Credit Agricole: an end to aggressive emails and training courses on best practice for all
Agreement between trade unions and the senior management of the French bank in Italia: a guide to countering commercial pressure and compulsory training courses for managers too
No more emails with an aggressive tone or where capital letters are used to emphasise specific instructions. The handbook on commercial policies and work organisation, signed by Crédit Agricole Italia and the five banking trade union organisations, goes into great detail. The title of the document is telling: ‘Appropriate Managerial Conduct’, and the signatures of the signatories are still fresh, as they date from 15 July. It is a four-page handbook comprising six key sections; aggressive emails fall under the heading: ‘Avoiding abrasive language’.
Courses for everyone
Before going into detail, it is important to highlight a preliminary point regarding the guidelines on conduct; there are, in fact, five annexed articles. Article 4 stipulates that the document will be made available on the intranet and distributed ‘to all staff (including managers), both through the company’s communication channels (email, company portal, meetings) and through specific compulsory training programmes’. There will therefore be courses on best practice which managers must also attend, and this is a genuine obligation.
The trade union statement
And to think that the previous trade union leaflet, dated 3 June, had a headline that was not exactly conciliatory: ‘Commercial pressure: change cannot wait’. It was a statement that condemned a series of practices relating precisely to commercial pressure. Even then, however, it referred to the ongoing discussions regarding the guidelines that were subsequently signed on 15 July.
The chapters of the handbook
The first chapter is entitled ‘Involving all team members in the group strategy’; among the most important guidelines in this section is the specification regarding meetings, which, for example, ‘should be convened without being too frequent and with adequate notice’, whilst also taking care ‘to avoid contacting colleagues outside working hours, paying particular attention to part-time staff’.
The second chapter urges readers to “avoid an overload of ad hoc requests”; in this context, it is specified that “the collection of commercial data must, as a rule, be carried out using tools provided centrally by the company, thereby avoiding misuse, excessive frequency and unnecessary repetition”.
