Inside Bank of America’s $25 Minimum Wage and Mental Wellness Initiatives

For employees, understanding why companies do or don’t offer certain benefits, and how they choose between investing to retain employees or opting to hire new ones can often feel opaque. This week’s episode of Get Hired with Andrew Seaman takes you behind the scenes of Bank of America's decision to offer a $25/hour minimum wage and continue investing in their employees’ wellbeing and professional development. Andrew Seaman sits down with Sheri Bronstein, the bank’s Chief People Officer, to gain insights into how one of the largest employers in the U.S. is navigating today’s changing job market.

From implementing a higher minimum wage to prioritizing employee benefits like sabbaticals and an AI-training program, Sheri highlights why investing in employees benefits companies. This episode also explores Bank of America’s approach to skills-based hiring, the evolving role of AI across different job functions, and what qualities the bank values in its employees.

A transcript of the conversation is below. You can also listen to the episode above or on your favorite podcast platform by clicking here.

TRANSCRIPT: Inside Bank of America’s $25 Minimum Wage and Mental Wellness Initiatives

Andrew Seaman: These days, we all know that companies are less likely to retain employees for their entire careers. On top of that, AI has raised some big questions about what the future looks like. So what are the green flags you should keep an eye out for in companies when job searching? Plus, what are they looking for in you? Today we are hearing from one of the largest banks in the US on why investing in employees benefits companies and what you can show employers that will increase your chances of getting hired. That's coming up after this short break.

Andrew: From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs and the ever-changing landscape of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's editor-at-large for jobs and career development, bringing new conversations with experts who, like me, want to see you succeed at work, at home, and everywhere in between. Joining me on the show today is Sheri Bronstein, chief People Officer at Bank of America. Sheri has been at Bank of America almost her entire career, and she believes that being able to take care of their customers comes down to taking care of employees.

Today, Sheri is announcing something. Bank of America has been working toward, additional benefits they offer employees, and how they're supporting their workforce through the adoption of AI. Of course, Sheri talks about what her team is looking for from long-time team members and new hires alike. She also shares some tips for how to think about looking for a job. The thing about finance where people are trusting you with their livelihoods, the human part is so important. You have to bring in the right people to say, listen, you can trust us with all of your money, with sort of your life savings. And it's so important to have the right people.

Sheri Bronstein: Yeah, every consumer, we have 70 million in the US. Every large corporation, every middle market company, every global partner, trading partner that we trade with, they all have their own goals, their own financial goals, their own personal goals, and our job is to make sure we deliver that. And to your point, at the core of it is really our people and making sure we have the best people to do that.

Andrew: And I know that you're making an announcement today because Bank of America, they made a commitment to say, listen, we're going to actually invest in our people and we're going to set a benchmark for ourselves. And can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing today, but also why you did that and sort of the reason behind it?

Sheri: So today we're really excited. We are announcing that we are moving our minimum starting wage in the US to $25 an hour. We've been on a multi-year journey and we've really been a leader in wage and in financial wellness for our teammates. We think about wellness as financial, emotional, and physical. And so the combination of $25 an hour, over $50,000 a year, making sure, again, that our teammates starting out, that they too can live their financial lives so that they can take good care of our customers and clients. We run at 8% turnover. For an incredibly big company, that makes better customer service, it allows for much better efficiency and effectiveness. But at the end of the day, it's really about making sure we're investing in our people.

Andrew: Yeah. And it leads people to be there for decades and-

Sheri: Decades. We do this thing every year where we honor people who have been with the company for 40, 45, 50 years. It's incredible. People can start with us at 18 years old and someday they can be the CEO like Brian is. So it's really quite incredible. But we want to make sure that that first stage is one where people can take care of their families and take care of themselves so that they can take care of our customers and clients.

Andrew: And also, like you said, it's the minimum.

Sheri: Yeah, that's just the minimum. Yes. In places like New York City or San Francisco, our average is a lot higher than that. But we want to make sure across the country that that's our minimum.

Andrew: That's great. And also just reading up on some of the other benefits you have, you offer people sabbaticals too, which I think four to six weeks depending on length of tenure, right?

Sheri: Yeah, that's right.

Andrew: Why?

Sheri: So this has been sort of a long time passion. It's actually one of my favorite benefits, in addition to our great starting minimum wage. Candidly, we were trying to get at a particular issue. We were seeing some attrition at that sort of 10 to 15 year. And so we tried it there and then we said, look, people come back, they're refreshed, but we said we've got to be able to do it across the whole company globally. And we rolled it out, and 2023 was our first year of doing it across the company. We've had 23,000 people take it. I think we've got 10,000 more going next year. It's on five year increments, starting at 15 years, 20 years, 25 years. You can take two in your career. And it's four to six weeks. And the feedback we get is just incredible. And it really just re-energizes people.

Andrew: It's incredible to think about because so many people, I think they hear of companies offering different perks and incentives and it's always like the why. And I really like the emphasis you put on, listen, this is good for us too because it's nice to obviously take care of people. But then I think a lot of times people don't realize that if you are an employer where it's just ROI is the main thing, when you actually say, okay, let's invest in taking care of our people, you still get the ROI. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, because I know from reading your background, you're also really committed and obviously these initiatives go toward that is mental. What is your approach to that?

