Is there a quick fix in changing organisational culture?

Margaret Doyle, Head of Financial Services Insight at Deloitte,in a recent presentation covered findings from "The Deloitte Banking Survey" which focused heavily on culture within banking. The survey was conducted with 41 global bankers at Executive level. 2/3 of respondents said the industry had a problem with culture.

Many banks are now creating the new appointment of Head of Culture as the focus on conduct and behaviours ramps up. The Richard Lambert Review with its call for industry benchmarking in such areas as culture has probably got a key part to play in this(e.g.. is the expected organisational conduct understood by employees and embedded in recruitment, promotion etc?)

One interesting aspect in the findings was that "compensation structure" (81%) headed the factors given by respondents as causes for cultural problems in their bank. So is simply changing the compensation structure the most effective trigger for culture change?

We know that "what gets measured gets done" but is culture change really so simple?  Hopefully the bankers don't really think so although their expected speed of conduct change was reported as just a few years in this research. This is worrying because, for example, in the days when  Mystery Shopper research was prevalent one bank branch responded by putting up notices for staff saying "watch out, there's a mystery shopper about" showing a sad lack of understanding that the research was designed to measure genuine behaviour change leading to improvements in outcomes for customers. But maybe it was just to get good scores?

With industry benchmarking on the cards following the Lambert Review, the danger is that the focus may concentrate on the relatively short-term job of just getting the scores right, the tick-box exercise that compliance teams and boards are so good at? What we really need is to recruit leaders who have the relevant intrinsic values and espouse "good" conduct themselves, creating leaders and their management teams who discuss, adopt, demonstrate and live, everyday, meaningful, personal and organisational values which are subsequently copied by all employees and witnessed by customers. Cultural change is the long game and measurements are there to support,not to replace, it..

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