our human
capital

Considering that human resources are the biggest investment of our Bank, we regularly measure the engagement, satisfaction, and expectations of our employees. We continuously strive to make improvements in a variety of fields from recruitment to the promotion and performance assessment, from career planning to training processes, to strengthen our employees’ engagement.

We conducted an Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Survey in 2021 to learn about the trust and engagement of the employees for the VakıfBank brand and perception, their work-private life balance, their opinions on performance management, salary, training, and development opportunities, and their general evaluations about their managers. A total of 12,739 employees participated in the survey, including employees from Vakıf Finansal Kiralama AŞ, Vakıf Faktoring AŞ, Vakıf Yatırım Menkul Değerler AŞ, Vakıf Gayrimenkul Değerleme AŞ and Vakıf Pazarlama San ve Tic AŞ, which are under VakıfBank Finance Group as well as the employees of our Bank. We are aware that high employee engagement also contributes to a low employee turnover rate. Our employee turnover rate was 1.69 and our voluntary employee turnover rate was 1.61 in this period. We will determine the areas where our employees want investment, their sentiments and thoughts, and the issues they want to be improved by studying the satisfaction variables that impact engagement within the scope of the research, and we will make progress in these areas. In addition, we aim to increase employee engagement and satisfaction by closely following employee opinions and thoughts through the platforms that we have implemented.

We think that one of the important factors affecting employee satisfaction is the quality and efficiency of the relationship they establish with other departments in the same organization. We value measuring and evaluating employee satisfaction in terms of the service employees receive from Headquarters units, executing the processes between units with which we have business relations more accurately and quickly, increasing the Bank’s internal customer satisfaction, differentiating the Bank from its rivals, and supporting the Bank’s continued development. In 2021, we achieved high levels of participation in the Internal Customer Satisfaction Survey, which we have executed to efficiently manage employee satisfaction in 2021.

Our employees can communicate ideas and suggestions that they think will add value to our Bank through the Suggestion Platform. We also continue to work towards the implementation of suggestions. Through the Suggestion Platform, we directly designed 23 out of 2,925 suggestions submitted by our employees in 2021. We also subjected 543 suggestions to a feasibility study.

We conduct Permanent Staff studies throughout the Bank to accurately determine both the quality and quantity of the human resource, which is the most important human capital resource of our Bank’s organization, and to employ the optimum number, both in Headquarters units and in Branches, in accordance with the workload and organizational goals. Additionally, we are continuing our efforts to enable the Permanent Staff to be calculated using Artificial Intelligence.

In line with our goals of easy-to-reach Human Resources and keeping up with modern-day necessities, we added the Human Resources module to Bilio Support, which is the Bank’s in-house chatbot application. With the Bilio Support application, our employees can find answers to more than 250 questions regarding Human Resources, which include basic personnel information such as the number of remaining days of their annual leave, duration of free time, retirement, and starting date of employment at the bank.

In 2021, we continued with process documentation efforts using the Process Modeling Tool which was put into practice. With the new modeling tool, we achieved great efficiency by using our business processes for operational risk analysis studies, internal audit activities, emergency backup, and SLA agreements on information systems.

During this period, we continued our efforts to design experience-oriented and lean processes in line with Design-Oriented, Lean, and Six Sigma methodologies. As part of the digital transformation of processes, we have implemented the “Job Request Management” application in 2020, migrating processes such as correspondence and email conducted through tools to the Job Request Management application, making them traceable and reportable.

In line with the importance we attach to equal opportunity and diversity, we do not discriminate on issues such as language, ethnicity, age, gender, political thought, belief and offer equal opportunities and rights to our employees. In this regard, we take the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights principles, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the International Labor Organization (ILO) as guides in our human resources practice that values people.

