Company: MCHB
Filing Date: 2025-05-09
Form Type: 425
Source: 0001518715-25-000085
Chunk: 31

Company: Mechanics Bancorp
Filing Date: 2025-05-09
Form: 425
Chunk 31
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 going to turn to email questions quickly now that we did exhaust the chat pane. Congratulations. Let me see if we have anything. I think people are generally using the chat pane. All right, let me see. Oh, what's your vision for learning and development training? C.J. Johnson That's a key area focus for us. We've got a lot of emphasis right now around overhauling, our retail training program. It is challenging as you do acquisitions and you merge different banks together and different banks have different ways of training their retail branches. We've had a little bit of inconsistency across that. It's been made harder by COVID when you're fully remote and you don't get to come in person. So there's a big effort at Mechanics right now to create a centralized retail training area in Walnut Creek -- a dedicated space where we can fly new hires in and train them up in a consistent way and get them some exposure to senior management and invest at the beginning of their employment with Mechanics and make sure they're all getting the same training on our systems and how we want to interact with customers. So very important. We have a great L and D team. We probably need to continue investing there and bringing a few more folks on through the merger cause there's more employees and so you've got to have the ability to train them up and have consistent policies, procedures and education around how do we want to do business so we don't have confusion, we don't have things being done inconsistently cause that just compounds and turns into bigger problems. But I don't know Chris, if you want to add or Tony, anymore on that effort? Daniel Watt I think the only thing I would add to that when it comes to L and D, -- and this is no criticism on Mechanics or HomeStreet -- sometimes with L and D we get a lot of theory based practices on how we learn versus practical. So one of the things Chris and I have been partnered up with is whether it's the back office or the front office, really doing practical training. So something that's very similar to what if it's credit, right? What is an underwriter really looking at? If it's operations based, what are the real key risks? And so I think we're spending more time around that, investing in the right people and working hand in hand with L and D to have the right specialists teaching our colleagues. I think learning and development, you've got to look at it as an investment in our people. So we want to