One of the funny things about living in remote places in foreign countries is that important (and trivial) news items can pass us by without a murmur. We get the Economist delivered every week, so usually know about the major world events, but always seem to be eating dinner when the TV news is on.
Anyway, point is, from time-to-time somebody brings a newspaper from the UK and leaves it around somewhere where we can look at it. This week it was a Sunday Times, a very rare treat, being one of the few UK newspapers that isn’t completely uninteresting. We get very distressed when we find someone has only left behind a Daily Mail .
In the Sunday Times there was a story of a lady who had been more or less forced out of her career at Deutsche Bank by a bullying boss (and her inability to cope with the stressful environment), who had been awarded £800,000 compensation. Her annual salary was about £65,000 I believe.
Now I don’t have much in the way of sympathy for Investment Banks but on this occasion I have to agree with them. That amount of money is completely ridiculous for the harm suffered by the ‘victim’, regardless of the circumstances. But that is not the point.
The bullying boss is still employed by the bank, the lady is (presumably) still unemployed. Now call me an old fool, but I would have thought the solution is (a) sack the bully, (b) implement procedures to get rid of bullying in the work environment, and (c) give the lady a job, in a different department if necessary, and in an easier role if she can’t manage the stress. Tackle the problem at source so to speak.
Now why do I care about all this? Because, five years ago, before I sold up and moved to France, I worked in ‘middle management’ for Deutsche Bank. If truth be told, I disliked the environment and that played a significant role in my decision to change my life. I saw the solution as being to leave and work things out for myself, rather than stick around 10 years, wait for a nervous breakdown, and then sue them for £800,000, but I could have been wrong.
So why did I dislike the environment? Well, after five years of reflection (not…) I think I begin to understand. Banks like Deutsche Bank and the other big investment banks pay very high salaries, in an effort to attract the best staff. Fair enough. But what they actually attract most of is people who want big salaries, which is not the same as ‘the best people for the jobs’. So you have hundreds of people obsessing about their salaries and bonusses, and actually being pretty unproductive. Yes I know there are exceptions, but I’m allowed to generalise.
It is certainly true that the small Fund Management company I worked in before Deutsche Bank paid their staff a lot less, but the staff worked together well, and much more productively. And it was a nice place to work.
To make matters worse, the big banks then develop a culture of ‘we are paying you a lot, so we expect you to work hard’. Unfortunately they interpret ‘working hard’ to mean ‘working very long hours’ which is not the same thing at all. Typically (I have seen it several times) they then bring a completely useless boss in (often from the US in my limited experience) who has the particular talents of being bullying, rude, often thick, and makes people intimidated, with the sole purpose of getting more effort out of the staff. It doesn’t work of course – as even the most elementary psycholgist can tell you, you get results with encouragement and praise, not by bullying and threats – but hey, who cares about that.
So either people work the long hours, to create a good impression with the boss and guard the all important bonus and pay rise, or they leave like I did, or they stick around and put up with it for years on end, getting more and more stressed. Fair choice.
So why I am rattling on about all this?
Is it because I thank the environment for forcing me to move to France? Hummm, partly. But mostly because it is important to appreciate what people are going through to earn their enormous city salaries. Everyone wanting their boss’s job, and a larger slice of the bonus pie. Making an interesting and useful contribution to the company is only relevant if it achieves one of those two goals.
So next time you read about some big-shot earning £500k, think of me earning, lets just say, not very much, but being happy and unstressed every single day.
Although it would be about now I’d be due my £800,000, and that would help pay for a new car and some attractive new trees for the garden…
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