Ellen's Blog: Let's talk about Culture

“Let’s talk about ‘Culture’ - set at the top, but decided in the middle, and applied at the bottom. Nowadays it is increasingly common for employers to offer facilities to help their female (and male) workforce to combine family and career; everything from flexible working arrangements, to (and this is something my own employer does) free pregnancy yoga classes at the on-site gym. Surely any employer providing such excellent facilities and support could afford to sit back and relax in the knowledge that such a responsible and caring approach will engender happiness and loyalty from employees? In my view, a caring corporate culture will only translate into a happy workforce if the values that underpin it are embedded in the fabric of the firm. If your own boss considers any time away from your desk to be skiving, or your team consider that they have been discriminated against because the pregnant one is doing yoga while they do all the work, then you will never be happy, and in spite of their best intentions, your employer will not see its family-friendly policies translate into a happy and well-adjusted workforce. All the free yoga, workplace gyms, and on-site breast-milk refrigeration facilities in the world won’t change that. 

In my current role at (an anonymous) large financial institution I have the good fortune of working for a boss who detests presenteeism, does not question my occasional requests to work from home, and measures performance on demonstrable output, not on number of hours spent at a desk, or how late you leave the office. Not everyone is like this, and in the current economic climate no one wants to be in the gym at lunchtime while their boss is looking for names to go on his headcount reductions target list. I have been a slave to my job in the past, working for bosses who did not share the philosophy of output-based performance measures, and would rather you were at your desk at midnight, even if you have just been faffing around all day being inefficient but looking busy. It seems to me that, regardless of the culture or the ethos of the organisation, the culture and day-to-day way of doing things which you will actually live and breathe, is the one which your boss decides, so it’s not for nothing that they say ‘people join businesses, but leave managers’.”

Ellen works for a well-known investment bank in the City. She began her career at KPMG, before moving on to Barclays, HSBC and Aviva before joining her current employer almost three years ago.  She has two children aged three and one, who divide their working week between nursery and grandma's house.