About Financial Ombudsman Service Ltd

The Financial Ombudsman's executive team is very active at engaging with staff all year round. Their CEO shares a weekly video diary and her Roadshow earlier in the year engaged with the highest percentage of staff to date, when she visited every floor across all their buildings. The executive regularly meet teams and always try to have a presence at lunchtime talks, localised team presentations and social events such as their ombudsman got talent show. Their managers and professional leader’s events have seen them engaging with over 600 people in especially themed days aimed at really supporting and encouraging networking and sharing knowledge.

The Financial Ombudsman participated in National Fitness day, focusing on simple ways to inspire their people to be more active. They ran free power half hour sessions in their on-site gym every hour from 7.00 am and made these available to non-members. They had a high take up and more people have taken up membership of the gym as a result of this. They also ran a series of lunchtime walks for people; they had a number of walk leaders who took their groups on a tour of the local area of between 30 and 60 minutes. These were very popular and also a networking event as people met other people from the organisation. A number of people that took part in the lunchtime walks now meet regularly to go for a walk. They have impacted people at the ombudsman by taking part in this initiative as people are taking exercise that they were not before. They ran a Back Care and Posture Awareness Event in partnership with Nuffield Health and their health and safety department. They put in place a demo desk set up so that their health and safety advisor could show people how to make adjustments to their own work stations for better posture. They were also made aware that they could have a desk assessment. Nuffield did back check with a spinal mouse and there was a physiotherapist to give advice and demonstrate strengthening and relaxing exercises.

The Financial Ombudsman really values the importance of team building. You can see managers doing this in a variety of ways from using their reward and recognition budget to arrange an event for the team, to team meetings to allow everyone in the team to get to know one another. It’s something they encourage at all levels. Across the organisation they have put a lot of energy and thought into planning events they arrange for their people. As a not-for-profit organisation it’s really important there is a purpose and value. They regularly hold events for their management team including their “the big questions” where managers have the opportunity to meet and network and ask their executive questions about the work of the organisation. This is their way of getting their managers together to talk about what’s happening in their area. Following great success last year, they took all their managers off site again this year for an event that included various workshops to share knowledge and develop their skills, to focus on their purpose as an organisation and working together on what this means they expect from people working here. This involves a range of different interactive workshops and talks led by senior leaders and inspirational speakers.