Our employees

Involvement in voluntary work is one example of how our employees support the communities in which they work. We give employees more hours off work to participate in charitable activities than any company in the UK. We launched Colleagues in Action in Citizens to give greater prominence to the voluntary work of our employees. More than half of our employees report that the Group does ‘a very good job’ in supporting charitable giving and almost nine out of ten say we are socially responsible in the communities in which we operate.

Our supportive approach to community involvement is one of the reasons for the consistently strong results achieved in the annual Employee Opinion Survey where we consistently exceed the performance of our peers. More than 80% of employees feel they are treated with respect at work. Two out of three employees believe RBS does a good job in developing our people to their full potential. We seem to get right the balance between work and home life, with eight in ten employees saying the hours they put in to get the job done are reasonable. Almost nine out of ten employees feel they are sufficiently informed about the Group’s performance and more than 80% say we are good at keeping them informed more generally. In all of these instances, and more, our results exceed the Global High Performance Norm, the results achieved by the world’s best performing companies.

Since we believe that our people are the source of our enduring success we invest to develop them. The RBS Business School is central to our commitment to our people to bring out the best in them. It also helps us to develop the products and services to meet our customers’ needs, and to sustain and enhance the value we return to our shareholders. Last year we convened the new Strategic Advisory Board of our Business School, with membership drawn from some of the world’s leaders in executive education. Our Senior Manager Development Programme, designed and delivered for us by Harvard Business School, was supplemented by the Executive Leadership Programme which was developed by Duke Corporate Education.

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