In addition to being a signatory of the United Nations Women’s Empowerment Principles-WEPs, which aim for gender equality and women’s empowerment, by being elected to the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index (Bloomberg GEI), we have become one of the four banks from Turkey included in the index in 2021. Moreover, we also began to work on obtaining a Gender Equality Certificate in addition to the establishment of the Environmental and Social Risk Management System within the scope of the budget allocated to our bank, with the signing of the Green Mortgage Loan agreement with AFD in December 2020, amounting to EUR 200 million, with a 3-year grace period and a total maturity of 10 years. In this context, we carried out a gender equality survey to hear all our employees’ views and expectations, including senior management, on gender equality, which is among the Sustainable Development Goals and has an important place on the global agenda, and to identify areas that need improvement. Through this survey, our Bank launched the Gender Equality Program, and the necessary coordination was made with the relevant departments to develop gender equality practices within the Bank and raise awareness at all organizational levels.

In addition to these, as a signatory of the Equality at Work Declaration, which is prepared under the leadership of the Ministry of Family, Labor, and Social Services and in cooperation with the World Economic Forum, we support the active participation of women in all areas of social and economic life with equal rights. We advocate gender equality in business life. We support the participation of women in the workforce with our Human Resources practices, recruitments, and female employees we employ based on gender equality. We aim to maintain a work environment where equality and business peace prevail by taking the necessary measures to ensure all our women-men employees’ health, safety, and well-being. In this context, in 2021, 50.51% of our employees, 11% of our Board Members, and 24.9% of our employees in executive positions throughout the Bank are women.

We take care to provide equal opportunities among our employees in both recruitment and career development applications. While our female employees constitute 48% of our employees who rose to a higher title in 2021, we aim to ensure that our female employees, who are mothers, continue their career path after parental leave and offer them to benefit from the career opportunities equally, thus ensuring a work environment that maintains their work-family life balance. In this context, 100% of our 590 female employees who had parental leave in 2021 returned to work.

In addition to maternity leave, we also offer our female employees the option to take up to one year of unpaid leave and to work part-time until their children are five years old. In 2021, 88% of our female employees who requested unpaid leave due to childbirth took advantage of the right to 6 months of unpaid additional leave granted by our Bank in addition to the legal period of 16 weeks. Moreover, in the provinces with 150 and more female staff employees, we provide daycare assistance to all our male and female staff who have nursery children. With all of our practices in this regard, we aim to offer our mothers the opportunity to continue their careers from where they have left, after their parental leave.

With our Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Policy, we reflect the superior value we give to people. We consider offering our employees a safe and healthy work environment as one of our fundamental responsibilities. This framework adopts the essential requirement to comply with OHS’s international standards and legal requirements. We have managed to become the first bank in Turkey to establish the Integrated Management System (ISO 9001-ISO 14001-ISO 45001) and to receive a certificate following an Integrated Certification Audit by obtaining the ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Management System certificate. In 2021, we also achieved sustainability in the Integrated Management System.

We conduct OHS issues under the coordination of the Employee Relations and Discipline Department Our Employee Relations and Discipline Manager, our most authorized manager responsible for OHS, is three reporting levels away from our General Manager. Our OHS Board, where our employees are represented at a 100% ratio, is moderated by our Employee Relations and Discipline Department and reports quarterly to the Head of Human Resources, the Employee Relations and Discipline Department, and all participating sub-employer representatives. Our Bank’s Occupational Health and Safety Policy is available at https://www.vakifbank.com.tr/Default.aspx?pageID=2788

With our Occupational Health and Safety Policy, we guide all our employees, including our subcontractors. We reference European Statistics on Accidents at Work-ESAW methods to track OHS performance indicators. We regularly provide in-class and e-learning training to raise awareness of the OHS throughout the Bank. We ensure that every newly recruited employee joins the one-day OHS in-class training within the scope of orientation training. In 2021, we provided in-class OHS training to a total of 1,093 participants. In addition, the Occupational Health and Safety Data Bank, which we have prepared for our employees, is among our publications on the corporate portal.

