Robert Jeffery enjoys a new book that lifts the lid on what it's really like to work in financial services – and why HR gets the blame for everything
A funny thing happens to readers who get partway through Swimming With Sharks, the excellent new book from the Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk: they start to feel sorry for bankers. Well, not bankers exactly – we can all agree we wouldn't want to be stuck in a lift with Fred Goodwin – but the huge mass of people who toil away in banks and have found themselves, over the past few years, deemed public enemy number one despite the fact they're pretty decent people.
Swimming With Sharks is the most revealing book written about banking since Liar's Poker. But it isn't about money, or even much about banks; it concerns itself with the people who work in financial services and who we have reflexively come to loathe. In its own way, it is about HR practice, too, and it deserves to be read by anyone concerned with people management in large organisations – for where banks have gone, the rest of us could soon end up.
Luyendijk's book began life as an open-minded Guardian blog, where he asked individuals in financial services to explain the financial crisis, and their role in it. It is notoriously hard to get anyone in the sector to talk, given the all-pervading eye of compliance they labour under, yet the cloak of anonymity and the catharsis they experienced from unburdening themselves gradually drew them out from right across the City of London. Some explain how money gets moved around (investment banking, memorably, is characterised as “playing Russian roulette with someone else's head”) but others give a glimpse into their unremittingly bleak private lives. At the school gates, they daren't tell anyone where they work for a living. On dating websites, they are pariahs. When they go to job interviews in more sedate sectors, they are invariably told they wouldn't fit in.
While Luyendijk speaks to his fair share of Bollinger-swilling investment bankers, most of those who contributed aren't on the trading floor: they are the IT specialists, marketers, procurement experts and risk assessors who keep the wheels turning but are more likely to holiday on the Norfolk broads than the Amalfi coast. To the rest of the world, they are to blame for everything that has gone wrong since 2007, and yet they are a long way from the glamour or the money; asked in a training exercise to liken himself to an animal, one compliance officer says he is “a dog who liked to be kicked”.
And some of them, of course, are HR professionals, who take their own fair share of kicking. “It's much easier to take out your anger on someone from HR who you don't know, rather than your manager,” explains an employee relations specialist at a bank. “Managers will often join in the act, and blame everything on HR.” HR, in this reading, is only there to dish out the cards, and to soak up oppobrium like a giant human sponge, the phone call from the 20th floor HR suite the inevitable death knell in a world where employees simply disappear after lunch and are never heard from again.
If that all sounds bleak, there are moments of lightness, and black humour. There are also reasons to admire elements of the culture bankers have inadvertently created. While there is doubtless a problem with sexism in the city, financial services is presented as “fiercely meritocratic” and “ridiculously tolerant” of difference. If you make the numbers, little else matters. People with autism are many firms' superstars. Working class youngsters with few qualifications enjoy five-star lifestyles thanks to their sheer ability.
But, inevitably, there is plenty to ponder, not least the culture of overwork that ruins health, relationships and, in some cases, sanity. Banks' well-intentioned efforts to address such issues are clearly just window dressing. And until HR is afforded respect, and empowered to make the sort of interventions in well-being and performance management we have seen in other industries, it's not hard to see why more and more bright young graduates are deciding they'd rather take their talents almost anywhere else than the Square Mile.