keep learning and sharing that information, and it gets stronger as you go.

Al: Laura Jones and Shon Cass, I want to thank you for your contributions today. This has been great. And most of all, I appreciate your commitment to a healthy workplace culture that serves your employees and your customers and your community. Texas Security Bank amplifies the values—I mean, I can just feel it even over Zoom—that make a marketplace organization shine in your area of influence. So thank you for taking time out of your day and speaking into the lives of so many of our listeners.

Laura: Thank you for the opportunity.

Shon: Thank you, Al. We appreciate the opportunity. And thanks for the partnership.

Al: We love it and appreciate it, and it’s a pleasure to serve you. Thank you.

Outro: Thank you for joining us on the Flourishing Culture Podcast and for investing this time in your workplace culture. If there's a specific insight, story, or action step you've enjoyed, please share it with others so they can benefit, too. Please share this podcast with friends on social media, and show your support by rating, reviewing, and subscribing wherever you listen.

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Remember, a healthy workplace culture drives greater impact and growth for your organization. We'll see you again soon on the Flourishing Culture Podcast.