The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) doubled its spending on initiatives to boost employees’ morale in the first year of a pandemic that has prompted a spike in mental ill-health amongst workers in the financial district of London, known as the ‘City’. The UK’s markets regulator spent about £12,304 in the year to March 2021 on initiatives designed to boost morale, up from £6,477 in the 12 months to March 2020, according to its response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
The FCA also boosted their spend on initiatives to support its employees’ well-being by 50 per cent to around £22,118 in the year to March 2021, up from a spend of about £15,636 in the previous year, the response said. These included adding a “well-being hub” to its intranet with resources designed to help FCA staff manage stress, isolation and anxiety, running mental health awareness sessions, well-being sessions and training employees at the regulator as “mental health first-aiders”, the FCA said.
The chairman of FCA, Charles Randell, said last month alongside the release of the regulator’s latest annual report, that the past 12 months had been “a challenging year for everyone – the people we serve, the industry we regulate, and all of us at the Financial Conduct Authority.”
It was reported back in June that the Bank of England, the UK’s central bank, spent just over £2,000 on three bank-wide initiatives to support its employees’ well-being over the same time period. A Bank of England spokesperson said in June that its employees well-being had “long been an extremely important priority for the Bank, and no less so during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The FCA said in its Freedom of Information (FOI) response: “As we all moved to working from home during the pandemic, we recognised that there would be a considerable impact on peoples’ mental health and well-being. The numbers of FCA staff receiving free counselling for “work or external stress” tripled over the same period from 21 in the year to February 2020 to 59 in the 12 months to February 2021, according to the response to a separate FOI request.
The percentage of FCA employees citing stress when calling in sick dropped slightly over the same period from 11.4 per cent of 24,293 sick days in 2020 to 9.7 per cent of 321 sick days in the first two months of 2021, according to that same FOI request. A spokesperson of FCA said: “We have invested, and continue to invest, in this area. The pandemic has posed a number of challenges for our people.”
He added: “Our interventions to support them during this period are helping to decrease stress-related absence.” The Covid-19 crisis has prompted a spike in mental ill-health among workers in the financial district of London, with many reporting longer hours at work. In a February survey of senior finance executives, 60 per cent of respondent said Covid-19 has made their lives more stressful, while 42 per cent said the crisis, as well as Brexit, has made them reconsider their careers.
City firms have been forced to give renewed focus to the mental well-being of their junior ranks in recent months in the wake of a stinging presentation by a group of Goldman Sachs analysts in march, outlining 100-hour weeks and declining physical and mental health.
Data analytics company PQ, meanwhile, found that more than 50 per cent of senior executives averaged more than 10 hours of stress a day. However, they had less than two hours of daily recovery or downtime, including weekends and meal times. (The writer is our foreign correspondent based in the UK)
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