Metro Bank cracking down on staff frowns
MOST ad campaigns about fun firms or service with a smile are just talk – a half-hearted effort to look like a generous firm which cares for its staff.
But Metro Bank founder and chairman Vernon Hill insists smiling is a very serious business.
In fact, if staff look grumpy, they’re not going to be staff for much longer.
“If you don’t smile in your first job interview here, that is the end,” Hill said yesterday, taking a tough line on sad faces.
Employees are also expected to take an unconventional approach to the rules, with the boss demanding they “kill stupid rules” whenever they see them.
“Every computer has a button that staff press to send in any stupid rule they’ve found to kill – for example, why do banks not open on Sundays like other high street stores?” said the billionaire chairman, who founded the bank in 2010 and took the top job at the start of this year.
And US-style service is not the only unusual thing about Metro Bank.
Hill likes to supersize everything he sees, too – with his ambitions even stretching to the expanding borders of London’s sprawling metropole.
“We want 200 branches in Greater London,” he told the Westminster Business Council event.
“For me, that stretches from Brighton to Milton Keynes, from Reading to Southend.”
A much Greater London, it seems.