Deutsche Bank staff morale higher as lender boosts bonuses

Bloomberg

Deutsche Bank AG may still face more years of restructuring, but at least the belief of its staff has stopped fading.
The Frankfurt-based bank’s annual internal survey showed that 57 percent of employees are committed to the lender, unchanged from last year and arresting years of declines, according to a person with knowledge of the results. The share of employees who said they were proud to work for the bank was also stable, at slightly less than 50 percent, the person said.
Morale at Germany’s largest lender has been depressed by years of restructuring and three straight annual losses. The results of the survey, conducted in the same period that new Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing unveiled the bank’s latest turnaround plan, may indicate that the declines have bottomed out after the lender boosted bonuses this year.
There was a seven-percentage point rise in the share of participants who agreed that good work was recognised, though only 45 percent of respondents gave that response. That came after the bank paid 2.2 billion euros (2.56 billion) of variable compensation for 2017 after cutting it by about 80 percent the previous year. At the same time, staff seem to have become more impatient with the tolerance of poor work. Only 48 percent agreed that bad work is criticised at the bank, down seven points from 2017.
Some 40 percent of respondents said the decision-making process at the bank is too slow, compared with 30 percent who disagreed, according to the person familiar with results, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.
“Even though there are a number of encouraging developments, we are definitely not yet where we want to be,” co-President Karl von Rohr said in a memo to staff obtained by Bloomberg. He acknowledged that a number of employees said they don’t feel “sufficiently connected” to their managers and that staff “want better communication of who exactly is responsible for what.”
More than 40,000 staff — around half of all those eligible — took part in the survey, according to von Rohr’s memo.
The results of the survey come in the same week that the Federal Reserve is due to pass judgment on what goes on inside Deutsche Bank, when it presents the second, “qualitative,” part of the results of its annual stress tests. The Fed said last week that Deutsche Bank had enough capital to ride out the severest scenario for which it tested.