'Trust has been hard-earned in the wake of the crash'

The importance of trust in the financial services sector has never been greater. The reputational damage dealt by the financial crash of a decade ago was enormous and regulators have rightly placed a heavy emphasis on the culture of financial institutions in response.

"Regulators across the world have been focusing on the importance of trust, risk-taking behaviours, and the protection of whistle-blowers in the sector," says Jim Flynn, head of consulting with the Great Place to Work Institute. "One of the factors which is seen to have a major influence on the stability of the sector is the extent to which the institutions involved have a healthy culture. We have been seeing a lot of work put into that issue by firms across the sector and Goodbody has been among those leading the way on it."

Goodbody managing director Roy Barrett is in no doubt about the importance of organisational culture. “It decides the attitudes and behaviours of people, how they act and don’t act with each other,” he says. “Having the wrong culture will lead to bad outcomes. Having the right culture is very important.”

He doesn’t believe it should require regulatory intervention for financial institutions to develop the right culture, however. “The Central Bank’s drive in relation to culture is a good thing but no institution should depend on a regulator or other third party to drive their behaviours. It shouldn’t require an external diktat. It’s the responsibility of the organisation itself and you should do it because it is the right thing to do and not because someone is looking over your shoulder making you do it.”

Creating a high-trust culture goes back to a simple premise, he argues. “If people in the business can’t trust the it, how can customers? It’s about the response of customers to the behaviours and attitudes of the people they are dealing with. Our people are all technically very good at what they do but what’s important is that the customer can trust the integrity of the advice they are being given.”

‘Decline in trust’

And that trust has been hard-earned in the wake of the crash. “In an Irish context, when you look at what happened in the banking sector and other financial services firms back then it was inevitable there would be a decline in trust,” he says. “If respect and trust hadn’t fallen away completely it was definitely challenged. As a business within that sector, whatever people’s perceptions of the sector, we’re only responsible for one thing – our own behaviours and how we interact with people. The only things we can change and improve on is our own internal attitudes and behaviours.”

The Goodbody response was to seek measurable ways of improving as a business. “It’s about trust and integrity and values,” Barrett explains. “It’s one thing talking about it, it’s quite another to try to do something about it. The Great Place to Work programme gives you very objective benchmarks to prove that a culture of trust and integrity exists in the business. And these benchmarks are set against all industries and not just the financial services sector. Once you start measuring it, you get a framework for continuous improvement. Great Place to Work is measurable and quantifiable and real. You either improve or you disimprove. Thankfully, we improved.”

He accepts that every organisation will claim to have those values of trust and integrity. “Our view is that if you have them you have to be able to prove it to yourself first. The most cynical audience is the internal one. When you talk about values it is important to actually live them and have a framework that ensures that it happens. If you don’t have them within the business, how can your customers have faith that they can place their trust in you? That’s the real value in the Great Place to Work Programme – it enables you to prove that those values exist in the business. Ultimately, it benefits our employees, customers and those who will come to work for us in the future.”

Indeed, the impact on recruitment has been significant. “We hope we are seen as an employer of choice. When we look at the level of staff turnover in the business, it is very low; the industry average is many multiples of it. The number of applications we receive for positions has increased. Applications for our intern programme have increased by 100 per cent in each of the last two years. This can be due to a lot of different factors, but we hope that part of it is the external perception of the culture of the organisation.”