City regulators call time on workplace bullies

Hello and welcome to Working It

The work story that has really captured FT readers’ attention this week is the strange tale of a Citibank analyst sacked for a meal expenses claim that was under the bank’s €100 daily allowance. Check out the nearly 500 reader comments . . . 🤐

Read on for a look at the surprisingly far-reaching diversity, equity and inclusion regulation coming to the financial services sector, and in Office Therapy we tackle the contagion 🤧 of negative colleagues.

Do email me about truth, lies, illicit sandwiches — and anything else that we should cover: [email protected].

Bullies in the City are getting the red card

There’s something big afoot in the City — and it’s going to be a game-changer. Why? The two financial services regulators, the Financial Conduct Authority (covering financial services such as mortgages, pensions and investments) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (the Bank of England’s regulatory arm, broadly covering banks, insurers and major investment groups), have issued parallel consultation papers around a new regulatory framework to underpin diversity, equity and inclusion in the entire financial sector.

I’ve ploughed through some very dusty prose but the hidden gems in these proposals are indeed valuable 💎. In short, it’s likely that “non-financial misconduct” — such as bullying, harassment and discriminatory practices — will be added to existing FCA regulatory frameworks governing workers’ behaviour. The PRA, meanwhile, proposes to clarify that it will take into account established patterns of behaviour (ie the bad sort) when it does “fit and proper assessments”. Read more in PwC’s handy guide.

Katy Bennett, PwC’s diversity, equity and inclusion consulting director, says these proposals “are pretty comprehensive — and probably have a lot more implications than we were expecting”. It’s not often that oh-so-cautious regulators actually rock the boat a bit 🚣🏽‍♀️.

Katy goes on: “What is encouraging is that the regulators have said, ‘well actually we spend a lot of time telling organisations what good behaviour looks like from a regulatory perspective — this is what good culture is, this is what good conduct is. So let’s embed the concepts of what they call non-financial conduct: bullying, harassment, even sometimes kinds of behaviours in our personal lives.” Breaking the non-financial conduct rules could affect an individual’s status and ability to work within a financial services organisation.

The other big “wow” in the consultation is the requirement for companies to collect a lot more data about their staff. And I mean a lot. Gender/sex, plus ethnicity, disability, sexuality, faith and, on a voluntary basis, social mobility and information on being a parent. [The FT recently ran an opinion piece by Nick Bent of the charity upReach calling for this consultation to ask for mandatory reporting of socio-economic data. It has been shown that coming from a lower socio-economic background is a huge barrier to advancement at work.]

That data has to be reported to the regulator. It will then form the basis of each company’s diversity strategy. All of this makes for more joined-up thinking, and many companies will already be doing this sort of data collection, but, as Katy says, “you need to have [diversity] targets, and those targets need to be connected to your strategy, and the CEO is responsible for making sure those targets happen”. Some people are going to be very busy 👩🏽‍💻.

The small print? If all goes to plan, these changes will come into force once the FCA and PRA publish policy statements in 2024, and regulated companies will then be given a year to implement the changes, with a slightly easier regime in place for the first year. Those with fewer than 250 employees are exempt (as they are for gender pay gap reporting). There’s still a long way to go — the consultation runs until December 18 this year.

But overall? “It really does make me feel positive,” says Katy. “It means we can start benchmarking in a way we can’t at the moment. We don’t know what it is like to be someone with a disability in the City, we don’t have stats on that.”

More data = more information = a chance to remedy where things may be unfair. And where the City leads, others may follow 🚶🏼‍♂️.

Got thoughts on the City’s DEI consultation, pro or anti? Email me at [email protected]. Comments can be anonymised for print.

This week on the Working It podcast

Meetings, meetings. Managers spend 75 per cent of their time in them, and we all seem unable to stop them spreading across our calendars like a red rash of pseudo-busyness. How can we get a grip? In this week’s episode we talk to an expert, Professor Joe Allen of the University of Utah, who runs its Center for Meeting Effectiveness. Joe tells us some of the dos and don’ts to remember. (Number one? Start the meeting on time.)

And we also hear from Kaz Nejatian, chief operating officer at Shopify and architect of the “chaos monkey” programme that has successfully ended almost all meetings at the ecommerce giant 🛑.

