Barclays Employees Face The Heat As Chairman Tightens Policies
Barclays Bank Plc has fallen well before expectations and during the last couple of months, the chairman John McFarlane has taken a number of steps during the last few weeks to make changes to the Bank’s overall structure.
McFarlane was unhappy with the performance of chief executive Antony Jenkins as he felt Jenkins should have been more aggressive in cutting down costs, making the bank more lean and adopting a future growth policy that would give its investors a lot more confidence.
McFarlane sacked Jenkins and took on the responsibility of being executive chairman on a temporary basis, till a replacement could be hired for Jenkins.
Barclays had earlier announced that it plans to sack as many as 30,000 employees across its global operations during the course of the next 24 months and a majority of those would be in the United Kingdom. Once these 30,000 employees are terminated, the overall workforce of Barclays would fall below 100,000.
Most Barclay’s employees are now no longer certain of job security as they wait on the senior management to bring clarity as to which divisions will face job cuts in 2015. Chairman McFarlane recently decided to turn up the heat on Barclays employees by suggesting that the dress code policies adopted by the Canary Wharf head office at One Churchill Place were not very professional and needed to be changed immediately.
McFarlane made it clear that employees dressing in jeans, trainers, t-shirts and flip flops portray the bank in a poor light and has made it clear that it will no longer be acceptable. The Barclaycard division has a lighter dress code than the other departments and was the first to receive a memo based on McFarlane’s comments.
The memo read
Over the past couple of years a range of different dress codes have emerged in our One Churchill Place office and, to ensure a consistent experience for clients, customers and colleagues the dress code has now been reviewed and updated. So with effect from September 1, all colleagues have been asked to adopt ‘business casual’ as the dress standard when in the office, other than on Friday which will remain a designated ‘dress down/casual dress’ day.
McFarlane has made it clear that he expects Barclay’s to leave its old mindset behind and adopt a new approach under his leadership to ensure that the bank makes a swift recovery. He has stated that he has not patience for incongruent conduct behavior amongst his staff and he will take every measure to get rid of it at the earliest.
