Barclays has been in business for over 300 years, and the common thread running through its long history is relationships. Strong business relationships depend on talented people.
The development of our people and the nurturing of talent within Barclays is the key to lifting performance and to creating differentiating capabilities. It's also the key to our two overriding operational priorities: good execution on behalf of customers, and excellent customer service.
We now have over 113,000 people within the Group, and nearly half of them are outside the UK. Barclays is changing. We are increasingly a magnet for talent. Recruiting and retaining the best people is a strategic imperative for us. We direct a lot of time and effort at nurturing what we call ‘franchise health': in other words, the standing of Barclays in the minds of our people, our customers and the communities in which we live and work. We measure our people's level of engagement regularly through our employee opinion surveys, and the results of the 2005 survey continued the positive trend of recent years, with good progress in employee engagement and pride in Barclays.
We take pride in being successful, because if we are successful as an organisation, then we contribute significantly to the societies in which we work. It is important for all our stakeholders – be they pensioners, employees, customers or governments – that Barclays does well.
John Varley
Group Chief Executive
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