Julie Ann, Head Teller

I have often told about a day when my Dad found me lying around and asked what was wrong. I replied that I was bored. He responded, “How can you be bored when there are so many interesting things to do in this world?” I decided that day that I would never be bored again. The only times I remember being bored in my life were when we had to sit through repetitive, useless, long-winded staff meetings at First Union Bank.

But when it came to staff meetings, our Julie did it better. She was the Head Teller (or whatever the current title was) and responsible for her team’s actions. She wrote and told me about a meeting that she created, and I was extremely proud of her. There was a list of policies that every teller was supposed to know and she discovered that most of the tellers didn’t know all of the policies. So she created a game. She set a rolling chair on a square on the floor and had them take turns being the contestant. She would ask them a question about the policies and if they were correct, they got to move forward a square. If they didn’t know the answer, they were allowed to “phone a friend” by asking the other team members. When everyone was stumped, a new team member became the contestant. There was a lot of laughter and joking around during the process, but it made them all realize that they didn’t know all of the policies and it also taught them what they were. Some were quite surprised! The entire meeting took only a half an hour or so, and everyone enjoyed it. It was SO much better than other meetings we suffered through.