^{Business Review} Human Resources

Human Resources played a critical role in empowering our people in 2021, focusing on performance, training, and career development to create an even more robust and efficient organisation to support our ambitious five-year strategy.

We promoted leadership skills and continued to cultivate a high-performance culture across the Bank. We introduced a new performance management system and increased training opportunities, with a focus on digital. At the same time, the Bank intensified its drive to attract and develop UAE National talent to make ADCB the employer of choice in the financial services industry.

To nurture effective leadership in the coming years, we identified the most critical roles in the organisation and developed a detailed and comprehensive individual development plan for each. We also established a successor for these vital roles while creating a tailored support programme to build capabilities. We review each key role regularly to ensure they reflect the needs of our fast-changing business and strengthen our resilience as an organisation.

In parallel, the Bank created individual development plans for every employee, embedding continuous feedback as the cornerstone in our approach to performance management. The plans clearly define roles and responsibilities and a set of agreed objectives, with specific performance indicators. These KPIs are closely connected to our strategy and relate to the performance of the Bank, each department and individual. Variable pay is based on achieving targets, which are assessed and monitored regularly.

The Bank also continued to invest significantly in training. We delivered more than 275,000 learning hours in 2021, externally and through our in-house Ambition University, which provides a wide range of courses available to all employees. Our comprehensive programme is a significant differentiator in the industry and highly popular among employees, receiving a net promoter score of 92 in 2021.

A digital fluency programme was a significant new addition to our curriculum, designed to support the rapid pace of the Bank’s digital transformation. We worked with Group Business Services (GBS) to produce content relevant to each business area, ensuring that technical knowledge was complemented by practical application. For example, our ‘Digital Learning Bytes’ series provided insight into topics such as blockchain, application programming interface (APIs), customer experience, and data & analytics.

In response to the ongoing challenges presented by the global pandemic, the Bank has organised vaccination programmes and regular PCR testing across the organisation to promote the welfare of our employees and ensure business continuity. We also introduced a new digital portal to facilitate the recruitment, onboarding, e-learning modules and documentation completion for new employees.

Focusing on diversity and inclusion helps us to serve customers better, and to attract, develop and retain top performers. This is particularly important as the Bank seeks to embed wider skillsets in line with its digital transformation.

We are proud to have over 80 nationalities represented in the Group’s employee base, enriching our culture and contributing to an open-minded environment. The Bank scores highly in gender diversity, with women comprising 44% of employees in the Group,² with an increasing number advancing to middle and senior management roles, including the positions of Chief Group Compliance Officer and Group General Counsel at ADCB.

To assess how the Bank is performing on culture, we carried out an Organisational Health Index (OHI) survey in 2021, which achieved a response rate of 80% from employees. The OHI exercise complements our annual employee survey by going beyond workplace engagement to analyse leadership and management capabilities and a wide range of other organisational assessments.

The results reinforced the positive findings from a previous survey conducted two years earlier and placed us firmly among the top decile when measured against the global OHI average of the last three years. A large majority, 83% of employees, said they feel that their work environment was either the same or better than 24 months earlier, a significant achievement given the global pandemic and the additional responsibilities associated with completing a complex three-way merger.

The Bank ranked in the top decile for coordination and control, innovation and learning, and external orientation. It remained in the top quartile for direction, leadership, capabilities, accountability and the work environment.

As part of the survey, we received more than 17,000 comments, many of which reflected support and commitment to colleagues and customers during the global pandemic.