Sheri: Yeah, we're super data-driven. We have an incredible HR data and analytics team, and we do an annual health survey, obviously anonymized. Sort of in 2016, '17, '18, we just started to see questions around mental health creeping up. I think it was in 2017, almost 25% of our employees were saying I'm stressed and not coping. And we just said, that is not okay.

And sometimes it was about work, sometimes it was about personal, sometimes it was about caregiving. It could be a thousand different things. But we could see both the hard costs in our healthcare plans, we could see through the surveys and the data. And we were just getting more and more calls about, I need help. I need support. Managers calling in. And we just said, we've got to do something about this. And so we really went on a mission to create a multi-tiered approach. And we just started talking about it a lot more. Because the biggest issue was lifting the stigma.

And I have to say, we're really pleased. We feel like we're making a dent. So in our latest healthcare survey, we were down to 10% of our people who said I'm stressed and not coping. Now 10% is 10% too much. But if you think about where we started, we feel good that we're making progress. It's again core to being a great place to work. We want people to be healthy, we want people to be able to cope. We want people to be their most productive. And so yes, it's about taking care of our teammates, but also, to your point, there is an ROI. We've got in every day and take care of our customers and our clients and our communities.

Andrew: We'll be right back with Sheri Bronstein. 

Andrew: And we're back with Sheri Bronstein, Chief People Officer at Bank of America. When you have a workforce that has been with you for a while and you introduce new people, what is your approach to up-skilling?

Sheri: It's really interesting. Obviously we have students that are graduating now from undergrad or from community college and they're digital natives. So I think we have to think about multiple aspects. And I have to say I'm more in the optimistic camp. Do I think that AI is going to impact how we work? Absolutely. Do I think it's going to automate lots of tasks? Absolutely.

What we're really focused on is how does it allow us to take out the work that's more mundane and focus, have more capacity to serve our clients, serve our people, serve our communities. And at the same time, we also have to be realistic that jobs are going to change. And we do have to up-skill. We're literally in that process of rolling out Microsoft Copilot to the entire company. So we're going through this right now, and there's definitely top down training. We have an academy, we have about a thousand people in our academy. They're there every day to help our people with training, with up-skilling, re-skilling. We've really turned our talent acquisition function to focus on internal mobility. Of course, we hire externally as well, but over 40% of our jobs that get filled are internal.

And our commitment to our people is, look, we're going to do everything we can to retain people to help people through that process. What we need back from them is that interest in learning, taking this on, learning new ways to work and really embracing the technology. Because I think in the past, a lot of the technology impacted our tech teams or very specific functions. And not that it hasn't impacted a function like hr, but now it's like this tool's going to be in everyone's hands and we all have to think about how we use it, and it's our job to make sure we're leading through the transition in a responsible way.

And like I said, that's our commitment to our people, that we're going to help support them, and we need people to embrace and be energized. And when I talk to a lot of my peers at other companies, especially on the HR side, I think we tend to be a pretty optimistic bunch, a little scared but not terrified. And that's what we try to tell our young people is just embrace, learn, think about how to work alongside it, but try not to be so anxious that they can't be productive.

Andrew: And I also, I really like the idea of the commitment to internal mobility because I think a lot of times people think, especially if they've been in the workforce for a while, they'll say, oh, there's this new technology. They're just going to go for young people. But for companies, it works out financially and just in a business sense to say, listen, you've been with the company for a while. We need your institutional knowledge, and it costs a lot to hire people. So you're already here. We can give you a raise and not spend a ton of money to bring in new people.

Sheri: Yeah. I think the other thing, and this is particularly so, I think, for our college grads that are coming in, jobs are going to change quickly. And so I think the days of I'm going to come in and ... People aren't going to have careers like me, where I started in HR at another bank, I went through the training program, spent five years there, I moved to Bank of America. It was a fairly traditional career path.

People are going to need to be flexible because the jobs are going to be changing. And so thinking about people as less about, okay, I did three years of this and more about what are the skills I learned, what are the things that I'm good at, what do I want to keep investing in? And we've been really focused on making sure, again, that we use our entry pipeline to then fuel talent across the whole company, not just in certain areas. So I think that's something that's going to continue to shift too. And we've all got to be open-minded, because jobs are just going to change faster.

Andrew: Yeah. And I think what you're talking about is this idea of skills-based hiring. And I know that Bank of America was one of the first to sort of say like, oh yeah, we're jumping on this bandwagon, because I think traditionally, like you said, if you graduated with a degree HR or you graduated with a degree in accounting, like, oh, that's the path you took. And now it's, I don't think there is a world now, where you enter as one thing and you exit the workforce as that same thing.

Sheri: That's right. That's right. We've actually done a lot of work with LinkedIn and Microsoft and Walmart and others around also making sure that we're thinking about those skills' taxonomy. Because in order to make this work at scale, you can't go person by person, by person. So we've done a lot of work on our skills' taxonomy, how we think about, again, the sort of infrastructure of the whole mobility process and how that then plays into, okay, I have this and I need this, and then, okay, I can go into the academy and the three things I don't have, I can go learn how to do and then that will help me get over here.

