State of Engagement 2026 Report |
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Since their first Best Companies survey in 2021, Danske Bank has seen a remarkable upward trajectory:
As a result, Danske Bank has seen:
With a heritage spanning 200 years in Northern Ireland, Danske Bank is no stranger to investing in their people, and their commitment to creating Employee Engagement has earned them a 3-Star Accreditation from Best Companies for the third-year running.
We sat down with Caroline van der Feltz, HR Director at Danske Bank, to explore the strategies and initiatives that have resulted in Danske Bank being named the Best Company to Work For in Northern Ireland and in the Financial Services Sector.
In 2021, Danske Bank partnered with Best Companies to improve:
As Caroline stated, the goal was simple: to look beyond the bank’s walls and see “how good were we really, how were we performing, how engaged were our colleagues, how strong were our managers and our leaders versus the complete benchmark of data information and comparable companies that Best Companies gave us access to”.
The data helped the leadership team to "diagnose really quickly where our opportunities were” and provided "a strong foundation on where we could do even better". By listening to over 2,000 colleague comments, Danske Bank turned raw data into tangible cultural shifts.
A cornerstone of this success has been the Adaptive Leadership programme. Designed to help leaders navigate the complexities of modern banking, the initiative encouraged managers to move from the "dancefloor" (getting bogged down in daily tasks) to the "balcony," where they could gain a strategic view of team growth.
To support this, the bank utilised Elevate which, as Caroline suggested, “gave much more targeted insights into People Leaders and how they were doing”. This allowed for a more personalised approach to development, where People Leaders could identify their own "areas of excellence" and “what did they need to do better”.
Elevate, combined with the bank’s Mentor Me app, which “helps to establish the purpose and the rationale for a mentoring relationship”, enabled People Leaders to either seek support from 3-star colleagues or offer guidance to others in areas of People Leadership that have been identified as opportunities for improvement.
As Caroline discussed, using Elevate “helped us to understand which functions we really need to focus on”, resulting in Danske Bank’s My Manager scores increasing by 6% since 2021, resulting in Danske Bank scoring 9% higher than the Financial Services sector average score for this factor.
Danske Bank has also fundamentally redefined what a ‘career’ looks like. Moving away from traditional vertical ladders, the bank embraces its Squiggly Careers.
Caroline talked about how Squiggly Careers enables Danske Bank’s people to experience multiple facets of the bank’s operations by allowing them to “move around different departments, understand what skills worked in different departments”.
The bank’s philosophy is that growth (one of the Best Companies measured factors) is often "linear and around re-skilling" rather than just promotion. In the last year alone:
Caroline believes that it is this Squiggly Careers strategy that “has been absolutely instrumental in helping our Personal Growth scores”. Danske Bank has seen a 5% increase in this factor since 2021, and is currently scoring 10% higher in Personal Growth than the average for the Financial Services sector.
This culture of mobility is supported by the Making Your Mark framework, which Caroline says empowers colleagues to own their career paths and “make changes and differences that will make this the best place to work”.
According to Caroline, Employee Engagement at Danske Bank is rooted in a simple truth: "Colleagues will only buy in if they see actions." One standout example of this ‘listen-and-act’ culture is the creation of Reset Spaces, created after Best Companies survey feedback revealed that colleagues needed a place to ‘decompress’ after difficult customer interactions.
Working with an idea that came from their Making Your Mark champions, the bank gave budgets to every one of their premises to enable colleagues to design their own relaxing environments, proving that their voices directly shape their workplace.
This transparency extends to the very top. Through the Board 360 initiative, board members go out "unaccompanied and listen to groups of colleagues". They engage in thematic discussions on trust and engagement, and are then held accountable by their peers for the actions they take following those sessions.
This practice has helped to create trust throughout the organisation, as Caroline states, “We believed we had high levels of trust in the organisation, and importantly colleague trust, thankfully we were able to prove this via insight from survey results from Best Companies”. This trust has resulted in Danske bank seeing a 10% increase in Leadership scores, meaning that they are currently scoring 14% higher than the Financial Services sector average.
Despite the rapid pace of technological change, Danske Bank has maintained a focus on the human element. While 20% of colleagues expressed anxiety about the impact of AI on their roles, the bank launched Make It My Business and digital ‘AI agent’ building sessions to “try and demystify some of those challenges that we heard through Best Companies, around job security concern and new technology”.
Through the Make It My Business initiative, Caroline says that, “This was us trying to tap into the local community, trying to get some of the great practice and entrepreneurial spirit that family businesses, startups, really successful big businesses have locally”. One business that they brought in, Denroy, had reinvented themselves during Covid, and were a “brilliant example of really driving and delivering great business transformation with AI”.
To further demystify AI, Caroline says that Danske Bank “had over 1,000 colleagues actually build an agent”. The result was that those who undertook the challenge, “They're hungry to learn more. They're interacting much more with the learning opportunities”.
By learning together - from the CFO to branch staff - the bank fostered a ‘cultural connection’ that saw Wellbeing scores rise by 8%, and also scoring 8% higher than the Financial Services sector average.
As Danske Bank continues to climb, it remains clear that their 3-Star success isn't just about the numbers; it's about investing in its people, thereby ensuring that as the organisation thrives, its people thrive alongside it.
A Northern Ireland native, Caroline has been the HR Director for Danske Bank since 2015. Following a successful London-based career in Financial Services and FMCG - including senior roles at RBS Group, Coutts & Co, and a global remit at Reckitt Benckiser - she returned to Belfast to lead Danske Bank’s HR function.
Beyond her corporate role, she holds several leadership positions, including Chair of the CBI People and Skills Committee, sits on the Department for the Economy’s Northern Ireland Skills Committee and Chairs their Skills EDI Committee, and is a Board member of the Financial Services Skills Commission. A visiting Professor at Ulster University, Caroline was named IoD EDI Director of the Year (2022) and received the CIPD Outstanding Contribution Award (2023). She currently lives in Co. Down with her two sons.
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