Salz Review - Wall Street Journal

Salz Review
An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices
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that the activities are undertaken for a customer or a client. Making the discussions
of values and ethical dilemmas resonate is essential to the success of embedding the
values in the organisation.
8.63 Creating a distinctive culture requires a process which is disciplined, thoughtful and
persistent – one in which actions will speak louder than words. A detailed road map
is needed to ensure that the values set by management are reflected in the
organisation’s business practices. It is their day-to-day experiences that enable people
to orient themselves and their attitudes and behaviours around the cultural norms,
through informal dialogue, and observing how leaders behave, as well as more
formally through training, development, recognition and reward and
disciplinary procedures.
Recommendation 4: Bringing the values to life
Barclays should institute learning programmes which actively encourage
frequent discussion of its chosen values among all staff, focusing on
understanding potential conflicts and how to address them. These discussions
should be tailored so as to be relevant to the work of individual staff members.
To make Barclays’ commitment tangible to staff, senior management should
lead and attend as many of these sessions as is practical.
8.64 Key challenges for Barclays will include:
― Ensuring that, where leaders are faced with the inevitable conflicts of doing
business, their decisions demonstrate consistency with the values;
― Responding to evidence of unethical practices appropriately – promoting
open learning from ‘near misses’, celebrating things which go well and
imposing clear, consistent disciplinary action on those who breach the
code of conduct;
― Establishing and applying consistently a performance appraisal system using
a balanced scorecard approach which places real weight on behaviours that
reflect values as well as achieving financial targets;
― Linking promotion, bonuses and other incentives explicitly and clearly to the
results of such an appraisal system;
― Providing induction for new employees which explains the bank’s purposes
and values, and how those shape business practices;
― Training leaders so that they understand group dynamics, effective group
decision-making and engaging with employees;
― Developing formal and informal systems to encourage discussion of how
values are implemented in practice, and when to escalate difficulties to
managers – to encourage open debate and review of ethical and organisational
dilemmas;
― Commissioning regular reviews of business practices to ensure that progress is
being made and identifying areas for further improvement;