Creating a healthy culture | RBS

Our long-term success depends on us building and nurturing a healthy culture where colleagues are engaged, and where our working environment is underpinned by robust risk behaviours.

Our Values guide the way we identify the right people to serve our customers well, as well as how we manage, engage and reward our colleagues. These values are at the heart of Our Code (the Group’s Code of Conduct).

To make sure we really live Our Values, we reinforce them in our policies, processes, communications, training and leadership role-modelling.

How we measure our progress

We continue to monitor our progress against our goals – gathering feedback from colleagues through our listening strategy, which includes our colleague opinion survey, a Colleague Advisory Panel that connects directly with our Board and ‘Workplace’, our social media platform. We also track metrics and key performance indicators, and feedback from regulators and industry bodies, including the Banking Standards Board’s (BSB) annual assessment of culture in the UK banking sector where we have continued to make good progress, with improvements in all 9 BSB categories (*).

Almost 58,000, 83%, of our colleagues completed our most recent opinion survey, the highest participation we’ve had. The results showed a further improvement in colleague sentiment and demonstrate that we are changing the culture of the bank for the better. Key measures of engagement, leadership and our culture have improved further, and we are above the global financial services norm in all comparable survey categories. The results are encouraging and show that our hard work is paying off. The strengthening of our culture was also echoed in the 2019 BSB assessment, which provides further proof of progress across a range of measures.

Whistleblowing
 

Where colleagues wish to report concerns relating to wrong doing or misconduct, one of the ways in which they can do this is by raising their concerns via Speak Up, the bank’s whistleblowing service. Our colleague opinion survey has shown the highest ever score when asking colleagues if they feel safe to speak up, as well as an understanding the process of how they do that. In 2019, 458 cases were raised compared to 480 in 2018.

(*) Limited assurance provided by Ernst & Young LLP.