Staff

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  • Photo: Stefan Weitanen

A radical organisational change was carried out during the year. Two business areas have been created – one for large corporates and one for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Each business area has a customer teams tasked with looking after customer contacts.

The purpose of the reorganisation, which was carried out at mid-year, was to achieve a greater degree of customer focus by means of some new working practices. One business area looks after small and medium-sized enterprises. Marketing, new transactions, payment defaults, losses and recoveries – everything is done based on the needs of SMEs. In the other business area, this is done based on the needs of large corporates, which are often very different from those of SMEs.

The reorganisation meant changed job responsibilities for many people. A new staff function has been formed, with the task of further ensuring that we comply with external rules, and that we have internal policies and rules in key areas. A special group, Business Support, has been set up to support the business areas’ customer-focused activities, and to ensure rapid processing.
More wide-ranging working practices, in which everyone has multiple skills, are being developed in the business areas’ customer teams. In order to implement this, a training programme was initiated, covering credit research, risk assessment, guarantee techniques and financing.

Additional employees

During the year, we increased our workforce by six annual work units, to 101, in order to meet customer needs better, and to continue actively marketing EKN. A need for quality control, business development and greater knowledge of industry has also contributed to EKN’s need to grow. The year 2007 saw the top of an economic boom, which also meant an increase in staff turnover. However, we have found no problems in re-recruiting people.

Security policy

In order to live up to the demands imposed on us by clients, customers and others, as well as legislation and ordinances, we continuously analyse risks. We have rules and guidelines for protecting staff, property and information. Employees are continuously briefed about this, and are kept up-to-date so that they are best able to manage the operational risks that may arise.

Objectives for skills provision

We will continue our strategic efforts in skills provision in order to be able to attract, recruit, develop and retain skilled staff. Below we report EKN’s values for this objective, with 2006 values in brackets:

  • A uniform age distribution with a median age in the range 38-42.
    The median age at the end of 2007 was 43 (42).
  • Annual turnover of personnel around 4-5%.
    The turnover of personnel was just over 11% (10%).
  • A balanced distribution by gender in all skills areas, i.e. within the range 40%-60%.
    At the end of 2007, 58% of EKN’s employees were women and 42% were men (55%, 45%).
  • The average period of employment for persons who give notice to leave shall not be less than 4 years.
    The average period of employment for persons who left during the year was 4 years (3 years).

That the objective for personnel turnover was not met can be explained by the favourable situation for employees on the job market.

EKN has been working for several years to increase ethnic and cultural diversity.

Sick leave has been very low during the year at 1.9% of total normal working hours. No fewer than 70% of EKN’s employees had five or fewer days of illness during the year, the definition of what is called being long-term healthy.