Culture and ethics

In “There’s More…” we set out the importance of having an ethical culture in the firm, as well as identifying the key areas of focus for us in order to ensure we deliver on this.

Measuring how good we are at creating and embedding an ethical culture is no easy task, and many of our indicators are proxy measures only – e.g. results from opinion surveys. This is an area where we are working to improve our reporting and aim to develop more robust measures over the coming year.

We are pleased to note the improving trend in many of our current measures, whilst recognising that there is more to do in each area.

The key areas of focus set out in “There’s more…” are as follows:

Setting the right tone from the top

The views of our people are an important measure of whether we are getting this right – our people’s opinion of their own managers and the leadership of their part of the business are significant indicators in this area (figures from our quarterly survey of our people’s opinions “YouMatter”. Note: BU = Business Unit.)

Managing the business using more than just financial measures

Our management board reviews the overall performance of the business with the aid of a balanced business scorecard. The scorecard consists of 32 measures across the four key areas of People, Clients, Firm and Profits. Of these 32 measures 10 are specifically finance linked, leaving the remaining 69% focused on developing our people, the environment, risk and quality management etc.

Making ethics a part of business decision making

We put a lot of effort into embedding ethics in the way we do business - e.g. our rules require that new assignments and new clients are screened through our risk procedures. We are working to develop a key indicator for this area to summarise our performance in a manner useful to management.

A relevant indicator here is our people's awareness of how to resolve ethical issues.

Taking a thorough approach to regulatory compliance

Again we place a great emphasis on embedding a “compliance culture” throughout the firm, from new joiner awareness programmes to the formal rules and control systems we have in place. Possibly the single simplest indicator though is the total hours we invest regularly in mandatory compliance and independence training.

 

Trusting and empowering our people

One of our most relevant measures here is what our people think – gathered from our YouMatter survey.

 

Enabling personal development

Our commitment to encouraging and enabling our people to realise their maximum potential is demonstrated by our investment in learning and development activities.