Financial services workers want a course-correction

Financial services firms face a range of disruptions, from new competitors to crypto and regulation—not to mention the threat from high interest rates, which is pressuring the business model at some banks and forcing others to shut down. The challenge for CEOs is responding to these changes nimbly, but at least one group of stakeholders isn’t fully convinced they can: employees. 

In PwC’s 2023 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears survey of nearly 54,000 employees worldwide, 39% of financial services employees said that their company won’t survive a decade on its current path (compared with 31% of the overall survey group). Employees in certain sectors have an even gloomier outlook: 47% of private equity employees gave their company a decade or less to live unless it reinvents itself. Among asset and wealth management employees, that figure is 61%.

Some employees are creating a back-up plan. One in four (24%) financial services employees have taken on work outside of their main job, three percentage points higher than the overall average. Among that group, many are doing it to give themselves a safety net (29%). And employees are looking to change jobs as well, with 32% saying they plan to do so in the next 12 months.  

If there’s a bright spot, it’s that these employees are also hungry for skills. When asked to rate the relative importance of a wide set of skills, FS employees rated virtually all of them as more important than respondents in other industries. Leaders can satisfy this demand for new skills—and make their workforce reinvention-ready—by focusing on a few areas:

1. Prioritise human skills over technical skills. Employees rated areas like flexibility and adaptability, critical thinking and collaboration as more important than technical skills like data analytics. Devote resources accordingly; those softer skills can equip workers to solve problems and innovate even in the face of disruptive technologies like AI (which 17% of FS workers cited as a threat to their jobs, as opposed to 13% of all respondents).
2. Develop leaders. Some firms have been slow to advance their leadership capabilities, and hybrid work compounds the challenge. In our findings, 68% of employees said that leadership skills were important. Development programs for everyone from middle management to the C-suite can build the critical leadership skills that companies need to compete. These programs take time and money, but in a highly disrupted industry, they’re worth the investment. 
3. Put your best people in charge of transformation. Firms typically reserve their most promising talent for profit-generating units. That makes sense in a steady-state environment, but given the urgent need for change, companies need their best and brightest employees and managers overseeing transformation programs. In the long run, transformation is the path to future profits, so staff those programs accordingly. 

Viewed in the right light, these findings are positive: workers in the FS industry see a clear need for change, and they’re asking to be part of it. Smart leaders will listen and bring them along.