It’s taken an email from one father to another for Lloyds Banking Group to finally tackle the old-style sales practices that are now increasingly commonplace in Consumer Growth.
We’ve been talking about these sales practices for years. Lloyds Banking Group is an organisation that exists to make a profit from sales of services and products and no one can doubt the need to drive sales. But without sensible and obvious safeguards, made clear by people at the top of banks, it’s obvious that driving sales can all too easily drive mis-selling.
We understand from several sources that the father of a member of staff, who previously worked for Lloyds, wrote to Mr. Charlie Nunn, Group Chief Executive, to let him know about the pressure his daughter was being put under to sell products to customers. That email, and an avalanche of complaints from other members of staff to ‘Speak-Up’, has forced Lloyds to take the issue seriously and launch a wide-ranging investigation into what’s been going on in Consumer Growth.
The Bank’s investigation shouldn’t just focus on those at the bottom, which is what invariably happens, but should include the people running Consumer Growth. What messages have they been sending to their direct reports about how performance should be managed? Equally, have these direct reports been put under pressure too with excessively demanding growth targets? What messages were they told to send down the management chain?
The kind of practices we’ve seen, which caused us to launch our recent survey, results of which will be published over the next few weeks, include:
- Homemade trackers, or league tables, designed to allow line managers to compare individual performance.
- Using dashboards to drive individual sales performance. We warned Lloyds that would happen.
- 1+1. If a customer contacts Consumer Growth for a ‘stated’ need, such as help with digital banking, for example, staff are then targeted by line management to identify ‘unstated’ needs such as home insurance or a wealth management referral. And woe betide the members of staff who come up short. Members are being targeted on ‘unstated’ needs with everyone expected to be at 100%.
We reported senior managers saying that selling wasn’t a dirty word anymore when Consumer [It was previously called Relationship] Growth was launched a few years ago.
In a Newsletter entitled ‘Change the people or change the people’ we said:
‘Change the people or change the people.’
That’s the title of a slide published by the Relationship Growth team last week.
If Relationship Managers and Relationship Growth Coaches are not achieving the expectations for the roles, then they’ll be fast tracked out of the business. Selling is no longer a dirty word anymore. According to Lloyds there needs to be a shift towards a ‘high performance culture’ and in Relationship Growth that invariably means more sales and more referrals.
Is it any wonder when staff are threatened with being managed out of the business even before it was launched, that they resort to old-style sales practices to protect their jobs. We don’t blame junior managers; we blame the people at the top for causing it to happen in the first place. Someone at a junior level did not just dream all this up or act without authority!
The Bank’s investigation is still ongoing, but it should result in fundamental changes in the way relationship managers in Consumer Growth are performance managed. If things don’t change, and we mean quickly, then we will make a referral to the FCA, and the Treasury Select Committee.
Lloyds has been warned.
We understand that 34% of relationship managers are on performance plans because they’re not ‘helping’ enough customers. Helping customers is the new euphemism for selling more. Members in this position should contact the Union immediately for help and advice.
Members who have been interviewed as part of the investigation should contact the Union immediately. Members with any questions should contact the Union’s Advice Team on 01234 262868 (Option 1).
MEMBERS SHOULD PASS THIS NEWSLETTER ON TO THEIR COLLEAGUES IN HALIFAX & LLOYDS SO THEY TOO CAN BENEFIT FROM THE ONLY INDEPENDENT TRADE UNION IN LLOYDS BANKING GROUP.