During this period, we have developed user-friendly screens and ensured sustainability in terms of efficiency and workflows. We developed and deployed virtual assistants to provide instant support to our employees via the Bilio Support application. All of our departments and branches have designated employee representatives in OHS. We raised awareness by training 157 employee representatives in 2021.

We mapped our OHS risks with a proactive risk management approach. We categorized them over approximately 100 control issues in our quarterly branch-department visits. Thus, we identify risks in advance and take the necessary measures. In this scope, we prepared a Risk Assessment Report and Emergency Plan in 339 branches and departments in 2021 and renewed those that were due. Thus, we have completed the Risk Assessment Report and Emergency Plan in all our departments and branches except for five branches and five departments. We also prepared a Covid-19 Risk Assessment Report in all our departments and branches every three months due to the pandemic. We have taken the necessary measures at all locations in accordance with the Pandemic Management and Study Guide and Covid-19 Risk Assessment Report. Within the scope of our service procurement, we care about OHS processes, and we supervise 100% of all our employees as part of our practices, including our subcontractor workers. We aim to maintain 100% compliance with the control issues at all locations in the upcoming period and realized over 100 items every three months by continuing the Integrated Management System’s continuity (ISO 9001-ISO 14001-ISO 45001).

We have updated the applications to be made at the organization phase and the response levels during emergencies. We conducted exercises in 330 departments and branches to increase the level of knowledge about the reality of earthquakes that exist due to our country’s location. At the Occupational Health and Safety and Employee Representative training sessions, we provided Earthquake Awareness Raising and Emergency Evacuation Training for 810 people. According to peak ground acceleration (475) (this is the maximum ground acceleration that occurred during earthquake shaking at a location) for all locations, we carried out an “Earthquake Technical Study” based on the presence of active faults and the degree of proximity, as well as the age and type of rocks, within the scope of the criteria related to the gathering areas. With the study, we conducted a comparison of the “Building Stock Status” starting from Istanbul province and made a change in the location of 7 branches in Istanbul that did not meet the criteria.

Regarding Intrusion Alarm, Fire Warning, and Security Camera Systems; we continued our activities of installation and elimination of malfunctions in existing systems and their regular maintenance, meeting the needs of new fire extinguishers, replacing the necessary ones with new ones and their regular maintenance in new branch openings and branch renovations in line with the reports of workplace safety specialist regarding “fire safety.” Within the scope of the improvement and development of electronic security measures; to eliminate the risk of the alarm system being disabled as a result of the failure to enter the alarm password during the closing of our branches or forgetting to enter the password, we started the application of sending an e-mail to the branch manager and text message to the branch security guard.

In 2021, we installed the CAS (Card Access System)/Turnstile System in the Headquarters Ankara Service Building, Corporate Academy Ankara Service Building, and the Pension and Health Support Fund Directorate buildings. We also renewed the security cameras and alarm systems of 100 departments and branches. We migrated the job request processes concerning physical security (security guard), electronic security (alarm and security cameras), and fire extinguishers to the system so that requests are met more effectively and quickly. To ensure that the installation, maintenance and repair, and progress payment control processes of the electronic security system are systematically, flawlessly, and rapidly carried out, we made improvements and advancements to the software installed at our bank’s locations in line with user feedback.

Within the scope of our service procurement, we care about OHS processes, and we inspect 100% of all our employees within the range of our practices, including our subcontractor workers. We aim to maintain 100% compliance in the upcoming period with the control issues realized over 100 items every three months by maintaining the Integrated Management System’s continuity (ISO 9001-ISO 14001-ISO 45001).

In this period when everything is changing rapidly, our Bank has adopted the philosophy of continuous development with a human-centered approach to achieve our strategic goals, keep up with the change and gain a competitive advantage. Our most critical mission is to follow a path that increases our employees’ motivation by considering their needs and expectations in line with our human resources policy.

In this context, we aim to manage our human resources effectively, meet our employees’ individual needs, and support our Bank’s corporate development through career management studies we conduct.