So I do think people are a lot more flexible. There's definitely people that are scared. Somebody said to me the other day, I think somebody from another company said, I think the workforce sort of falls into three categories. I'm on the front end of embracing technology. I'm in the sort of middle, and then people that you got to kind of drag along. And we probably look like most big companies in that. But our goal, like I said, is to make sure everyone's got that opportunity. Everyone knows the resources are there, that managers, again, are helping their teammates along the way on that journey.

Andrew: And also, I think those three categories that you listed, what I like is you kind of need all of those because it's like you want the person who's ready to change and willing to run at something new full-force, but then you need the people who are like, I'm going to do the foundational stuff. You strive for the next thing. That way it's like the business is being taken care of, but you also have the people who move you forward. Back to the hiring part of this, when you are recruiting now, has that changed at all what you look for? Or obviously you have people who are entering the workforce who are interested in joining Bank of America, but you also have people who maybe are mid-career. So has that changed for you at all?

Sheri: Yeah, I think the thing that we've always been focused on, but we're probably assessing more for now, is learning agility. Because again, whatever you come in, it may be very different. And so two years from now, so what we're trying to do is really get at some of those softer skills. And I think this is, again, very consistent when we talk about young people coming out of college, making sure that yes, we need the technical skills, but we also need the soft skills. So it's not that we ever got away from that, but I would say sort of a reemergence of focus on learning, agility, judgment, leadership, teamwork, all those things. And then I think there was a bit of a shift. Do they have the coding skills? Do they have the quantitative skills?

And then the other thing I would say that sort of underlines everything. And I think about this even in HR, people do need to understand data and analytics because all the models, all the AI, at the end of the day, if you don't have good data, they'll be wrong. And I always tell when young people ask, what class should I take? Even if you think you're never going to use something more technical, take that foundational data class and make sure that you've got the basic analytical skills. I think that in addition to a lot of the softer skills, a lot of the rest of it we can teach. And as we know, some of the AI tools are going to help us learn these days.

Andrew: And for the average person who's joining maybe at a branch or in sort of a more traditional finance role, how important would you say is AI skills and knowledge? Because I think that's for listeners who are job seeking, they're told, oh, learn AI skills, and they're like, but how much? So for your company, what would you say you're looking for in candidates when it comes to AI?

Sheri: Yeah, it's a great question. Obviously in some parts of the bank, whether it's our technology organization or businesses that are really technologically adjacent, people need to have a lot of AI, more technical AI skills. I think for the rest of us, it's really understanding the foundational, what does copilot do? How does it work? We have a lot of sensitive data. Is it understanding and going back, how does it pull the data? Is it taking my data and putting it out? There is it's not, but how does it work on my desktop? Being curious and understanding how it works. So you understand when I'm asking, it's something like, is this going to be 50% accurate or is it going to be 99% accurate?

And then also, and this, I have to say, we're still trying to figure this part out. I think a lot of people are. It's like, how do I know? When I look at something? Because I've been doing this a long time, I can read something and know what's wrong. So for somebody who's two years out of an HR degree, how are they going to know that? And so we're thinking a lot about, again, how do people get those reps and making sure that they know when they can trust the tools and when they can. But I think it's just having that sort of general understanding is really important.

Andrew: And also you said the willingness to learn.

Sheri: And the willingness to learn.

Andrew: And then obviously as someone who really has a view over the workforce and kind of different hierarchies throughout it and skill levels. For people out there who are job searching, what tips would you give them now?

Sheri: Yeah, so I think networking is really important or something that could be an event that you're hosting. I do think those things are still really important because it is still a human connection that you need. So I think that's one. I think the second thing is thinking about skills. I still see sometimes a lot of resumes that still look sort of the old way of, I did this and then I did that. And thinking about again like, okay, let me go look at the job descriptions of on LinkedIn of the types of roles that I want to do, or I think I'll be good at, and let me reverse engineer how I'm going to do my resume.

But just again, talk to people that are in the field that you want to be in. For young people, oftentimes talk to the grads that just graduated a year or two before that are at the companies that you want to be at. And look for great companies. We really pride ourselves on being a great place to work. Culture's really important. You want to be at a company that's going to invest in you. And so, really think about that as well as you're going through your search.

It can be a challenging market, but again, at the end of the day, there's a lot of roles out there. We all need talent. We're still in an environment where we are running at 4% unemployment. Maybe it's a little bit higher at the entry level. And there's a lot of new jobs being created, so be open-minded too.

Andrew: That was Sheri Bronstein, Chief People Officer at Bank of America. Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Ava Ahmadbeigi and Emily Reeves. Assaf Gidron engineered our show, Tim Boland mixed our show. We get additional support from Alexandra Kuznietsova and Mujib Mehrdad. Sarah Storm is our senior producer. Dave Pond is head of production and creative operations. Maya Pope-Chappel is director of content and audience Development. Courtney Coupe is head of original programming. Dan Roth is LinkedIn's editor-in-chief and vice president of content development. And I am Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.