Stress in Banking Industry

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Money is the lifeblood of the world and therefore, the employees of financial institutions must face an unmeasurable level of stress from time to time. In this essay, I’ll discuss the main reasons that contribute the stress in the banking industry (particularly in the UK), the effects of stress on different parties and how the financial institutions and individuals somehow manage to reduce the stress resulted from their workload.
In commercial banking, one of the most typical reasons that lead to high stress is that the staff must (by any means) manage to meet the daily sales target in selling financial products to customers. Hilary Osborne (2013) reports how a staff member at Halifax described how stressful the sales culture there is, with “sales targets are everywhere” and “throughout the day, staff discuss how much they have sold and how they can sell more”. Specifically, there were around four meetings in a Halifax branch a day, discussing which products will be sold to which customers, which staff claimed left them quite “disheartened and demotivated” because “how can you know a customer's needs without ever speaking to them?”. If the customers available at the branch don’t buy much financial products, staff will need to “call existing customers about the potential products they could want”. All sales will be translated into points and since each branch has to make roughly 5,000 points a day, “pressure is put on staff again to find more points from customers before 5pm”.
Things are even worse in investment banking. One former banker comments on the workload in investment banking: “It's insane because even under normal conditions you could be clocking in 100-plus hours per week. Often I'd suddenly get up out of bed an hour o...

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.... Available at: http://rt.com/business/credit-suisse-saturday-off-585/ (7) (Accessed: 23 April 2014)
The Huffington Post/PA (2014) Hormones Can Make Stressed Bankers Worse In Financial Crisis, Study Reveals. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/02/17/city-bankers-stress-hormones_n_4802802.html (8) (Accessed: 23 April 2014)
Tuttle B, (2014), RANKED: The Most Stressful Jobs On Wall Street, Business Insider, 9 January [Online]. Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-most-stressful-jobs-on-wall-street-2014-1 (9) (Accessed: 7 May 2014)
Ward V, (2013), Bank intern who died after 'working for 72 hours' felt pressure to excel, The Telegraph, 20 August [Online]. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/10255199/Bank-intern-who-died-after-working-for-72-hours-felt-pressure-to-excel.html (10) (Accessed: 23 April 2014)

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