Global banking giant Standard Chartered may be UK headquartered, but it has a truly global footprint with 85,000 employees working across 53 markets.

The bank’s total operating income reached $17.4 billion for the 2023 financial year (that’s up 10% from 2022) – its profit reached $5.7 billion.

These impressive results come against a challenging global economy.

Dr José Viñals, Standard Chartered’s Group Chairman, wrote in the latest financial report that the figures are proof of “our clear strategy, discipline and tireless execution – a significant achievement for our colleagues, led by our Group Chief Executive Bill Winters and his Management Team”.

UNLEASH sat down with a key member of Standard Chartered’s C-Suite, Tanuj Kapilashrami to discuss these results and the world of HR at the banking giant.

Formerly the bank’s CHRO, Kapilashrami stepped into a Chief Strategy and Talent Officer role in April this year.

Kapilashrami tells UNLEASH: “One of the exciting things about my role is that it is at the intersection of corporate strategy, people, talent and our transformation agenda.

“While a large part of my career has been in HR roles, actually, the work I’ve done has always played at the intersection of these areas. How does your people & talent agenda come in service of your corporate strategy?”

It is clear from Standard Chartered’s 2023 results that something is working – “I was very pleased at a very strong set of results. We delivered double-digit growth key to the market, which was a very important milestone for us”.

She continues: “I’ve always said that the people and culture agenda and strategy is a strong enabler of the performance of the bank, and the delivery of business strategy.”

Dr Viñals echoed this in his Chairman’s note. He shared that “both the Board and the Management Team are dedicated to maintaining our status as an employer of choice”.

In fact, in its 2023 annual report, the bank shared that it saw its highest employee net promoter score ever (25.86), which is up 8.31 points on 2022 figures – this shows that Standard Chartered workers are willing to recommend working at the bank.

The question that remains is what is the HR secret to success?

Standard Chartered on becoming a skills-first employer

In her exclusive interview with UNLEASH, Kapilashrami shares key moments of HR pride.

The first is the impressive work that Standard Chartered is doing to become a skills-first organization – the bank’s commitment to skills as the currency at work is something that UNLEASH has reported on previously, and it is something that Kapilashrami is very proud of.

This mindset shift for HR to “become a custodian of skills, not jobs” started at the bank in 2019 when the HR team did some strategic workforce planning and found that “thousands of jobs weren’t going to be needed anymore because of advances in technology”.

These were named “sunset jobs” – and Standard Chartered also noticed lots of new jobs coming up (“sunrise jobs”) because of all the emerging technologies.

“It became very clear to us that it was cheaper to reskill and redeploy internally in those areas, as opposed to hiring externally,” Kapilashrami shares.

Plus, Standard Chartered realized that for these ‘sunrise jobs’, “there’s just not enough women coming into these fields”, so if the bank didn’t take decisive action, it was going to impact the gender balance within the company.

This meant there was not just a commercial case for making the switch from jobs to skills, but also a diversity and inclusion case: “Being able to drive equitable participation in the workforce was the second imperative for us.”

Then the work started to actually make the switch to ensuring the bank has the right future skills. For Kapilashrami, it is crucial to note that these future skills are not just technical ones, they are also human skills.

“Technical skills are getting disrupted so quickly – there’s a shrinking half life of technical skills”, so there’s a need to balance technical skills with human skills, like collaboration, design thinking, communication and managing ambiguity.

Learning tech success at Standard Chartered

There was also a need for the bank to create a culture of learning.

Standard Chartered did this by changing its learning platform to EdCast (now part of Cornerstone), embracing Future Skills Academies in areas like cybersecurity, data and sustainability, and partnering with Gloat on an AI-powered talent marketplace, which matches up employees to roles, projects and gigs within the bank.

For Kapilashrami, the marketplace has really helped Standard Chartered break through the traditional hierarchy of jobs, which typically prevents companies from being able to the tap into the skills of their people.

When you’re on the talent marketplace, your job title is not relevant. It is about the skills you have, the skills you want to develop, the skills you would like to deploy to various existing pieces of work that are happening in the company. It is really about connecting skills, experience and aspirations to career development opportunities,” she tells UNLEASH.

