At Wells Fargo, managers have dreamt up a new ratio to track alongside such banking stalwarts as provision coverage and capital adequacy. It is called the happy:grumpy ratio, and measures how many cheery staff the bank employs for every curmudgeon.
The point of this exercise, executives told the Wall Street Journal last week, was that happy employees are more likely to do the right thing than unhappy ones. Financial regulators, who have recently been exercising themselves about the nasty culture of banks, will no doubt be impressed. And they will be even more so when they see how this ratio is moving at the San Francisco bank. Only five years ago happy bankers (measured by their own assessment) outnumbered the grumpy ones by 3.8 to 1; by last year there were eight times as many Pollyannas at Wells Fargo as there were miserable sods.
When I first read about the happy: grumpy ratio, I thought it sounded so good it should become compulsory in the industry. Making banks produce such a number would force them to become less cut-throat places to work. And compared to most banking statistics, which are so complicated that even clever people can’t fathom them, this one is simple enough that any idiot can grasp it in a second.