Australian Military Bank CPO Laurence Halabut discusses staffing, PTSD and COVID recovery
“About 80% of our membership is defence force-related,” says Laurence Halabut, the chief people officer Australian Military Bank. “But we’re a bank like any other bank – we’ll take money from anybody.”
Despite the levity, Halabut faces challenges that other HR chiefs in the finance sector would seldom concern themselves about: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the talent pool made up of customers’ spouses.
Australian Military Bank has about 150 staff in 19 branches on military bases around the country. Halabut will employ civilians but he says the wives or husbands of defence forces personnel are well worth finding in any pile of applicants.
“One of the complexities with our staff is that military post every three years, so the defence spouses are being moved as well,” he says. “If we know in advance where their postings are, we can work on relocating them to one of our other branches.”
The pool of better-halves is a great cohort to mine, Halabut says, because they understand the idiosyncrasies of life in the forces. Partners of Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel make up 30% of the bank’s payroll and 60% identify as having a close family member in the forces.
“That makes it a lot easier if you’re looking at lending, for example, because they understand how [the customer-borrowers’] packages are made up and their allowances and all that sort of thing,” he says. “They understand that from a lending perspective, which makes it a lot easier.”
Working for the ADF – the Royal Australian Navy, Australian Army and Royal Australian Air Force – is nothing like your regular nine-to-five, he says, and staff who are spouses “understand what’s happening within the lives of defence personnel”.
The government estimates about 8.3% of ADF members will have experienced PTSD in the previous 12 months, a prevalence rate almost twice as high as the general community (4.6%). PTSD can be diagnosed in people who have witnessed killing, been sexually assaulted, attacked or feared for their life, among other events. But not everyone who has experienced trauma will develop PTSD.
At Australian Military Bank, Halabut knows it’s important that staff are aware of the effects of PTSD and how they display in people.
“It’s about making our staff aware of the symptoms of PTSD so when people come into a branch or are on the phone [our staff] can take a step back and perhaps explain things differently,” he says. “We’ve put a lot of time and effort into our interactions with the members.”
PTSD can change a person’s behaviour, so a relatively simple frustration can manifest as elevated agitation.
“It’s important to understand that agitation, especially in the call centre,” he says. “You’re just trying to pick it up from verbal cues so you can work a bit differently with the member to help them through.”
A worker who understands how some cues might arouse the emotions in a sufferer of PTSD will do their best to avoid them.
“You don’t want to inflame a situation that doesn’t need to be inflamed,” says Halabut, who works most of the time in the bank’s headquarters in the Sydney CBD but spoke to HRD from his home in Adelaide.
Halabut’s hybrid work arrangement is a remnant of the pandemic, and he identifies plusses and negatives from that great disruption.
“I started in January 2020, just before it hit,” he says. “It was a three-month assignment [to help usher in a new CEO], because I had my own consultancy company. And then, of course, COVID hit, and the CEO said, ‘I need you to stay.’”
That was more than four years ago. Since then, the organisation has been rebuilt and some of the fundamentals, he says, have changed. “Having to re-establish an organisation during that COVID period was a bit of a tough gig, but we got there,” he says. “I think we’re a lot stronger because of it.”
The period saw a cultural renaissance at the bank, he says.
“I look at the silver lining of it,” he says. “COVID destroyed community – that’s what it was designed to do, to isolate – and we were able to rebuild the organisation and rebuild community at the same time. It was something we were going to have to do anyway, because of a total company restructure. But we had that added piece of COVID, which actually helped bring it all back together.”
Halabut started in HR at Qantas, where he led the domestic flight attendant union. Corporate roles followed, for HBOS Australia and Bankwest (during its merger with Commonwealth Bank of Australia) and then for Toyota Finance Australia, where he gained a lot of mileage working as HR manager across the Asia-Pacific as well as Australia.
“It was going in and really redefining the HR service offering within the business,” he says. “A lot of what I’ve done in my career is that redefinition of HR as the service, HR as the value-add.”
Companies will only benefit as HR edges in at C-suite level, he says.
“I’ve seen HR change from being quite insular to being a partner within the organisation,” Halabut says. “When HR is at that level, we have to understand the business in totality. We add value, and it’s adding value at the table, which is one of the things I love best.”
