Amcham: Please tell me how this Covid situation came into recognition within your company, what were the first thoughts, how did your perception develop over time from the early days?
Niccolo Polli: We were organising a large Chinese New Year (“CNY”) celebration for February 21,and were in regular contact with our colleagues in Hong Kong and mainland China and also the local Chinese banks in Luxembourg. As such, we were seeing the situation unfold throughout late December and early January and were very aware of the seriousness of COVID and its impact on people, families, business and society. At the end of January, in consultation with our Chinese colleagues and counterparts in the local banks, we decided to cancel our CNY celebration plans in recognition of the gravity of the evolving situation.
As a management team, we monitored the situation through internal channels and after the half-term break in February we decided to set-up a COVID-task force whose main objective was to protect the health of our staff, our clients and suppliers.
Amcham: What steps did you first take to adapt to the unfolding situation?
Niccolo Polli: One of the first things was to ensure that staff were equipped to work from home. This was the case for people in our Securities Services, Asset Management and Corporate Banking business, but we discovered some coverage gaps in the Private Bank due to legacy rules on Banking secrecy. We had to quickly amend certain processes and procedures and in parallel source and build over 40 computers asap: no mean feat when the entire world was trying to do the same, but here is where being part of a large Group has benefits and we managed to ship them in from the UK.
Our IT colleagues across the bank did an amazing job throughout March issuing equipment, installing Zoom and other relevant software, ensuring sufficient bandwidth for remote secure connectivity and more. By March, 99% of local staff were working remotely. Globally, over 200,000 HSBC employees were working from home in April!
Amcham: How have you modified and adapted company practices and policies over the time of the crisis?
Niccolo Polli: The joke circulating the internet at the time was: “Who is responsible for digitising your company? A) the CEO, b) the CTO, c) COVID” While significant investment was already going into digital transformation for HSBC globally, it’s fair to say COVID effectively turbo-charged digital adoption both for the bank and our customers. It was no longer aspirational and ‘futuristic’ but needs-driven and immediate.
The pandemic gave us an ideal opportunity to question our legacy practices, processes and to be more agile in our ways. In-line with HSBC’s Digital-First Agenda, we sought out opportunities to automate and leverage new technology, including robotic process automation (RPA), chatbots, digital collaboration tools and digital signatures.
The need to find a solution for signing agreements was immediate and like all banks, we had to respond with speed, whilst ensuring that we could conduct a full and robust assessment of the risks.
Amcham: What lessons have you and your colleagues learned?
Niccolo Polli: We miss each other! We learnt that humans are resourceful, resilient, but also social beings. At the beginning, home working was great, zoom was wonderful, digital signatures a relief, and no commuting added hours to the day. Twelve months later and many people are tired of zoom calls, miss interaction with their colleagues and realise that the commuter hours saved, are spent on the computer. We need to take the best of office working and home working and find a happy equilibrium for our personal and organisational well-being.
Amcham: What actions would you take differently in retrospect?
Niccolo Polli: We should have stock-piled alcohol and not toilet paper!
Seriously though, not very much. It’s in times of crisis that people will remember how you behaved and so we prioritised people over everything else and I think it paid off in terms of results. We had no cases of COVID spread in the office; we made the office safe for those struggling at home to come and work during the summer but never forced anyone to come back; we communicated with our staff very regularly to keep them all up to date as things were moving fast; we kept the business going and one major client even wrote to our Group CEO to commend our staff in Luxembourg.
Amcham: Are the changes which have occurred situational, or do you expect are long lasting institutional changes?
Niccolo Polli: The changes will be long-lasting, but not as dramatic as initially hypothesized.
There will be more home-working and less commuting as people find their preferred balance. Urbanisation will take a pause as flexible working practices allow greater geographical disbursement of employees and some chose to move to larger homes. Institutions will re-evaluate their complex multi-system, multi-jurisdictional supply chains and operating models to ensure they remain resilient under pandemic-conditions.
But humans remain social at their core and this will always act as a counter-balance drawing us back together.
Amcham: What will the post Covid “new normal” look like for HSBC?
Niccolo Polli: We need to build back better. We need to take the positives from this crisis and integrate them into our ways of working. Home-working will become more widely used, and office space will be designed for collaboration, brain-storming, client meetings and relationship building. We hope an agreement can be found to ease some of the restrictions faced by cross-border workers so they can more fully partake in this as well.
