People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1 - 43

T

he October 18, 2013, edition of the
London Evening Standard reported
under the headline, "Stress and the
City: Has the banking world gone soft?" the
following: "when it emerged on Tuesday
night that top Barclay's executive and former
FSA boss Sir Hector Sants was taking three
months off as a result of "exhaustion and
stress" the financial world's reaction-some
surprise and plenty of sympathy-showed
how things have changed. Two years ago, the
announcement that Lloyd's chief executive
António Horta-Osório was taking a similar
leave deeply shocked the City, with some
obser vers u nsu re whether the stated
reason-'fatigue'-masked something more
prosaic.
In fact, some of the City's biggest beasts,
once the preserve of macho, all-hours working culture, are now taking stress so seriously you'd be forgiven for thinking they've
gone soft.
A senior banker told the Standard this week
that stress is now firmly on the City's agenda.
He said his bank even forces some workers to
stay out of the office between Friday night and
Sunday morning-what the rest of us call a
weekend-and encourages holidays so tired
minds can be "rested." (Hermann, 2013)
The Square Mile, as the City of London is
also known, is Europe's financial hub, second only to Wall Street as the world financial, banking, and insurance center (and the
first on international transactions and reinsurance). Employing some 400,000 people
in more than 2,500 institutions, the sector
contributes about 4 percent of the country's
gross national product. Its highly visible profile among business elites, fast pace, high
risk, legendary salaries, and out-of-thisworld bonuses, attract the most ambitious,
if not the best high-fliers, from all over the
world. With a proportion of two men to
every woman-as compared to the general
workforce average of five men to four women
(ONS, 2013), the Square Mile is also
renowned for its "macho" culture.

The Mental Health
"Iceberg"
The extent of mental health problems in the
City-the general population lifetime prevalence of experiencing a serious, though not
lasting, mental illness episode-is one in
three globally, and nearly one in two in the
United States (Kessler, et al. 2009)] are both

evident and troubling. While top bosses cannot hide from the public gaze, the great
majority of mental-health-related difficulties among working people remain hidden.
A September 2014 survey by OnePoll found
that 48 percent of employed Londoners (there
are no separate figures for the City) have experienced a common mental health problem like
stress, anxiety, or depression in the last year,
and 43 percent did not tell their employer.
More than a third of respondents disclosed
that they have taken a sick day claiming it was
for a physical problem when it was in fact for
a mental health issue (OnePoll, 2014). Though
the major implications of mental illness for
the individual (potentially long-lasting, poor
quality of life, shortened life expectancy) and
his or her family-and the severe costs to
one's career and financial situation-may be

is no exception (Fevre et al., 2011): incivility,
disrespect (40 percent of the sample), bullying
(nearly half of the sample) and even violence (6
percent) were prevalent. In a case study of a
large financial services company, the authors
note, "even minor exposure to only one illtreatment behaviour left 60 percent of company staff feeling stressed...25 percent felt the
quality of their work suffered and 20 percent
considered looking for a job elsewhere." A
survey of the U.K. financial sector (Robertson
Cooper, 2014) states, "for most people, work
pressures are a more important driver of health
and productivity than non-work hassles."
Altogether, the evidence suggests the City is
facing a major problem, and what we hear of
anecdotally, what we read about in the press,
what we learn from surveys and more indepth studies may be but the tip of the iceberg.

While top bosses cannot hide from the public gaze,
the great majority of mental-health-related
difficulties among working people remain hidden.

visible, but much less so are the enormous
costs to a national economy. The Sainsbury
Centre for Mental Health calculated in a
2007 report that cost to be £1,035 (about
$1,654) for every employee in the U.K. workforce (SCMH, 2007).
In their groundbreaking book Mental Illness in
the Workplace, Harder, Wagner and Rash
(2014) posit alongside the common ailment of
stress, clinical depression, and anxiety disorders, that the toxic work environment is as
detrimental to mental health. Attention is
called to external-to-work factors that induce
a mental health problem, whether personality
related, genetically conditioned, or in response
to a critical life event (serious accident, major
loss, marriage breakdown, and so forth); and
work-induced triggers, in which bullying and
harassment play a central role, alongside a
culture of long working hours and little job
security, not to mention toxic leadership. The
highest incidence of corporate psychopaths
(those who exhibit "dark leadership") are to be
found in the financial sector and the legal profession (Boddy, 2010). An authoritative U.K.
national representative study found that toxic
elements permeate work environments in all
sectors of the economy, and the financial sector

Getting Help
Executives in the financial sector enjoy private health insurance, which normally
includes a provision for mental illness, whereas for non-executive City workers who cannot afford costly private care, the situation is
difficult. While the National Health Service
is free for all, mental health services in the
U.K. are severely underfunded (over £1 billion spent on preventing physical health problems as compared to £40 million on mental
health preventative measures, Mind, 2014).
The process to get primary mental health
treatment from community mental health
teams requires referral from one's general
practitioner, and it takes about three months
to be seen. More severe cases requiring referral to hospital may necessitate a lengthy wait,
longer than a year, in the case of the City (City
& Hackney, 2014).
Armed with these background data, we set
out to explore the state of mental health
among City workers and what some of the
U.K.'s best known blue chip companies are
doing about it. We talked to company executives, trade union representatives, occupaVOLUME 38/ISSUE 1 - 2015

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People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1
