Our friend Becky McCray over at Small Biz Survival wrote about the state of small town banks a little over a month ago, concluding, based on the informal research of a small town banker, that it's "business as usual" for the vast majority of the local and community banks in the U.S. This, of course, is a stark contrast to the picture painted by the media of all banks – those on Wall Street and especially those on "ailing" Main Street.
Why are these smaller banks seeing profits and growth consistent with what they've experienced in recent years, or perhaps even better, with the economy in the state that it's in? We will dig into this largely under-wraps story in our November Ideas newsletter on employee engagement best practices, due out later today. In doing so, we profile two of our Top Small Workplaces, Phelps County Bank in Missouri (2007 winner) and The Paducah Bank and Trust Company in Paducah, Kentucky (2008 winner).
The Paducah part of our feature article quotes Joe Framptom, CEO of the 60-year-old, independently owned bank, who talks about how the firm's core values, which are their employees and the community, led them to avoid issuing the types of "exotic loans that we don't understand in exotic places" that sent AIG and Wachovia (to name a few) spiraling.
Due to length, we were only able to capture part of Joe's sentiment in our article. What follows is the rest of what he told us. It certainly illuminates how their employee engagement activities and team building help the bank maintain their market dominance while at the same time giving back to their community (Paducah and other towns in McCracken County).
Here's Joe, from a phone interview I did with him last week:
The sub-prime issue is a whole different thing than community banks. That involves complicated packaged loans. In community banks, we have plenty to do with other types of loans. Our mission, market and products are different than Wachovia's.
One of the measures we look at is how many assets we've loaned back to the community. Right now we're at 70%, the same as most of our peers. This tells me we're doing a good job of deploying our resources back into the community, where our people live and work. Therefore, they don't have to go seek employment in California or other hard-hit places.
All of our people live in this county or the adjacent county. Our depositors live in this region. So we feel the need to give back to support this community by volunteering and being charitable.
I'm proud of the fact that we just completed our 13th annual United Way campaign, and this year 100 percent of our employees [140 total] were involved. We raised $56,000 for the United Way, a record year for us – 10% more than last year.
The mainstream press, when they talk about banks being in trouble, are talking about the largest 25% of banks in the country. The other 8,500 or so local and community banks are doing quite well, thank you.
They are also talking about the housing crisis as a national problem. In fact, grossly inflated home values have really only affected six states: California, Nevada, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Michigan. The other 46 states are doing OK when it comes to home values and people meeting their mortgage requirements.
In The New York Times just the other day, there was a story with the headline, "Vermont Bank Thrives While Others Cut Back." This is the same story with other "Main Street" banks like ours and like Phelps in Missouri, which I've watched and admired for a while.
This whole thing with the bailout – look who’s getting bailed out. Nobody's going to bail out Main Street. Nobody's going to bail out taxpayers.
What are your thoughts on Joe's remarks? Do you agree or disagree with him? I welcome your comments below.
I just looked back and it's been almost three months to the day since I published a "Friday Nugget"
As if employees didn't have enough to worry about, what with massive
When I wrote my
In a new
If you've budgeted for and are still planning on bringing your people together in December or January for an annual holiday event, you are in the majority. However, that majority is shrinking due to the struggling economy.
Regular readers of this blog surely know that employee engagement is like many things in life: you get out of it what you put in.
We have heard for some time that Michelle Obama's pet concerns on the campaign trail, which she hoped to be able to continue while in the White House – and will indeed be able to after yesterday's dramatic election
Although we prefer to highlight the employee engagement best practices of small and midsize organizations over large ones – since they
I'm going to peg this debate in the big business vs. small business category. As in, it pertains (maybe) to very large firms, but not to small and midsize ones.
When I was doing some research today on the much-hyped – but still, surprisingly, not universally adopted employee engagement practice of the daily huddle – I found this quote from an
Do a search on "music + worker productivity" and you'll find a wealth of pro and con opinions on whether music should be pumped into work environments and, if so, what effect it has on workplace team building and employee performance.