Additionally, a greater collective environmental conscience has developed, and we will make a concerted effort to take fewer flights for meetings; we will maintain the streamlined processes and push digital innovation even further; we will consider our environmental footprint in the choices we make.
Amcham: What are the key components of your personal management style and have they evolved as a result of the Covid related stresses?
Niccolo Polli: Steve Jobs once said “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do.”
I like to hire the best, empower them and hold them accountable for delivering results. As a CEO I need to create a culture that allows and drives us to be at our best, not just as individuals but as a team. I also need to be clear on priorities, provide guidance, help people when they need it. Additionally, I need to understand the details of every business and function so that we can make informed decisions rapidly to continue delivering at pace.
In a crisis situation, the human aspect takes precedence over all else and I needed to dial-up the people element. We are a people business at our core and if our people are uncertain or afraid or unclear of what is happening then nothing else matters. It’s like a hierarchy of needs, and the CEO role in this instance cannot be delegated. So I stepped-up communication across the organisation. I held weekly meetings with my leadership team, extended leadership team and All-Staff. We also had weekly COVID task force meetings and I held exchange sessions with groups of 10-20 people at a time over the course of April-June so everybody in the organisation had an opportunity to ask me anything they wanted directly.
My agenda became packed with people meetings just talking to people, keeping them informed and letting them know that we were on top of things.
Amcham: Tell us about the Diversity and Inclusion initiatives you have put into place within HSBC. Why have you done these initiatives and what has been the impact?
Niccolo Polli: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) is first a question of fairness for me. We shouldn’t treat people differently based on the colour of their skin, their gender or their sexual orientation. We don’t do it for people with blue or brown eyes. These things are predetermined by genetics and not linked to innate ability.
Second it’s about talent attraction. Imagine the impact on our talent base if no brown-eyed person wanted to work for us because they did not feel welcome or able to be themselves. We would lose 50% of our talent, because ability is distributed equally. So if I want to have the best team possible to serve my clients, shareholders and employees, I must attract talent, whatever shape or form it comes in. The more people feel welcome and included, the more they will apply to work with us and the higher my talent base will be. A diverse bank with the best talent there is, has a natural competitive advantage. This is what I am trying to create.
As CEO, I try to amplify my voice by being actively involved in external engagements on the topic of D&I. It is important to raise awareness and to continue to shift the organisational mind-set around D&I from a perceived constraint to a competitive advantage.
The COVID situation has not been conducive to me continuing external engagements, but I remain nevertheless active on Linked-in, participating in virtual events (like the 24 hours of Pride) and sponsoring others active in this space (like Rosa Lëtzebuerg and IMS).
Amcham: What has been the impact of these D&I initiatives especially with regards to business efficiency and productivity, employee happiness, identification of future company leaders?
Niccolo Polli: When our staff was asked in a free-form manner to state the best thing about working for HSBC in Luxembourg, “Focus on fairness/ Inclusion/ Diversity” came second only to “flexible home working.”
We regularly do a people survey and since starting our D&I efforts, the percentage of positive responses to the question “I feel able to be myself” has grown over 10% points and we are now at 80% positive responses (and over 95% positive plus neutral).
For the question “people can express their opinion without fear of consequences”, the number of positive responses went up 14% points. And for the question “where I work, people are treated fairly”, the progression was 13% points.
The improvement is noteworthy. It is important that our staff feel able to be themselves because they will perform better as individuals and we will perform better as a team. We have also been reviewing our talent lists, succession plans and interviewer training materials to ensure no unconscious bias creeps into the process. People who come to work for HSBC want an open, welcoming culture that is fair and meritocratic and that is what we strive to provide.
Amcham: What additional advice or messages would you like to pass along to our
Niccolo Polli: There can be a misperception that a focus on D&I means favouring diverse candidates at the exclusion of others (often referred to as reverse discrimination). This perception exists because people believe they are fair and simply select the best candidates that apply. That the result is predominantly white male, is just considered a fact of life and D&I an attempt to distort that.
As an Engineer, if I see that the outcome of a process is not reflective of the underlying diversity in society, then to me that is an indication either of a biased process or some form of self-selection occurring so that talented and diverse candidates are not even bothering to apply (they don’t even enter the process). So we need to review the processes for unconscious bias and improve our ability to attract diverse talent if we truly want to create the best teams. But we must at all times remain meritocratic and favour talent and ability, and not simply replace one bias with another. That helps nobody.