Transforming culture across Financial Services

Achieving a healthy and profitable organisational culture is something our clients often list as one of their most pressing challenges.

FourthLine’s first Retail Conduct event of 2018 was held at the highly impressive Sky Garden on Fenchurch Street, and focused on good conduct and culture and the link to leadership. 

We were joined by guest speaker Gary Storer from Enterprise Learning, who presented and led the group discussion. Jodie Sable, Managing Consultant of FourthLine's Retail Conduct team, summarises the main talking points of the event:

Some of the key points raised and debated were:

• The FCA’s belief that culture, conduct and leadership are intrinsically linked
• The five key points the define good conduct culture: customer focus, capability, reliability, effectiveness and motivation
• Examples of the drivers of poor conduct
• The link to leadership: distinguishing drivers and capabilities
• How to develop the provider and consumer relationship

Following the event, Gary gave us his thoughts on the importance of getting culture and leadership right.

Gary’s 6 tips to develop a stronger conduct culture were:

• Educate and develop your regulated leaders
• Benchmark your ‘conduct culture’ regularly, separately to staff engagement surveys
• HR should understand conduct and risk
• Risk specialists need to understand culture, leadership and organisations
• Make conduct, culture and leadership the purpose of SMCR
• Don’t ever assume your culture is fixed! It always needs to be worked on.

What is conduct culture?

1. Customer focus: the focus, encouragement and priority given by management throughout the organisation to deliver great customer outcomes
   Example: reward and recognition for outstanding customer service
2. Capability: the value placed on continually developing staff and management ability to deal with customer requirements or complaints/issues directly or strategically
   Example: prioritising high quality training, coaching and feedback provided to customer service staff and managers at all levels
3. Reliability: the importance given to ensuring customers can rely on the organisation to deliver its promises to them
   Example: the extent to which errors or complaints are prioritised and corrected for customers.
4. Effectiveness: valuing effective processes and technology to support effective customer delivery
   Example: the extent to which leadership is perceived as investing in high quality technology and dealing with issues which compromise customer service.
5. Motivation: how much staff and managers feel motivated to deliver fair customer outcomes and outstanding customer service
   Example: empowering and encouraging staff to support customers and ‘go the extra mile’ for them.