What it’s like working for HSBC

WITH 220,000 staff in 9,500 offices around the globe, the HSBC Group has come a long way since Thomas Sutherland eyed the burgeoning business communities of 19th-century coastal China and founded the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.

Last year, HSBC had group assets of nearly £600 billion, which says something for the sound “Scottish banking principles” Sutherland espoused. Nowadays, your high-street branch of the “world’s local bank”, between the poodle parlour and the pound shop, is one small part of a huge corporate machine fuelled by 110 million customers worldwide.

So HSBC just wants worker bees, right? Homogenous desk-jockeys who can turn pollen to profit without wilting? Not so, says Hilary Wiseman, head of diversity for HSBC Bank plc. There were 10,000 applications for its management scheme last year, which suggests that HSBC is a fiscal favourite. With 28 years at the company under her belt, she clearly has few complaints.

Others do, however. Cathy Tinston, national officer for banking union Unifi, says that morale at HSBC is “extremely low” because a new emphasis on selling and sales targets means many staff feel they have been set against each other. “This isn’t the bank they joined,” she says.

But Wiseman describes HSBC as focused and principled, with strong values and beliefs, and says management recruits should be like-minded. Hang on. Principled? Strong values? We’re talking about banking here, not Shaolin monks. Aren’t banks supposed to turn branches into wine bars and divert customer calls to Basingstoke or Bangalore? Possibly, but at HSBC the focus remains “very clearly on the customer”, Wiseman says.

Unifi, however, suggests that the bank’s clients are beginning to side with staff and are tiring of HSBC’s “offshoring” of services and its strong emphasis on selling. “They don’t want to be bombarded with sales stuff every time they cash a cheque,” says Tinston.

Diversity is another of the bank’s self-proclaimed selling points. “We advertise the fact that we understand people,” Wiseman says.

Worldwide, HSBC has 60,000 managers of whom a minority — 13,000 — are white males. And with four women on the board, HSBC is certainly unusual among the chap-dominated companies of the FTSE 100.

The bank also takes corporate social responsibility seriously, according to a 50-page report. For example, 3,000 tons of office furniture were sent for recycling when 20 London offices became one — enough, apparently, to fill a hole the size of 178 double-decker buses. You can work these things out when you’re good with figures.

The report also shows nimble footwork in ducking charges of fat-cattery among those at the top of the HSBC tree — one of the issues that exercised its stakeholders last year. “High salaries are necessary to compete for the best people in this international market-place,” the report says.

If those salaries still cause you restless nights, you might be comforted by the fact that HSBC’s top people remain “relatively moderately paid”, a detail borne out by “survey after survey”, the bank says.

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