Garanti BBVA’s Human Resources strategy is based on employee centricity.

Garanti BBVA strongly believes that organizations offering employees development opportunities in diverse areas, highlighting the tools for maximum self-realization, and maintaining practices that nurture the fact that humans are social beings will be the organizations of the future.

Carrying out all of its employee-centered activities under the heading “Talent and Culture”, Garanti BBVA thus focuses on sustainable business processes and projects that live, ensure equality and fairness among employees, and their involvement in decisions. At the same time, the Bank keeps developing practices to create a working environment that encourages full utilization of employees’ skills, offer a wide range of opportunities and guarantee recognition and rewarding of their accomplishments.

Under the Talent and Culture organization, the Bank regards each employee as a talent in his or her position, and builds its main focus on producing and developing the tools that will secure the development needed by the talent. In this context, the Bank pursues alignment of the “Talent Solutions” practices designed by Garanti BBVA with its fair and happiness-oriented culture that is also molded according to employee needs and is nurtured by the organization’s values.

The Bank collects and analyzes employee expectations in environments providing equal opportunities, and constantly updates its policy in keeping with technological advancements. The Bank believes that it creates an environment that complies with international standards by maximizing participation in every aspect. It places great emphasis on keeping bidirectional dialogue channels to ensure that employees are actively engaged in the decision-making mechanism and to benefit from innovative opinions. The Bank aims to increase employee satisfaction and employee engagement by collecting employee opinions systematically using a variety of channels, such as the intranet, various questionnaires and platforms.

Within the frame of processes shaped according to employee needs and expectations, Garanti BBVA maximizes self-monitoring by employees at a number of points from career management to performance evaluation and training planning by taking steps that will encourage more active involvement of employees.

The Employee Committee, headed by the CEO and formed of Board members and Senior Management, is responsible for developing all of Garanti BBVA’s employee-centered policies, carrying out and coordinating activities that will further improve employee engagement and satisfaction, monitoring results and developing action plans when needed. With the support of the management, the Committee also aims to promote learning in order to enhance the Bank’s development and tracks how training reflects on business.

Under the “Talent Solutions” heading, Garanti BBVA has in place a Compensation Policy for employees, which is prepared in accordance with banking and capital market legislation and approved by the Board of Directors. The Policy is erected on job-based remuneration, encourages fair, transparent, measurable and sustainable achievement among employees, and is aligned with the Bank’s risk principles.

The performance evaluation system at Garanti BBVA measures employee performance depending on objectives and the extent of their attainment. Systematic bonus and performance models are supported by concrete and measurable criteria during the assessment, and they serve as major and effective management tools for achieving cost management and efficiency, while ensuring fairness among the employees.

Development is positioned as the most valuable value creation tool in all “Talent Solutions” initiatives that place development in their focus. The Bank devises schemes that increase the share of digital training programs within the entire training portfolio to give equal access to development opportunities for Garanti BBVA employees scattered in all 81 cities across Turkey, and aims to increase the number of training programs per person by the year.

The organization’s values make the basis of culture practices. Through the Work Life Integration (İYİ) platform set up to enhance employee satisfaction and ensure a richer working experience, the Bank seeks to increase the number of programs establishing a work-life balance and boosting employee motivation, and to expand their coverage across Turkey.

The Bank thinks that being “one team”, one of Garanti BBVA’s values determined by employee opinions in 2017, bears major effects upon customer satisfaction. The Bank champions the idea that shared wisdom practices that will build up team spirit directly contribute to joint work and development, as well as to the equality principle. In this context, the Bank develops projects that encourage employees to be respectful of diversities.

One of the key goals of Garanti BBVA is to establish a fair and transparent working environment that is dominated by equal opportunities and diversity. In a bid to provide support with real-life practices, the Bank contributes to gender equality and women’s empowerment through studies that measure employees’ prejudices regarding equality of women and men. Garanti BBVA will continue to pioneer and further expand activities maintaining equality principle in the ratio of employees at different levels, the ratio of women vs. men employees, and in all fringe benefits and practices provided. Diversity initiatives will be themed around equality once again, and the projects will focus on reducing unconscious bias and boosting awareness.

In line with local regulations on Occupational Health and Safety (OHS), Garanti BBVA, through its OHS team organized under Talent and Culture, coordinates and monitors all processes including risk assessment, occupational health practices, training programs, OHS Committees, near misses, workplace accidents and corrective and preventive actions.

The customer-centric approach of Garanti BBVA that places the utmost emphasis on common value creation by its employees brings along egalitarian and agile working cultures that value team success. Organized under the Talent and Culture roof within the scope of agile working methodology, project teams are structured so as to be responsible for developing employeecentric practices, and they manage the efforts to improve, develop and simplify existing work processes, as well as running projects that will contribute to the development of talent solutions and culture-related implementations.

By focusing on employees’ professional development and giving all employees equal opportunities, the Bank is actively contributing to Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, Goal 5: Gender Equality, Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.