Ba[n]king trust
flow’s Clarissa Dann reports on how a series of Deutsche Bank cooking events has helped to foster team togetherness amid the homeworking environment
T
wenty-five years ago, organisational behaviourist Charles Handy predicted, “Like it or not, the mixture of economics and technology means that more and more of us will be spending time in virtual space…[and] we will have to get accustomed to working with and managing those we do not see.”
While nobody would have predicted how the Covid-19 pandemic has made homeworking the new normal for most organisations, the issues of trust and touch raised by Handy in his essay Trust and the Virtual Organization (1995) remain. “Trust needs touch,” he said. Not anymore, and nor, it would appear, does engagement. “The pandemic has kicked off new engagement models in companies that have enabled their leaders to be role models rather than hierarchy-driven leaders,” reflects Christoph Woermann, Deutsche Bank Corporate Bank’s Chief Marketing Officer.
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Over the past 12 months Woermann, who is one of the bank’s Mental Health First Aiders, has seen more activities supporting mental health and wellbeing than in his past 30 years at the bank; a testament to a culture that is supporting the destigmatisation of mental health issues in the financial services sector.
This has much to do with the vision and energy of the Corporate Bank’s Global People Strategy Programme Lead, Nasrin Oskui, who notes that “before the pandemic we were all about bringing people together in the same room, and then we had to switch almost overnight to a virtual delivery.” This virtual environment does, she adds, have its advantages. For one, it has made it possible to connect people across the world (Covid-19 prompted the relocation of more than 8,000 Corporate Bank employees to homeworking) and support them through these testing times.
Virtual coffee breaks to share challenges about, for example, homeschooling have helped, along with Zoom-based yoga, development programmes, wellbeing webinars, engagement sessions with the leadership team, and cookery events. All of these initiatives have done much to inspire people and bring them closer together as part of a wider working family. “Senior management support has been vital in all our initiatives, and our leaders have cooked and done exercise classes along with everyone else,” Oskui says.
Cooking, baking, banking “I love food and would always try and take a cookery class when travelling,” says Andy Ward, who leads the bank’s UK/EMEA People Strategy Programme. Irish chef Darryl Breen, an acquaintance of Ward’s, has switched his Chef’s Compliments catering business over
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