Coming across an alphabet soup of meaningless management guff is an occupational hazard when you work in financial journalism.
But even by the lazy standards of most HR departments, the drivel put out by PTSB this week has to be a front-runner for the gibberish of the year award.
Announcing that it was introducing a voluntary redundancy programme, the company said: “Following a period of transformational growth, the bank is now undertaking a number of important strategic business transformation change initiatives to enable its strategy and improve organisational effectiveness and efficiency”.
“Important strategic business change initiatives . . .” Really? Transparent it certainly is not. The message seems to be that “we need to cut jobs but we can’t explain why to you”.
They also talk about improving “organisational effectiveness”, precisely the same words the bank used when it announced a previous plan to cull 20 senior managers across its network. But on the other hand, they are broadening the previous scheme “in light of expressions of interest from employees”.
Well, which is it? Are you targeting a more streamlined, efficient bank, or just bowing to pressure from your disgruntled staff? Or is that last element just deflection, making it sound as though the bank is just accommodating employees rather than making an active business decision that it needs to slim down staff numbers?
Companies always need to keep an eye on costs and that would be imperative for a lender that continues to lag rivals AIB and Bank of Ireland on all fronts, not least in share price performance and running costs as a proportion of its income.
It is also the case that the bank has taken on significant staff in recent years – more than 850 since the end of 2019 as it took over business from the departing KBC and Ulster banks – increasing staff numbers by over 35 per cent.
So there might be good reason to announce a redundancy plan a fortnight before Christmas. But if there is, PTSB at least has a duty to be straight up with staff who have done the legwork of that “transformational growth” over recent years.
If it cannot, maybe those behind the announcement should find themselves near the front of any queue for the exit.
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