Do employees have a right to regular amounts of sleep? One bank in the US recently argued that no they didn’t, work performance had to come first, and the resulting legal confrontation led to an out of court settlement for a junior banker who’d been sacked just two months into their career after insisting that their eight hours of sleep was a medical necessity.
For many commentators, the settlement was another sign of the finance industry sidestepping the problems of a “grind culture”, long hours and management “bullying”. A Wall Street Journal investigation has claimed that junior bankers were being told to not log all of their hours, allowing them to ignore limits on working hours.
Because for all the measures put into place to counter the sector’s image problem, enforced by regulatory bodies and by employers themselves, the emphasis on performance and results isn’t disappearing. Businesses have to be competitive, they have to win, and staff want the rewards from that success. Let’s not forget that new entrants are excited to join operations willing to pay an average salary exceeding £100,000, along with the potential for fast-tracking and even bigger rewards and prospect of substantial bonuses.
Yet the evidence suggests that more awareness-raising and zero tolerance warnings around bullying and harassment have not changed the sector’s culture. A Financial Times survey suggested levels of bullying had actually risen by two-thirds in the past three years.
Such extreme conditions in finance — the claims of unreasonable demands, insults and shouting — have been possible because of a cycle of expectations around performance and progression. Managers have paid their dues, been through the storms of all-night working, the intense stress of meeting client demands, to get where they are, and now feel entitled to impose the same rite of passage on newcomers. Rather than moderating attitudes, the rise of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion policies and initiatives are believed to have led to a stiffening of attitudes and a trend for anti-DEI sentiments as acceptable, sometimes even fashionable.
The situation is relevant to employers generally: the question of how it’s possible to have a balanced culture, where there might be instances of a need for long hours and pressure to deliver on targets, without the severe strains on health and wellbeing, the constant potential for conflict and claims of toxicity. It’s not only a challenge that banking and finance has to deal with, and there are plenty of examples of tough environments, in healthcare, sales, the media, government etc, where employees don’t feel they’re being pushed to the brink of a collapse in their wellbeing.
The foundation is trust. The underlying problem in the finance sector has been a lack of openness; generations of staff who have felt unable to speak up, an acceptance of the power of bosses and their behaviours; and a lack of effective systems for managing conflict, for clearing the air of grievances and reasonable complaints about long hours working and its effects. As a result, there’s a build up of secrecy and nervousness about the consequences of challenging norms for people’s reputations and careers.
A healthier balance is based on a Clear Air culture, which is in turn delivered by access to informal conflict processes like mediation and neutral assessment, high quality formal processes for investigating complex cases in a professional way, and the development of people skills, particularly around helping line managers deal with difficult conversations.
Another essential to finding a balance between pressure and personal rewards for employees, is providing a clear sense of purpose. Increasingly it seems as if workers in finance industries are less convinced by the importance of higher salaries and bonuses as the only motivation needed for dealing with stress. Research among younger recruits has suggested that 42% would choose a job that was linked to social responsibility over the offer of more money. It’s becoming more important for recruiters to think about the wider social roles and responsibilities of financing, making stronger connections between job roles and positive impacts on others in terms of standards of living, alongside the flexibility and autonomy that can be offered.