To date, an impressive 32,000 employees have participated in the Future Skills Academies, while 26,000 have used the talent marketplace with 2,500 projects being completed on the platform.

Standard Chartered employees are really impassioned about the talent marketplace – it allows them to “not only put their skills to be part of exciting, impactful work”, but to actively develop their skills with real-world work experiences and have “purposeful, impactful careers”.

Crucially, AI enables the learning system and the marketplace to talk to each other – as employees take on projects and gig work, personalized learning pathways are created to help people to continue to develop those skills.

Finally, Standard Chartered has leaned into the power of recognition to drive that learning culture. Every few months, Kapilashrami and the bank’s CEO would send out a note to the top learners in the company to recognize and reward their commitment to upskilling and reskilling themselves.

Beyond skills, towards progressive benefits

Transitioning to becoming a skills-first employer is not the only enabler of HR (and business) success for Standard Chartered.

Another core area of pride for Kapilashrami and Standard Chartered is the bank’s work on progressive benefits.

A central part of the bank’s commitment to being an employer of choice globally is by having progressive, purpose-led benefits.

“Last year, we announced equalized parental leave globally across all our markets – we are saying to our colleagues you get the same amount of time off irrespective of their gender, and irrespective of the circumstances by which they welcome a child into their families,” notes Kapilashrami. There are some markets where longer statutory maternity leave applies.

The policy is flexible and enables parents to take the leave any time in the first year of birth.

This policy has been in place less than a year, but Standard Chartered tells UNLEASH that the data shows there’s been a shift from two weeks (the previous maximum outside of maternity leave) to around eight weeks.

Another progressive policy that Standard Chartered has implemented is to provide menopause cover through its insurance providers globally. This is important because “in many parts of our footprint where there is no national health system like the NHS, so the focus on progressive benefits is important”.

“Given our footprint, we’re in emerging markets, taking a stand on positions like this expands our impact beyond our employees and into the communities within which we operate,” notes Kapilashrami.

I’d like to believe we set an expectation for other employers to think about progressive benefits.”

Remember, “people want to work for businesses that take a stand and stand for something”.

Tanuj Kapilashrami, Chief Strategy and Talent Officer, Standard Chartered.

Psychological safety is another key priority for Standard Chartered – the bank has seen that when people actively engage in a two-way feedback process, those teams can see psychological safety increase by up to 20 percentage points.

By giving people “the opportunity to have their performance assessed, and to develop and grow”, it ensure that people know where they stand; “the link of psychological safety to more innovation, high performance, lower attrition and more discretionary effort is all very well established”, Kapilashrami tells UNLEASH.

How to do HR change management well

Kapilashrami and her HR team have clearly been very busy, so UNLEASH was keen to find out how they (and the wider employee base) managed all of this change.

Don’t try and boil the ocean – instead, pick a few things that really matter to the company, and be very clear on the commercial benefit. Then keep tweaking it.

Another element of change management is to co-create the future of HR and work with the workforce – it shouldn’t all be top down, according to Kapilashrami.

Standard Chartered therefore leans into continuous listening (with the help of Qualtrics), and it helps to capture employee feedback and ideas on important HR topics.

A great example of co-creation with employees is Standard Chartered’s approach to hybrid working – UNLEASH spoke to Kapilashrami about the bank’s commitments here back in 2021, which were a real standout from the rest of banking sector.

Kapilashrami shares: “One of the big criticisms of hybrid working was we won’t be able to recreate watercooler moments – so we reached out to all our employees and said you tells us how to recreate them?

“We’ve got this entrepreneur program where we say to our colleagues, you are an entrepreneur in the company, lean in and help us – and people came up with great ideas.

“The top three or four ideas, we gave them some funding to develop their thinking, so we are actually going to them to co-create and work to solve problems.”

The workforce is the most critical stakeholder group and thinking about employee advocacy is a real source of good” for the business, concludes Kapilashrami.

Therefore, HR needs to focus on “what’s the most impactful, value creating work that we can do within the function?”