Healthy corporate culture a key to AFS’ success

Advanced financial services Sales manager Maria Fernandes, left, discusses her management style with fellow manager Matt Sherman during a sales coaching session. /
Advanced financial services Sales manager Maria Fernandes, left, discusses her management style with fellow manager Matt Sherman during a sales coaching session. /

In the past year, as troubles mounted in the real estate and financial industries, Newport-based Advanced Financial Services Inc. worked daily to share as much information as possible with its employees about the company’s challenges, opportunities and decisions during difficult times.
AFS’ “open-book” policy with its team is one of the central tenets of the company’s mission, said Kurt D. Noyce, AFS president, who has led the privately held, residential mortgage lender for the past eight years.
“Being faithful to our open-book culture, I think it becomes an easy thing to do when times are good,” Noyce said. “It becomes easy to not only communicate but an easy thing to be generous to your employees. And when finances are somewhat more strained, I think that’s the real test of where your corporate culture is.”
AFS’ strong commitment to a corporate culture that benefits its employees in many ways has resulted in the company being included for the third time in as many years on the list of Best Places To Work in Rhode Island, which Providence Business News sponsors annually in conjunction with Best Companies Group, an independent research organization based in Harrisburg, Pa., which chose the winners.
AFS conducts lending activities in more than 40 states, using a network of local service providers that allows the company to reach into big cities and small towns alike. The company currently has 271 employees, adding 39 new hires in the past fiscal year.
AFS positions each new employee for success in the firm, providing an average 188 hours in company orientation and training during their first year.
“For a new person, we have a pretty extensive orientation camp where they get a pretty tight ratio – about one sales trainer to three new hires – for more than two months, then a one-to-six ratio for the first year, so they get a lot of attention,” Noyce said.
The company offers employees a generous incentive program, with annual merit increases that have averaged 7 percent for the past several years – well exceeding the nationwide average of about 3 percent.
Loan officers, which comprise more than half of AFS’ work force, are paid monthly commissions based on revenue they generate after reaching a minimum threshold. Even higher percentages are awarded for referrals and reactivated customers.
AFS also offers a stock/bonus program that distributes cash bonuses and stock annually to every employee that has been with the firm for at least one year. Noyce sets the performance goal and levels of distribution based on the company’s financial budget and projections.
Graded vesting in AFS shares occurs over a five-year period and begins after three years of service. The vested shares, which can be redeemed by employees on a quarterly basis, have appreciated 880 percent in the last seven years.
AFS also offers a very generous medical-insurance plan with low co-payments and very comprehensive coverage. The company’s employees pay 20 percent of monthly premiums. They have incurred an average annual increase of just 4.8 percent in premium costs over the past five years, with no reduction in benefits – compared with 10-15 percent annual increases that employees throughout the country have experienced.
In an effort to help employees save tax dollars, AFS offers a Flexible Spending Account Plan that enables employees to contribute up to $3,000 per year for medical expenses and up to $5,000 per year for dependent-care expenses.
AFS also makes it a policy to recognize and reward employees on a regular basis who have made exceptional contributions to the company’s success. At the beginning of each month, the entire company comes together for a catered lunch to publicly recognize individual and departmental achievements from the previous month. At AFS’ annual meeting, twelve employees are honored as “teammates of the year.”
The company develops all of its sales team leaders internally, through a management training program that invites participants to all management forums, training classes and project- improvement committees.
For the past nine years AFS has rewarded its top loan officers and team leaders with a four-day, all-expense paid vacation at the Hotel Monaco, a palatial resort that occupies an entire city block in downtown Washington, DC.
A final, but not insignificant, aspect of AFS’ corporate culture that makes the company a great place to work has less to do with what it gives its employees, than what the company enables them to give to their community.
The company has a formalized volunteer program, called AFS Cares, which enables all full-time employees to take paid leave of up to 100 hours per year in addition to their traditional paid time off in order to volunteer for nonprofit organizations – both in the United States and abroad.
In addition, AFS gives a financial donation to each charitable organization for which employees volunteer, equal to $10 per volunteer hour, and donates up to $2,500 per employee annually to match their donations to charities of their choice.
And in what has become an annual tradition, AFS closes its doors one day a year to volunteer the entire organization’s time and resources to the local community. Last month, during the company’s most recent Volunteer Day, AFS shut down its operations for a few hours to provide about 350 needy families with groceries through local shelters, Noyce said.
AFS’s strong, public emphasis on community involvement and charitable giving attracts employees who share similar values, Noyce said. As a result, the company is staffed with individuals of high character who collectively make AFS a great place to work – even amid challenging times in their industry, he said. •

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