RBC Wealth Management recently appointed Shareen Luze, the firm’s human resources chief, as its head of culture and field experience, a newly created role dedicated to diversity and inclusion, employee experience and wellbeing. RBC is currently seeking to fill the head of HR position in the near future.
But unlike similar roles at other companies, Luze’s role will fit within the business, among other C-Suite executives, rather than in human resources or another function. She’ll report directly to CEO Michael Armstrong, ensuring that her workplace and people strategies affect business decisions.
Luze is responsible for making sure the firm’s 2,000 financial advisors, which operate in 180 locations in 42 states, feel supported and have a similar employee experience as those in the home office.
One particularly area of focus, which has become even more important in the global pandemic, has been mental wellbeing. In a recent interview with WealthManagement.com, Luze shares her struggles with anxiety, and the difficulties of talking about it.
She also speaks about other initiatives she’s working on at RBC and how she thinks the wealth management industry can attract a more diverse workforce.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WealthManagement.com: Why did RBC create this role?
Shareen Luze: It's not a new area of interest for RBC, but I think that this is a pivot that we haven't done before because I think we have really put a ton of effort and energy into it, but this is a different take on it. This is unique in the industry. I think it's unique in most industries to have a role that is dedicated to culture that actually fits within the business instead of in human resources or another function that supports the business. This is actually ingrained within the business itself and paid for by the business.
And we've learned a lot over the last year and a half with the pandemic and it reinforced how important our culture is to us, but it also really taught us some things about how do we move forward post pandemic and maintain that culture because we're going to embrace flexibility. We're going to have employees working in different places. We want to continue to offer that flexibility to all of our roles, including our office-based roles, like our support staff and our financial advisors, but we don't want to lose the thread of our culture.
I am a firm believer that you have to have inclusiveness before you can have diversity because you can bring people in, but if you don't have a culture that supports it, they're just going to leave.
WM: What do you mean by culture?
SL: To me what culture is, it is the employee bringing their true authentic selves to work. But it's also recognizing all aspects of that employee. So all of the dimensions of the employee, so not just what they do for the business, but their life outside of work and the ability for us to support them. We got to see during the pandemic so much. Whether it's their kids or their partners or their parents walking through the video, it has opened up and allowed a vulnerability that I don't know was really that welcomed before in corporate America, especially financial services.
And I want that to continue. And it's recognizing that that employee is so much more than a financial advisor. It's an employee that feels supported, that feels good about what they're doing and feels like they can truly be themselves, but also working with leadership that is vulnerable and showing the empathic side of leading enough, the corporate world, because I think we've stuffed that and hidden it for so long that I think when you can work for a company and in a workplace where you see people, not just a title, that's a strong culture.
WM: Being a financial advisor is an extremely stressful job, especially in this pandemic. How are you supporting or planning to support your advisors in terms of mental wellbeing?
SL: This is something that I am personally incredibly passionate about. I have battled with anxiety, and I carried a lot of shame around that, about talking about it. And I really started to open up about it five or six years ago because I saw other people going through it and I started to share it and to really put a voice to it because we don't talk enough about it. This has been the No. 1 focus of our employee support resources globally for the last year and a half.
I think a lot of people shy away from and are intimidated by the idea of mental illness because of the stereotypes that it has with it. So we try to reframe it to talk about mental wellbeing and how do you counter burnout, especially with our financial advisors. They're taking care of everyone else. And during the pandemic, they were the frontline of not only their own lives and dealing with the stress and anxiety and all of the trauma going on, but the clients were calling them.
They were on the phone or doing the video conferences with their clients nonstop. And so where was the time for me in that? We have several programs that we rolled out as well as mental health resources. We paid full coverage without copays for telehealth visits for employees, as well as their families. We enhanced our mental health benefits. We also have, I want to say it's over 100 webinars and micro webinars on mental health, whether it's dealing with stress or anxiety that are available at any time for employees.
We're really coming at it from a lot of different channels because people consume it differently and they feel comfortable in different ways, whether that's going into an office or doing it via text. We're making all of those channels available to employees because that is something we see. And particularly as we're going through now, the Delta variant, we're sensing people getting knocked back down because people were starting to feel a little freer, a little safer. Now we're getting more anxiety around returning to the office or staying home and all over the spectrum. And what we're really trying to do is just meet people where they're at, but we have to recognize all of that dynamics of what they're dealing with.
WM: How is this role different from, say, a head of diversity and inclusion, which a lot of financial services firms now have?
SL: We have a wonderful diversity and inclusion center of expertise that is world-class and they are the experts. And they have come up with our blueprints that guides us. What this role does is it takes the blueprint, it takes the values and the broad strokes and it activates them. And this role is a part of the business in that I will be sitting next to the CEO, the president, the field leaders, and working with them to activate. So it's not just, "Hey, we want to move the dial on our numbers of female financial advisors," for example. It's understanding the community. It's working with them to really activate our strategy, and that's not something that can always be done from the center of expertise.
WM: What initiatives are you working on?
SL: A couple of the things that I had the fortune of doing and working on in the past I'll continue to support. And those would be our pays for advisors when they're on maternity leave. We revamped how we pay our advisors so that advisors truly have a choice if they want to take that time off. Because what we had heard before was financially, they needed to continue, well what I want now, and what we've made the change to do is to make sure that if they have a medical leave of absence or maternity leave, that they can focus on taking care of themselves versus worrying about their compensation. And then we can support them from a client standpoint.
Another way more broadly speaking is we have just short of 200 office locations across our U.S. footprint and what is really important to me and will be really fundamental to this new role is ensuring that the culture and the experience for employees in all of those offices is similar to that in the home office. Making sure that they can avail themselves of all the programs we have.
We also have some really fantastic employee resource groups, including WAFA or Women's Association of Financial Advisors, that we’ve had for 30 years. So it's really being that activation arm so that the experience in the field resembles the experience in the home office.
WM: Do you have any statistics about the firm's diversity either at the home office or your advisor force?
SL: I can tell you we track similar to the industry across all segments, which isn't surprising considering we are an industry where we just recruit from one another. Part of this new role is helping to put into action plans of how do we diversify the candidates that are coming in, how do we make financial services career possibilities for diverse communities, but also the next generation, because the numbers are dwindling?
WM: What are some of your ideas about how to do so?
SL: Some of the things that we've been doing is, we've been participating in Rock the Street Wall Street, which is an organization where we go into communities, diverse communities and do financial literacy training for high school aged girls. Another piece is we have a student ambassador program, which we started just a couple of years ago. And what we do is we hire former interns who are still in college and we use them as RBC ambassadors because they're on college campuses. We give them a bunch of RBC swag and they go out and they go to finance clubs, investment clubs on campus, as well as do coffee chats to really promote the idea of financial services and RBC as a career opportunity.
I mean, campuses are over 50% women and significantly more diverse than financial services. So we have to get more creative in where we're looking for the talent, and we have to make ourselves available.
WM: Has RBC been providing employees with more flexibility?
SL: The pandemic just kind of accelerated the desire for it because we had advisors who wanted to work remotely or wanted more flexibility before. But now we've just seen a significant uptick, but I think also it's the kind of flexibility, not just from a where you physically worked standpoint, but to support your life stages. We have so many of our employees and our advisors who are in the sandwich generation, they're taking care of kids and they're taking care of elderly parents. And so how do we support them?
And I think we have the makings and the foundation to be the leader in this space, because we do put the employee first, but we have to continue to focus on the non-business aspects of the employee, because to me that's where the future is.