For more than 180+ years, United Bank has been one of the nation’s longest-standing financial institutions with 2,000+ employees, offering personal banking, business banking, and wealth management solutions.
As United Bank grew and its teams evolved, leaders recognized the need for deeper clarity, an insights engine that could move the organization beyond manual surveys and into a modern, scalable, research-backed way of listening.
To build a modern listening foundation, the bank partnered with CultureMonkey to bring structured, clear engagement intelligence into its people strategy.
Challenge: Unclear signals around employee engagement and sentiment
Need to move beyond manual measurement
United Bank had relied on manual survey processes that offered limited visibility. Without a structured system, it was difficult to spot patterns, compare results, or identify pockets of disengagement across the organization with confidence
Fragmented visibility across distributed teams
Across 54 functions and 7 regions, leaders wanted deeper clarity into how employees felt supported and engaged. Understanding engagement across 15 business units required a more structured, data-informed approach.
Solution: Building a people-science-driven listening system
United Bank needed clearer, more consistent visibility into engagement. CultureMonkey became the foundation of that shift, introducing a unified system that made engagement easier to measure, simpler to interpret, and more actionable for leaders across the organization.
A secure, scalable survey engine for 2,000+ employees
CultureMonkey enabled seamless deployment across all functions and regions, with automated reminders and real-time visibility into participation. This visibility helped maintain stable response rates and contributed to the bank achieving over 80% completion across teams.
Building a custom driver framework for United Bank
With support from CultureMonkey’s People Science team, the bank’s priority drivers were mapped to a research-backed framework. This created a model that was unique to United Bank, scientifically validated, and consistent across teams and regions.
Enabling leaders to spot patterns with clarity
CultureMonkey’s dashboards simplified complexity, giving leaders clear visibility from high-performing business units to locations needing immediate attention. This level of granularity created unprecedented clarity for action planning.
Results: Greater clarity on experience, priorities, and progress
The insights that emerged from this listening cycle gave United Bank’s leaders a clearer view of how employees were experiencing their work, where strengths were emerging, and which areas needed focused attention.
- Clear focus map for 2025: For the 2025 engagement plan, key focus areas, such as leadership effectiveness and rewards and recognition, were identified through in-depth engagement driver analysis.
- High employee response rate: United Bank achieved over 80% participation, driven by CultureMonkey’s customizable survey design that made it easy for employees across roles to respond in a meaningful and relevant way.
- Stronger engagement than industry peers: By leveraging CultureMonkey’s benchmark data, the bank’s engagement score was found to be 10% higher than financial organizations with a similar workforce size.
- Refocusing priority areas: The Growth & Development area was found to be 13% above the industry benchmark, guiding the bank to further focus on development pathways and leadership capability building.
CultureMonkey made it easy to automate our employee engagement surveys while still giving us the flexibility to customize them. Their real-time data analysis, combined with insights from the People Science team, helped us uncover key focus areas, align our strategy with industry benchmarks, and strengthen our leadership development efforts. - Mollie Mock Kaufman, Director of Talent Development & Training, United Bank
