The Hamburg-based bank specializes in specialist areas - a highly profitable business. The bank would be described as a "hidden champion" if it were an industrial SME - at least until the start of the Iran embargo. This was followed by sanctions, a social plan and staff cuts. In the end, the bank employed just enough staff to handle its existing business and maintain its banking license.
Why was an interim HR manager hired during this phase of standstill of all times?
After the sanctions-related redundancies were completed, the long-standing HR manager took early retirement. What remained was a foreign language correspondent, for whom HR work was initially just as foreign as the numerous personnel documents. The files and folders had piled up in cupboards and drawers - and in overwhelming numbers in the HR folders on the computer drives.
Tidying up was the order of the day! The first task was to use the trained eye of the HR professional to decide which documents could be disposed of without further ado and which should be kept for a more thorough review. Together with the future HR administrator, the drives were also tidied up. A logical, easily understandable file and IT folder structure was created. The HR Interim Manager introduced the colleague, who was not yet a specialist, to HR administration. She learned the necessary basics in connection with company pension schemes, employment, wage tax and social security law. The brief for the interim mandate was to make the employee "fit" enough to handle the usual HR processing tasks without outside help. This was achieved very successfully within nine months. Today, the employee performs her new HR tasks with satisfaction and pleasure.
New HR processes
In the meantime, a thaw has set in in US-European-Iranian relations. The bank is hopeful that the sanctions against the bank will be lifted in the foreseeable future. The Management Board has begun to prepare the bank for a new start.
For HR, this means that future-proof HR processes are needed. There should be job descriptions and requirement profiles for recruitment procedures. The layout for online advertisements needs to be modernized. Contacts need to be established with HR consultants, employment agencies and temporary employment agencies. Staff appraisals are to be established as a management tool in future. What assessment criteria are important for the bank? Which target figures are the right ones for the bank in the context of target agreements? Should target agreements be linked to variable remuneration components? Discussions on this are ongoing with the Management Board. Finally, the results must be described for the bank's organizational handbook and implemented in appraisal and target agreement forms. Employment contracts, including ancillary agreements and annexes, must be adapted to current legislation. New procedures need to be thought through and formulated for standard HR processes. In short: a lot of groundwork had to be done, but the project also offered the opportunity to completely rebuild human resource management.