Office Therapy

The problem: I am a manager with an underperforming senior team member who refuses to gain more skills. As a result he is now doing boring tasks — and moans about it all the time. The new issue is our graduate trainee is saying they don’t have much ambition and just want to do the job etc. The older negative team member is already having influence over the younger one.

I’ve tried helping our new recruit through mentorship-style one-on-one meetings, and they seem convinced — yet only manage to change attitude for a couple of days then go back to the previous behaviour. What is the solution for negative colleagues? They drag everyone down 🙁.

Isabel’s advice: I think low-level moaners can be worse than full-on confrontational colleagues. At least the latter are likely to implode and there’ll be some kind of intervention. Moaning, on the other hand, can go on for years and the “ripple effects” of a negative person are huge: one piece of research found that the impact of a de-energising person is four to seven times greater than the effect of someone who is positive or energising 🌊.

I asked Naomi Shragai, a workplace psychotherapist, about how best to understand this situation — and what to do next. She says: “Unconsciously, your senior team member may be trying to make himself feel better by dragging your new recruit down. Or, he may be envious that the new recruit is having the attention he craves but refuses to accept.

“If your attempts to reverse this negativity prove fruitless, another option is to restructure. Is there any location or structural change you can make so that the new recruit is not at the receiving end of continuous negativity? This might help them benefit from your good coaching and hopefully change the culture for the better.”

One last thought: “Try having a direct and honest conversation with your senior employee. He may not be aware of the destructive impact he is having on others.”

Got a question, problem, or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: [email protected] or via a voice note. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Influencers and CEOs take their brands to LinkedIn: As the quality of exchange on the social platform X descends even further, a lot more people are moving over to LinkedIn, the polite platform. Hannah Murphy explains how everyone wants to build their brand there — and the money to be made for the lucky few with big followings.

2. Employers woo women back to work from career breaks: The huge and largely untapped pool of formerly senior women who have taken extended career breaks are being targeted for “returnerships” in many big companies. Brooke Masters explores the latest trends.

3. It’s time we stopped talking about retirement: A stark cut-off at 60 or 65 is no longer the aim for many professionals, and Michael Skapinker (himself a career changer in his 60s) points out that longer lives call for change of focus — not a halt to paid work.

4. Goldman chief David Solomon calls time on high-profile DJ gigs: The CEO has stopped his famous side hustle, following criticism that it formed a “distraction” from his day job. (One of the most-read FT stories this week.)

5. How long before gaming sheds sexist attitudes? Women are still very under-represented in the gaming industry, despite making up half of all gamers. Cristina Criddle looks at the barriers — and the people making a difference.

One more thing . . . 

On my daughter’s recommendation I am comfort-watching Superstore on Netflix. This workplace comedy (which ran over six seasons) is set in a St Louis “big box megastore” and stars America Ferrera.

If you’ve finished The Office and Parks and Recreation, then Superstore is a natural next stop. It has, like those two other great workplace shows, an ensemble cast, among whom deputy manager Dina (Lauren Ash) is the standout. Her obsessive rule-following and customer-unfriendly manner is a treat for those of us who miss Dwight Schrute.

A word from the Working It community

Last week’s newsletter offered a snapshot of how women are faring in the US workplace in 2023 — including the finding that flexible work has driven higher levels of ambition. It drew an, um, wide range of replies, as gender-focused stories always do. (As an aside, I’d say that one measure of progress in the workplace is that the FT can now open these articles for comments — six years ago that was certainly not the case 😬.)

Keeping things positive, Debbie Bayntun-Lees, professor of organisational change at Hult International Business School, wrote in to highlight how men can help to change workplaces for the better, for everyone:

“Our recent research identified three groups of men, those who positively advocate for women (allies/partners), those who positively want to help but don’t know how, and those who don’t want to go there as they see women’s gains come at their expense. There is no doubt that progress towards female equity is accelerated when men take up the powerful roles of ‘ally’ or ‘sponsor’.

“Yet this is a complex ask, there is a great deal still to do. We found that for men to embrace and thrive in organisations working towards gender equity they need to acquire the necessary mindset and skills to firstly ‘notice’ gender-related inequity, unfairness, discrimination, and bad behaviour, and then to make choices about acting.”