Judo Bank’s chief people and culture officer on designing reward and culture in a heavily regulated sector
For Jess Lantieri, chief people and culture officer at Judo Bank, running a human resources function inside one of Australia's most heavily regulated industries starts with a simple design choice: take individual sales targets off the table entirely.
"There was probably a lot of dissatisfaction with the way reward was done in banking, insofar as individual sales targets were driving adverse action against customers, or adverse outcomes for customers at the expense of bankers hitting sales targets," Lantieri said, reflecting on the years following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the subsequent Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry.
Those events reshaped how remuneration is designed and overseen across the financial services sector, and they sit behind much of how Judo Bank structures its people function today.
Reward built around teams, not individuals
Judo Bank's bankers work in what the company calls "pods" – small teams that share a scorecard rather than individual sales quotas.
"Bankers do not have individual sales targets, they have team scorecards that they work to, and it's a balance of measures across the scorecard," Lantieri said. "So no one individual is incentivised to do the wrong thing at all costs for getting an incentive payment."
That structure, she said, is a direct response to operating in a regulated environment, and it extends into how the bank designs roles and recruits. Under an operating model introduced last year, known internally as Banker 2.0, Judo Bank recruits specialists in customer acquisition, customer growth or credit writing alongside generalist bankers, then allocates work across each pod according to strength.
"We've got very kind of defined talent plans and maps that we have for each team that we then bring to life through talent acquisition or development of our people and coaching as well," said Lantieri.
Lantieri, who was recently named among the best HR executives in Australia and New Zealand on this year's Hot List, said learning and development carries particular weight in a sector where formal qualifications aren't always mandatory.
Judo Bank funds chartered banking certifications for staff even though, unlike accounting, a chartered qualification isn't a legal requirement to work as a banker. "We are very big believers that we would like people to take those more formal qualifications around chartered banking certifications," she said. "We do invest in that for our people."
Listening every week, not once a year
Because Judo Bank was built from scratch rather than inheriting legacy structures, Lantieri said the organisation has been able to design its culture deliberately rather than retrofit it.
Central to that is a proprietary weekly engagement tool called the Judo Employee Delight Index (JEDI), sent to staff by text and taking under two minutes to complete.
"It gives us real time insights on how people are feeling in any one week," Lantieri said. "We've now got multiple years of data, so we can see trend and actually predict engagement cycles throughout the years and ahead of time, not after the fact."
She contrasted this with the annual or half-yearly engagement surveys she had used earlier in her career: "By the time you get around to action planning on the results from six months ago, the mood of the business has moved on."
Lantieri said the tool has directly shaped policy – prompting the introduction of long-service bursaries after staff feedback flagged a lack of recognition once the bank passed its five-year mark.
Her approach reflects a broader shift captured in this year's report on the leadership formula behind Australia's top HR executives, which found senior HR leaders increasingly acting as architects of culture rather than administrators of process.
Flexibility as a competitive lever
Judo Bank's benefits program, which it calls Judo Perks, includes six weeks of annual leave for all staff and a parental leave policy that scales with the number of children an employee has, starting at 16 weeks and capped at 20 weeks regardless of gender or carer status.
Lantieri said the bank's smaller scale, relative to the major banks, makes career progression and a strong employee value proposition especially important to retention.
Lantieri's balancing act – designing reward and culture systems that satisfy prudential expectations while still differentiating Judo Bank from larger, more bureaucratic competitors – reflects wider themes witnessed in regulated industries, where leaders were shown to be increasingly commercially literate and data-driven.
