You work as financial lead for a sales team for a division of a large company, which provides financial services. The company has recently been implicated in a financial scandal. This has resulted in wide media coverage and some of the staff involved have been removed. As a consequence there has also been a review of the organisation’s culture, governance and related policies. Your CEO has been very apologetic publicly and has made a commitment to ensure that the organisation will operate to the highest standards, backed in the media by the Board.
However, some months after the new processes have been put in place and a wide HR campaign of ‘cultural change’ with online training and promotion has been run through the business, you feel there are some areas of day to day practice, and pressures to perform, that are in conflict with the new policies and guidelines. This includes intimidation by seniors, lack of transparency and a lack of autonomy in setting goals and customer targets under your team’s control.
There is now direct pressure within your division to hit targets that many members of your team have raised are not feasible, and you are aware that short-cuts are being made to achieve them. Although it does mean the annual numbers of new customers look good, you realise that it will create issues for the long term as short-cuts are neither sustainable nor serviceable, and some are high risk. This does not reflect the values in the cultural review.
How do you approach this conflict?