In the next in our series of Covid-19 interviews with Senior HR Leaders, our Founder & Managing Director, Peter Banks, talks directly to David Blackburn, Chief People Officer, Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) – an organisation that was set up in 2001 under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, to protect customers from financial services firms that have failed.

They are independent of the government and financial services industry and can pay compensation thanks to levies that authorise financial services firms pay. In 2018-2019, they paid out £473m to 425,760 customers of failed firms, have recovered £20 billion from the 2008 bank failures and repaid all £20.5 billion borrowed from HM Treasury that year. They’ve also returned £375 million from other recoveries to the industry in the last five years.

David shares how FSCS has demonstrated that it can be a remote working organisation through this crisis, but is now asking questions about what role the office will play in the future and exploring how best to utilise a hub. As they look to re-board, after changing the office environment in line with government policy, the biggest anxiety for their employees is the actual commute to the office, with concerns surrounding the safety of public transport. David also strongly believes that very different skills are called for from leaders and a greater level of emotional intelligence is required and he believes this will be a critical role for HR to manage.

Peter Banks, Founder & Managing Director of theHRDIRECTOR commented: “David has clearly had good days and bad, which you can see from his candid responses and he has been severely tested in these challenging times. Feeling that he had to be all things to all people, along with having the weight of responsibility of not making the wrong step, has been very difficult. I really liked how their CEO, Caroline Rainbird, posed the question to the organisation, ‘How do we build back better?’, as this is a real opportunity to do just that and David can see that this has accelerated lots of positive changes for how they work in the future.”

Watch the next in the series now as we look to uncover a rich source of ideas, insight, strategies and new working practices to guide us through this. Just what have we learnt from this global pandemic and is there an opportunity to return to ‘the new better’?

To watch the full interview click here:

Watch our previous Covid-19 video interviews in this series on our HRDTV You Tube channel, click here.