Q: Where does a company’s culture figure in the corporate respect equation? 

The culture at Standard Chartered is ‘the way we do things here,’ and is very much influenced by our values and beliefs.

Our approach is unique, and we identify ourselves and our approach as a ‘human bank.’ This transcends into the way we treat all stakeholders both internally and externally.

We have three valued behaviours that underpin all our actions. The valued behaviour ‘do the right thing’ requires staff to live with integrity, ‘think client’ and be brave in initiating change.

The second valued behaviour is ‘never settle,’ which encourages staff to continuously improve and innovate, simplify matters, and reflect and learn from success and failure.

Our third and final valued behaviour is ‘better together.’ This requires staff to exemplify high levels of intimacy by seeing more in others, going the extra mile to help one another and building sustainable relationships. As such, it has a multiplication effect on credibility, reliability and intimacy in the trust and respect equation.

Q: To what degree does the local culture impact that of businesses?

As an organisation, we strongly believe in diversity and inclusion, and trust that this focus prompts engagement, which drives business results.

We value what each of our stakeholders brings to the table, and believe that local culture is a sum total of individual values and beliefs that has a major impact on influencing the culture of the organisation.

It’s for this reason that we are very selective of the employees that we hire, the service providers with whom we engage and the clients that we on board. We look for compatibility and alignment in terms of having shared values and beliefs.