At VakıfBank, we ensure that corporate strategic goals are transformed into individual goals with the Performance Management System to solidarity our employees’ corporate and personal development with an innovative approach and continuous learning, increase solidarity and cooperation, and support their focus on corporate strategies.

We continue to improve our employees’ competencies to reach our goals and become the industry’s pioneer. Our performance evaluation system makes a behavioral-based competency assessment for our employees’ career planning once a year and analyzes their training and development needs based on the evaluations. While implementing this system, we support continuous change and development with the innovations we make every year so that our managers can make a healthy evaluation and advance the process with an objective approach.

In 2021, we included all our bank employees in our performance system and completed a successful period in which our employees made a difference with their performance during the pandemic process. We presented performance achievement awards to our employees by evaluating the individual performance objectively and transparently.

3,883 of our employees were promoted to a higher title as a result of the assessment of the Career and Salary Management System Regulation and the Specialized Personnel Regulation. As a result, we have promoted 23% of our employees to a higher position in our career planning with the vision of becoming a bank that trains its own executives.

As a result of the work we have carried out this year, we are transitioning to a promotion model in our career planning system from 2022 onwards, where personal competencies and performance will stand out. We will determine the promotion of employees in terms of titles according to the role groups in which they are involved as a result of the grouping work, which will be carried out according to precise and objective criteria determined in advance.

While developing our performance system, we have started to work to ensure that our data is processed with advanced algorithms and used effectively with artificial intelligence technology with a progressive analytical approach to making use of technological opportunities in our targeting methodology. As part of our digitalization journey, we aim to complete our work in 2022 by strengthening our system’s technical infrastructure, including the entire performance management system, and providing our users with reporting screens that will enable them an interactive and straightforward use.

We aim to complete the work in 2022 by accelerating the organizational backup software to facilitate business continuity, determine future management requirements from today, and follow up on our employees who will fill these requirements within our Bank.

With the Human Resources Reserve Management Project, we aim to ensure business continuity throughout our Bank and to reduce the dependence of processes on individuals to avoid any disruptions in ordinary and extraordinary situations. We will also ensure that the setup for monitoring the Reserve Management application defined in our Career and Wage Management System through our Bank’s data processing system is created.

Thanks to this project;

• Critical jobs will be defined,
• Personnel responsible for critical works and their backups will be determined and systematically monitored,
• Programs will be created to increase the competence of the relevant personnel,
• With creating a manager backup system, the entire backup system will be monitored and manageable.

Additionally, in line with our organizational goals, we effectively conduct our Bank’s Norm Staff activities to provide an optimum employment number according to the workload. Besides, we closely monitor these employees by creating talent pools to meet the workforce needed in the short, medium, and long term with high performance and potential employees within our Bank.

Changes to the organizational structuring of the Headquarters in 2021

• We have introduced a change in the organizational structuring of the Allocation Management Departments to ensure prompt and healthy meeting of loan allocation requests, the creation of effective allocation management, and the implementation of a common allocation policy.
• We have gone through a change in the organizational structuring of IT Departments to increase the effectiveness of our Bank’s Information Technology Departments, clarify functional distinctions, and build a structure in compliance with the requirements of modern Banking.
• We have established the Retail Banking Marketing Department to ensure the provision of customer-centric and effective management in the retail segment, timely and healthy satisfaction of customers’ changing needs, and support specialized expertise in this segment.
• To ensure widespread and effective deposit management, we made a structural adjustment in the Deposit Marketing Departments in parallel with current conjunctural requirements.

By contributing to the professional, technical and personal development of our employees through the training provided in line with the Bank’s strategy and the human resources policies that we follow, we aim to improve work productivity. We provide in-class, live virtual classroom, e-learning, and video-based training on the subjects determined as a result of the training needs analysis conducted as part of the competencies expected from our employees.

