What a difference a year makes.

There are still tens of thousands of customer complaints outstanding, TSB’s brand is a “challenge” according to the new Marketing Director, Paul Pester was forced out (although he’ll have been celebrating New Year having secured a £1.7 million ‘severance’ payment for failure), the Board are a laughing stock having overseen the biggest IT meltdown in UK corporate history and Sabadell wishes that it had never set foot in Gresham Street. The only redeeming factor in this sorry tail of hubris and nemesis is the staff. Lions led by donkeys would not be an overstatement of the current position because without them the bank would have suffered a spectacular collapse. We hope the BEC look back on that when they are considering pay increases for 2019.

The Weakest Link?

The recent results from the Partner Engagement survey show the scale of the Bank’s problems and Debbie Crosbie, the new Chief Executive is going to have her work cut out trying to turn things around. Some of the key results are as follows:

  • The TSB Trust Index was 64% compared to 78% for the UK Super Large Best Workplaces.
  • Only 49% of staff said that taking everything into account TSB is a great place to work. That’s some 33% less than the best organisations.
  • According to the organisation that carries out the Great Place to Work Survey “Employee engagement is a key outcome measure including questions on positive outcomes for the organisation and its employees: pride, loyalty, importance of work, advocacy of the organisation and willingness to go the extra mile. Driving these outcomes…..has repeatedly been shown to link to stronger organisation outcomes.” The TSB Engagement score was 58% compared to 81% for large organisations taking part in the survey. That’s a difference of some 23%.
  • What’s not surprising from the survey results given the fact that we expect the Bank to start cutting numbers once the system is up and running is that 45% of staff in TSB are uncomfortable “with the level of job security in this organisation”. They are right to be concerned.
  • Only 47% of staff said they trusted the senior leaders of TSB. The figure for the best organisations is 79%.
  • Astonishingly, 68% of TSB staff say that being part of the Sabadell Group makes TSB a weaker organisation for the future. And given what TSB has been saying since it was launched only 55% of staff believe that it brings more choice and competition to UK banking.

TBU is still by far the largest independent trade union in TSB and the only way these figures are going to be turned around is with our help. The ‘old’, discredited Pester regime believed it could build a great bank by ignoring the views of staff and seeking solace from weak, unrepresentative trade unions. We are still here; Pester has gone and the rest will be going shortly.

The Case Of The Missing Report

Where is it?

A few months ago Richard Meddings, acting MD of TSB, said that the Slaughter and May report into what went wrong with the IT migration would be split in two and the first part of report would be out before the end of the year. However, like one of TSB’s IT upgrades, it would appear that the publication of the report is going to be delayed. TSB originally said that the full report would be published in 2019 but that timetable was criticised by Nicky Morgan, Chair of the Treasury Select Committee and it agreed to split the report in two. Ms Morgan is not going to be pleased by the fact that publication of the report is being delayed for reasons that have not been explained. Slaughter and May have been working on the report for months at a cost of £millions. The least it could have done is produce it on time, unless it’s TSB delaying publication because they are not happy with the contents.

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