How Not To Deal With A Cynical Staff: Part Two

So in the last post you read the way our Director intends to address our attitude to the company. Here's what you might need to know and what we shouldn't need to tell him. No-one but you has ever read this.

(starts)

Dear Director,

It's clear from your recent mail that you are concerned about a number of factors that point to the level of morale and feeling of engagement amongst the people in the Loans business. But we don't think you have addressed them. Here's why.

Of course we can read the objectives on the Intranet, but that's the problem, the Intranet is nothing but PR fluff and regulatory box-ticking. Many of us are involved in the budgeting process, so we know that the business has real financial objectives, and none of those appear on the Intranet. What else are the management hiding? That's why we say we don't understand the objectives of the business - because we know we haven't been told what the real objectives are.

As for involvement in decision-making, we're also a realistic lot, so we don't expect to be involved in any meaningful sense in any decision taken in a business that employs over 100,000 people. We know that decisions are made mostly at your level and above on the basis of reporting that comes directly from IT and Group functions. We know that the majority of the implementation resources in the company - from IT to Branch - are taken by senior-level projects, so that proposals from business units can only be marginal in extent and effect. Except pricing. Is anyone going to ask us if we want to move office from (nice West End address) to the City fringes next year? We're pretty sure the decision has already been taken and we're just waiting for the official spin.

On the matter of training, many of us have friends who work in the Investment Banks, have been through the big consultancies and have worked in other industries, and know that companies committed to training are pro-active - they do not tell their staff that it is up to them to jump endless bureaucratic hurdles and persuade a senior manager to sign off on an external course or membership of a professional association. And what sort of company spends millions on new software and then leaves it up to the staff to decide if they want to get trained on it: The Bank did when it failed to incorporate training into the roll-out of Sharepoint. One more thing we're sure you're aware of: if the "training" does not enhance our CV's, we are not going to count it as serious. Training that is of value to The Bank is likely to be of value to another employer, and we know how interviewers regard internal courses and Intranet training - because we recruit people ourselves.

Sometimes we answer as we do because you are not asking us the questions we need you to ask, so we punish you for that. Of course we have read our job specs and filled in Balanced Scorecards. And of course we know that all that is empty HR box-ticking. We know that because many of us are managers who struggle to explain, for example, to a junior analyst how they have a TCF responsibility. We know they don't, they know they don't, but the box must be ticked. We know what our jobs really are, what we don't understand is what that reality has to do with the verbiage on the forms.

Of course we understand how our performance is judged - that's why often we don't approve of the results. But you don't ask us if we approve, you ask us if we understand, and the only way we can punish you for that is to tell you we don't understand. Actually, we don't understand how you could continue to use a system so obviously open to abuse, and that each of us have had experience of being abused by. In our experience, confident managers usually rate their people fairly, while weak or insecure managers use the process to get back at their staff.

As for the feedback on our performance, most of us have experience of hearing one thing in our appraisal meeting and then reading something entirely more harsh and damning on paper. Some of us are embarrassed by the fact that our recognition for someone's performance will not be matched in their pay packet. When there is neither significant financial reward nor development opportunity as a result, praise is cheapened.

Many of us have lost count of the number of Directors who have started their tenure by telling us how much they believe in personal development and then let it drop as they struggle to keep up with the demands from Board level. The ex-MT's have their careers pro-actively managed in the early years and the difference between their experience and that of a normal hire is salutary. We know how easily a manager can lock someone in - a simple "partially met" usually does it - and how few people move around and upwards. Of course we do not think anyone has serious opportunities for personal development.

ends

In the next post I'll explain why "hey, this is life in the modern corporation, just ignore it" won't really do as a mature and responsible response.