We offer our role-based training programs within the scope of;

• “Basic Training Programs” for newly recruited employees,
• “Development Programs” that include the personal development of our employees under different titles and professional/technical subjects,
• “Manager Development Training Programs” aimed at increasing the managerial, professional, and technical competencies of our employees working in executive positions,
• “Information Technologies Training Programs” will support the relevant business processes of the employees working in the information technologies departments and contribute to their professional development,
• “Online Training Programs” includes a wide range of e-learning training developed in the fields of professional/technical/individual, development/managerial, competence/legal, imperative/social, responsibility/hobby.

In our training processes, we use a mixed-learning model that also includes the next generation of digital learning experiences. We collaborate with universities and training companies in the design of educational programs. In order to monitor and evaluate the development of our employees, we conduct an evaluation test on the training portal at the end of the training and measure the training results.

We planned 63% of our in-class training sessions in the virtual classroom setting, thanks to our strengthened digital infrastructure as a result of the pandemic. A total of 707,026 people took part in 1,511 in-class and live virtual classroom training sessions, as well as e-learning and video training on 313 topics. We reached 11.04 people/hour for in-class training and 22.28 people/hour for e-learning. In 2021, the ratio of training sessions provided by internal trainers to in-house training sessions also amounted to 41% on a subject basis.

We conducted 343 training sessions for 5,864 Head Office Department employees during the same period, while 663 people participated in basic/orientation training programs. A total of 595 employees attended training sessions offered by the Banks Association of Turkey (TBB) and the Interbank Card Center (BKM), while 1,877 employees attended certification exam preparation and refresher training.

We have continued to contribute to the personal development of our employees through training videos on “Customer Relations,” “Sales,” “Effective and Good Speaking,” “Learning Human,” “Perception Management and Persuasion,” “Memory Strengthening Methods” and “Concentration Techniques” where micro-teaching methods are employed.

To raise awareness about sustainability, we organized e-learning training sessions on the topics of “Basic and Advanced Sustainability for Banking,” “ISO 9001 Quality Management System,” “ISO 14001 Environmental Management System,” “ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety Management System,” “Zero Waste,” “Integrated Management System and Auditor,” “Ethical Principles” and “Gender Equality in Working Life” for employees throughout the year. In the area of social responsibility, we provided our employees with e-learning training sessions on topics such as “How To Approach Disability,” and “Sign Language.”

After 2021 was declared the “Turkey Year of Disaster Education,” 8,544 of our employees have benefited from the “Disaster Awareness for Individuals and Families” training video prepared by AFAD.

We have transformed the face of distance learning through the Corporate Academy Training Platform for more effective and efficient learning. With the support of artificial intelligence, we made sure that training is delivered in a pleasant distance learning environment with a brand new experience offering employee-specific recommendations.

At the end of the training, we reduced our paper consumption thanks to our infrastructure, where an assessment form, in which participants state their views regarding the training, is delivered via a QR code.

In 2021, we won the Bronze Award in the TEGEP 2021 Learning and Development Awards with our “Phone Sales Techniques” training program, which we offered intensively to our employees in 2020.

In 2022, we will continue to support the development of our employees by diversifying digital learning channels such as e-learning, video training sessions, and live virtual classroom through a mixed learning model. In addition to the training and development opportunities offered by the Bank, we are planning to implement a digital library to support our learning culture. The library will be accessible 24/7 by our executives and employees and contain book summaries, articles, audiobooks, and periodicals. In the coming period, we will implement the “Data Analytics Development Program,” which we have designed to increase data awareness among employees to increase their data-based competencies and develop their data analytics skills.

