Taking a line from the late Richard Dawson, “Survey says…!” Recently, Kevin Wilderman and I sent out a survey to employees to determine your understanding of our North Shore Bank brand and tagline, “The Bank of You.”

The results of the survey were quite enlightening — and overwhelmingly positive. Thank you to everyone who took the few minutes to answer four simple questions.

What four words did you choose to best describe North Shore Bank? The top four answers on the board were…

Friendly – 65 percent

Professional – 50 percent

Trustworthy – 45 percent

Knowledgeable – 41 percent

A respectable 88 percent of respondents “Agreed” or “Strongly Agreed” that the bank supports our brand position, “North Shore Bank is a community-minded bank that empowers customers to confidently manage their money so they can live the life they want.” We had good comments on this question as well, with some positive suggestions for ways we can further live the brand.

When asked to describe North Shore Bank in one sentence, many of you got creative. Here are just a few samples:

“North Shore Bank is a trustworthy bank; they are looking out for the customers’ best interest.”

“North Shore Bank is a financially sound organization that is proud of both the level of service provided to external customers and our ability to pull together as an organization to meet operational challenges.”

“North Shore Bank cares about their customers and employees alike, always willing to help in any way they can.”

“North Shore Bank is more than ‘the bank of you’ — we’re the ‘bank for your whole family’; we treat our customers as family and we make responsible, educated business decision.”

“We are a high-touch, high integrity, community bank.”

“Best bank ever!”

When it comes to how you feel about North Shore Bank and how we interact with our customers and the communities we serve, here’s what some of you had to say:

“We are nice to our customers, supportive of our communities, and we treat each other as employees with respect. When I tell a new acquaintance where I work, I’m confident that they will not have had a bad experience with the bank.”

“I think putting our name in the community helps — the North Shore Bank zoo train, family free day. I think it makes [customers] proud to see that the bank where they bank is out in the community as well.”

“North Shore Bank has been around for years and has done many different things to help our community. Not only am I honored to work for such a great company, but I am proud to be part of the North Shore family!”

“I like being accountable to my customers. I like working in my community and seeing the faces in the bank that I see in the grocery store, the library, my church and restaurants. It is such a positive thing to see the impact I have on the lives of people. It isn’t always a big impact. It might be ordering checks, sending out a wire to a child far away or offering a solution to a financial situation. But it still is a wonderful feeling to help my community and the people in it.”

To be honest, it was difficult to pare down the hundreds of wonderful comments from the survey. There were nearly 300 comments for each of the above questions.

So, why did we ask you to take this survey? What’s next?

The marketing and human resources departments are teaming up to spread the word about why we are “The Bank of You” and how we arrived at this tagline to demonstrate our core brand. Additionally, we are developing this brand into a related employment brand and tagline.

This employment brand message will be used to represent us to potential employees on our new, soon-to-be-launched recruiting website (OpenHire) and our new on-boarding site (called RedCarpet — we’ll streamline the orientation and on-boarding processes here), as well as to all employees at various times and in different employee communications.

Next, we’ll be developing employee training about our brand so that we are all “on the same page” and have a greater understand of who we are, what we do, and how each of us truly brings our brand to life.

Again, thank you for taking part in the survey.