Massachusetts bank tellers are among the highest paid in the country, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great living.
According to a recent survey titled “The State of the Bank Employee on Wall Street,” wages for frontline bank employees across the country are so low that nearly one-third of those workers receive some sort of public assistance. While average wages for tellers steadily declined since the recession began, the top 50 financial CEOs collectively saw about 20 percent increases in compensation in 2011, the most recent executive pay figures cited by the study. Many lower-level workers also told the committee of increasingly hostile and abusive work environments.
The report was released in December by the Committee for Better Banks, a labor advocacy group that commissioned the report to assess the quality of banking industry jobs for retail, administrative, frontline and back office workers. The report relied on a combination of academic research and more than 5,000 personal interviews and focus groups with bank employees. The report mostly focused on some of the very biggest banks on Wall Street.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), tellers nationwide across all industry groups averaged $26,260 annually and $12.62 hourly last year. Those working in the depository credit intermediation group averaged $26,320 annually, or $12.65 hourly.
The report did not specify wages in Massachusetts, but there is data from the state’s Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development (EOLWD), which finds that tellers here averaged $28,327 in annual wages, or $13.62 per hour, in May 2012, the latest period for which that data was available. An experienced teller averaged $14.99 per hour, or $31,184 annually.
Chief executives in that same industry group in Massachusetts averaged $224,542 annually, or $107.95 per hour, according to EOLWD data. Those numbers do not reflect additional perks like hiring and retention bonuses, retirement contributions or profit-sharing plans, but they also do not approach the figures big bank chiefs earned in the recession’s wake.
And while Massachusetts tellers do a little better for themselves, that frontline position might not be the surefire stepping stone to a longtime banking career that it may have once been.
Shifting Roles, Shifting Responsibilities
Douglas Bowen of PeoplesBank in Holyoke is the rare bank CEO who actually began his banking career behind the teller line. It was Bowen’s first job out of college, and he said that even as he started out in a teller position, he was slotted into a management development program.
“I had an idea there could be a career and progression from that point, although I certainly didn’t see all the way down the road to where I ended up today,” he said.
The teller-to-CEO path is an anomaly, even in community banking, but Bowen estimates that probably half his senior staff started their careers in the branch. While tellers typically join the bank from outside the company, PeoplesBank generally promotes from within the organization, he said.
The bank also offers its staff various internal training programs and last year engaged a Ritz Carlton leadership training program as part of its core training process, he added.
As the branch model evolves to keep pace with shifting consumer behaviors, so too will the role of the bank teller. Increasingly, the duties of frontline staff have expanded beyond conducting simple transactions for the customer, and many banks are experimenting with models wherein the teller more resembles the universal bankers PeoplesBank employs at its newest Northampton branch.
“The role’s evolving, it’s broadening, and I think the new role creates more opportunities for people who want a career or people who just want to do this job because they enjoy people,” Bowen said.
Greater Stratification
“I’ve been at this for 35 years, and if you were to ask me this in 1980, I could name five CEOs who were former tellers in community banks,” said Arthur Warren, a compensation adviser with the Walpole-based bank consultancy Arthur Warren Assoc.
Back then, it was also not uncommon for employees to work 20 or more years at a local community bank. Warren said the average length of service for a bank employee today is around seven and a half years. Twenty years ago, he said, it was closer to 12 years.
By and large, Warren said, banks these days tend to “steal” new executives and other high-paid positions away from other banks. Highly trained bankers are a hot commodity, and the big, in-house training programs of yesteryear that might have offered a frontline employee a better shot at advancement have largely dried up.
“Today, there’s much more stratification,” Warren said. “People are hired for a job, and that job has economic value, but at some point that caps out. Without the employee getting that training on their own, you can’t get anywhere. You’re just not going to see the same ascension to higher paying jobs.”
Warren said he encourages banks to offer liberal education policies, including tuition reimbursement for training outside of the bank.
But as Bowen points out, people don’t always get into the teller job with the aim of one day landing the corner office and a personal secretary.
“I think people have different reasons for getting into the teller job,” he said. “For some people, that’s what they want to do. They love the customer contact, they love interacting with people on a daily basis. For other people, it’s a stepping stone to a career in banking.”
Email: lalix@thewarrengroup.com
