The idea of listening to departing employees is foolish

GREG SMITH’S diatribe in the New York Times made for one of the most savage public exit interviews of all time. But the oddest thing about it is that if you strip out the rage, the noise and the baggage, what he actually said about Goldman Sachs was perfectly ordinary. Not only were his accusations ones that all vaguely disaffected workers could make of their former employers, they are charges that most of us, happily employed, could equally level against our current ones.

Mr Smith beat Goldman with three sticks. First, he said its culture had got worse since he joined a decade ago and that the current bosses had spoilt it. Then he said the bank ripped off its customers. And finally he said that his colleagues had mocked clients behind their backs and called them names.

I don’t know about you, but this rings a lot of bells with me. First, I can definitely say the culture of most companies is in long-term decline as businesses become more competitive. This means they tend to be less forgiving and less paternalistic than they once were.

But the bigger point is that we always misrepresent the past because that is how our brains work. I have no idea what the culture was actually like when I joined the Financial Times. What I do remember is that at the time, viewing it through green and keen eyes, I thought it wonderful. My view of the present is made through eyes that are older and, by definition, more jaded.

Now take the complaint about ripping off clients. Surely there isn’t a commercial enterprise in the world that doesn’t set out to do this. The whole point of being a profit- making business is that you charge as much as you can possibly get away with without losing customers to the competition, without breaking the law and without attracting undue attention from the regulator.

The tragedy of my industry is that we haven’t been good enough at ripping off our clients. And on the final charge of calling customers nasty names, I agree this doesn’t look good when it’s written in the pages of the New York Times, but this surely is what most of us do from time to time. In the last week, I have succumbed to bouts of customer name-calling so savage that they make Goldman bankers look gentlemanly in calling their clients muppets. “Morons! Idiots! Nutters!” I declared last week, on seeing the angry nonsense readers had posted online beneath a colleague’s column.

I had a second outburst when I got an email from a reader who had taken exception to my appearance. “Your hair has no life or bounce to it,” he wrote. “Your hair reflects your personality, bitter and vindictive. In addition, you are short . . . a problem I know festers in that little brain of yours.”

The customer may be king but he can also be a pain in the backside and, when he is being excessively tiresome, it is no crime if employees point this out to each other.

So if Mr Smith made three commonplace complaints, why are we all so upset?

The reason is that Goldman is Goldman, suspiciously successful, suspiciously secretive and therefore much to be suspected of more or less everything. Should we take any notice? If we were rational, we would not.

The whole idea of listening to departing employees is foolish. I’ve never understood why companies set such store by exit interviews. They tell themselves that ex-workers are somehow free to tell the truth, when they are actually just as constrained as current employees, only the constraints are different. When you are in a job, you don’t say what you really think because you want to keep the pay cheques coming in. But when you are walking out the door you also fail the truth test just as reliably.

In Mr Smith’s case, once he had decided to speak out, he had a vested interest in inflicting maximum damage: the more vitriolic, the bigger the presumed book deal.

If we were all logical, we would pay no heed to the testimonies either of current or former employees. We would hold exit interviews and employee surveys in equal contempt. Yet we aren’t logical, so we latch on to anything that supports what we want to believe.

Goldman’s bosses are comforting themselves with employee surveys that purport to show that everyone – apart from Mr Smith – at the bank is deliriously happy. As for the rest of us, who surely believe that Goldman is a breeding ground for the arrogant and the greedy, we take Mr Smith’s words, forget they are empty and dubious, and treat them as gospel. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012)