OUR HIGHLIGHTED EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IN 2021

• In accordance with our vision of “always with our customers,” we have prioritized providing our staff with training and learning materials that will increase customer satisfaction and improve communication between our customers and employees. In this context, we made available the training videos “Code of Conduct,” “Customer Care and Right Welcoming,” “Measures to Be Taken at the Branch under Pandemic Conditions” and “Informing the Customer Accurately” to the employees working in branches.
• We have enabled our employees to be trained in data security and customer privacy protection, and compliance with legal regulations so that they can stay current in terms of information security.
• We conducted training sessions on the subjects of “Sector Based and Cash Flow Oriented Financial Analysis,” “Company Visit and Effective Communication with Customers,” “Early Warning Signals and Problematic Loans,” “Sales Techniques over the Phone” and “Treasury and Investment Products” for our branch employees.
• As part of the legally mandatory training, we provided “First Aid Update” training to 906 employees, “Occupational Health and Safety” training to 1,903 employees, and “Employee Representative” training to 106 employees.
• To develop the competencies of the employees, within the scope of the development program designed with the academicians of Boğaziçi University, we ensured that 21 participants received their internationally recognized specialization certificate by using the mixed teaching method.
• Before the Video Service Project was implemented at our Bank, we provided “Sign Language” training to our customer representatives working at the Call Center Directorate. With our Sign Language application in Video Call Center, which facilitates banking transactions for our hearing-impaired customers, we have been awarded the “Social Responsibility Special Prize” at the CX Awards where the most successful customer experience applications in Turkey are evaluated.
• While 11,447 employees benefited from a training video created for our bank’s new product “VINOV,” a total of 5,950 managers and employees attended 19 live virtual classroom training sessions.
• As part of the Presidential Internship Mobilization Project, we organized a four-day training program for university students in our bank, during their internship periods in August and September. We provided training sessions to 47 of our interns on the subjects of “Preparing for Business Life and Effective Time Management” as well as presentations prepared to promote our Bank.
• We presented the e-learning sessions organized under the subjects of “Human Rights,” “Ethics in the Framework of Human Rights,” “Human Rights and Ombudsman” and “Gender Equality in the Workplace based on Human Rights” organized by the Human Resources Office of the Presidency of Turkey in the category of Human Rights through the Distance Training Gate to the employees of our Bank.
• A total of 25,506 people/hour of training was provided in 59 subjects to enable our employees in information processing units to continue their education and development during the pandemic period. We have also enabled them to take advantage of global content provider digital platforms.

√ It has been subjected to limited assurance by the Independent Audit Firm.

In recruitment processes, we aim to carry out our activities effectively with our optimum number of employees and employ young and qualified candidates who will bring dynamism to our Bank. Accordingly, to meet our Bank’s increasing workload and the need for employees in IT departments, in 2021, we recruited 624 new employees. As of year-end, the number of our employees reached 16,929 with the recruitments we made throughout the year.

We have prioritized ensuring that the onboarding and adaptation process for newly appointed employees is carried out more efficiently. We have assigned “Onboarding Representatives” in our departments and branches to guide and support our employees in this regard. Through our representatives, we aimed to improve the onboarding and adaptation of our new employees, increase employee belonging throughout the organization, and better transfer the Bank’s corporate culture, mission, and objectives to newly recruited employees.

As a Bank, we have participated in career events at universities such as the Middle East Technical University, Galatasaray University, Yıldız Technical University, and Ankara University this year, as every year, to acquire university students or new graduates for our Bank and to inform them about our career and internship opportunities. We also organized an interview simulation event to help young minds gain experience in the interview process, supporting them in expressing themselves more accurately.

We granted internships in our departments/branches to help college students gain work experience and some insight into the banking profession. - As part of the “Internship Mobilization” project, carried out under the coordination of the Human Resources Office of the Presidency of Turkey, we recruited our intern students from among the candidates who applied to the “Career Gate” platform. We approved the application of “50” students to do internships at our Bank’s Departments/Branches for the internship calendars we have created on the Career Gate, with the work we have carried out as part of the “Internship Mobilization” project. We incorporated internship students into virtual classroom training programs specifically designed to get to know our bank’s corporate culture and to experience business life on a one-to-one basis during their internship. For our interns, we have assigned “Onboarding Representatives” to provide immediate support for their needs throughout the entire process and provided them with support throughout the process. We assessed the internship performance of the students who completed the internship process and training at our Bank via the Career Gate platform and issued an “Internship Certificate” to successful students.