Banking royal commission: ANZ staff morale crumbles amid cultural overhaul efforts

ANZ staff morale has plunged amid efforts by CEO Shayne Elliott to overhaul the lender’s bonus-hungry culture.

Staff morale has plummeted at ANZ with close to half of the bank’s staff thinking about getting a job somewhere else amid efforts by chief executive Shayne Elliott to overhaul the lender’s bonus-hungry culture.

Results of the bank’s annual “My Voice” staff survey, shown to the financial services royal commission yesterday, were mostly down on previous years.

And in ANZ’s finance division, another survey found almost three-quarters of employees in the division are afraid to share bad news with their boss “due to fear of repercussions”.

Meanwhile, a survey of three non-executive directors conducted this year as part of a self-assessment for the prudential regulator revealed they felt Mr Elliott had a “different style” from previous boss Mike Smith, who “appeared to keep board at arm’s length”, creating a “potential for mistrust”.

Mr Elliott was questioned about the staff and director surveys as he returned to the witness stand for a second day of evidence yesterday at Kenneth Hayne’s royal commission, which has its final day of hearings today.

The staff-wide survey, which had about 15,000 responses, found that only 56 per cent of employees said they “rarely think about looking for a new job with another organisation”, down from 63 per cent in 2015.

 

In a presentation to the ANZ’s human resources committee, two HR executives, group executive talent and culture Kathryn van der Merwe and general manager organisation and capability Tanya Deery, said they were concerned about a decline in the bank’s culture when it came to dealing with risk. “Our main concern relates to item regarding ‘speak up’, which has a 67 per cent favourable response to the item ‘I can raise issues and concerns at ANZ without fear of reprisal or negative consequences’, a 3 per cent decrease since 2016,” they said.

The survey showed the percentage of staff who felt that “people in this organisation maintain high ethical standards, act fairly and with integrity” fell from 80 to 72 per cent between 2015 and 2018. Over the same period overall satisfaction fell from 80 to 75 per cent.

Mr Elliott said it was important to build a culture where people felt free to speak up.

Most of the bank’s misconduct or conduct falling below community standards revealed in its 50-page submission to the royal commission early this year was discovered through staff or customers speaking up, rather than through its formal governance structures such as audit processes.

“If we don’t have a culture where people feel free ... to speak, we will fail,” Mr Elliott said.

“We will fail in terms of our responsibilities of being well managed and ultimately we will fail our customers.”

The survey of finance staff found they were suffering from “change fatigue” and felt management decisions were too short term and overly focused on cost-cutting rather than building long-term value for the company.

And only 56 per cent of finance staff “feel they are encouraged to experiment and try new things,, the survey found.

Mr Elliott said the “speak up culture has been a challenge”.

“To put that into context, we’re also in an environment of restructuring our industry for the lower growth, therefore people worry about job security, etc. So there are some other elements of why people feel they are not — they don’t want to speak up.”

He said ANZ previously had a “good news” culture where individual achievement was rewarded and he was now trying to move it towards “a culture that believes in the value of doing a few things and doing it well”.