STANDARD CHARTERED BANK
Q: How would you describe the culture at Standard Chartered Bank?
A: Culture to us refers to how we go about doing things here at Standard Chartered Bank. It’s what makes our people feel happy and valued.
This culture is built on our core values – viz. never settle, do the right thing and better together. This is underpinned by our aspiration for Standard Chartered in Sri Lanka to be transparent, consistent, performance oriented and most importantly, people centric.
If I were to provide an example of what has worked for us in Sri Lanka, it would be giving a voice to our people through focus groups across the bank and launching surveys to hear their expectations. We then communicated what can and can’t be done.
Next, we began openly sharing learnings from mistakes and their outcomes, and what could have been done differently. This helped create trust in the system.
Our cross-functional Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) team drives multiple initiatives throughout the year, celebrating our differences and creating a sense of inclusion.
Lastly, the wellbeing of our people always comes first, exemplifying our human approach.
Our activities range from in-house complimentary medical checks to the launch of our employee assistance programme ‘Here for You,’ supporting both employees and their families through free behavioural, financial and legal counselling, and even conducting virtual mindfulness sessions.
Our culture is something that we continue to improve and build on but it’s also what sets us apart from our competitors.
Q: In your assessment, what elements are needed to create a ‘great workplace’?
A: One of the main components of an inclusive and transparent culture is enabling an environment where our people feel psychologically safe to work and cared for.
This is what will ultimately drive greater inclusion, collaboration, innovation, engagement and in turn, high-performance. And a key enabler for us to drive this has been our cross-functional D&I team that focusses on ethnicity, gender, disability, generations and sexual orientation.
Whether it’s conducting unconscious bias training or creating opportunities to get to know each other better, it has been an integral part of driving engagement, forming the way of thinking, enhancing our employee value proposition, retaining our talent, driving cross-functional collaboration and creating a sense of pride among our people – all of which have helped make our bank a ‘great place to work.’
This year, Standard Chartered in Sri Lanka was certified as a great workplace for the third consecutive year and is the first in our global network to do so. The reason for this boils down to the leadership in the country, our in-country people centric vision, the many country specific initiatives and most importantly, the passionate cross functional D&I committee.
Q: Could you outline how workplaces and their cultures have changed since early last year? And what initiatives has Standard Chartered implemented?
A: The pandemic and changes it has brought have resulted in all of us having to reimagine and redesign the construct of work, worker and workplace as a majority of our workforce was forced to work virtually.
The employee experience, connectedness with each other and construct of doing business suddenly had to shift. And with that, our culture too began shifting, forming Standard Chartered’s New Ways of Working (NWoW) methodology.
And the biggest change we had to bring about was flexibility! People want very different choices in the way they work and as management, we’re required to consider factors such as family time, work-life balance, working hours and even commuting time.
While many of our employees had never worked from home before, over two-thirds are now telling us they would like to work flexibly for at least 50 percent of their working week. And we are working towards launching two key global initiatives – viz. Future Work Now and NWoW this year.
Whether it’s virtual murder mystery sessions, team crosswords, family competitions, digital learning sessions, town halls or even the inaugural drive through awards ceremony we conducted early this year, we’re required to think of new ways of re-engaging our people, which in turn is helping shape the employee experience and culture.
Q: In your opinion, how important is employee engagement in the context of nurturing a great workplace culture?
A: A great workplace culture and employee engagement are correlated – they are essential ingredients of corporate success.
Employee engagement should not be limited to celebrating events or organising activities but a well thought through process covering the life cycle from onboarding to the off-boarding of an employee.
We work on our employee value proposition and creating a sense of pride in our people, and focus on continuously listening to employees at all moments that matter to them to gauge their engagement and cater to their needs so that we can positively influence the level of engagement.
The unique culture at Standard Chartered is built on the inclusivity and engagement of our people. In my view, our employee engagement is the key enabler of our culture and we have done right by focussing efforts on improving it on a year on year basis.
INTERVIEWEE DETAILS
Ransi Dharmasiriwardhana
Head of Human Resources
COMPANY DETAILS
Telephone:2480000
Email:Feedback.RC@sc.com
Website:www.sc.com/lk
