Amy Cluskey

• What inspires you?
• What attracted you to Barclays?
• Why did you choose to join HR?
• What have you been doing since you joined?
• What does your current role involve?
• What do you enjoy the most about your job?
• Can you outline any interesting projects you've been involved with?
• What support and training have you had since joining?
• What qualities do you need to succeed at Barclays?
• What qualities do you need to succeed in HR?
• Can you outline any inspirational moments you've been involved with?
• Why join HR?
• Who at work inspires you and why?

Transcript

What inspires you?
I’m drawing a globe because from the project I’m working on now, I really understand what a global organisation Barclays is and it’s only growing more and more. We have presence in every continent in the world and that presence is growing. I think a globe is a really good depiction of our current and future state.

What attracted you to Barclays?
When I started thinking about where I wanted to apply to do a graduate programme I talked to people about different options and I was looking to work in the financial services sector. Someone told me that Barclays was a stuffy old high street English bank but when I dug a little bit deeper I saw that it had such a global footprint. I found that it employed 120,000 people worldwide and was still growing and that’s what really attracted me to it and excited me about it.

Why did you choose to join HR?
I’ve always been interested in Human Resources and Barclays strategy is one of growth and Human Resources is what feeds into that strategy. It’s all about achieving the strategic aims of the organisation through using the people and maximising the potential of the people and that’s why I was attracted to Human Resources.

What have you been doing since you joined?
I’ve been in such a number of roles since I joined here it has been absolutely amazing. I started off in reward which is a really interesting area - it’s all about how do we reward people appropriately. So all about salaries and bonuses, which if you are a nosy person is a great place to be. Then I moved into a more generalist area, so working on different projects and that was extremely varied, really really challenging and really stretched me. I am currently working on a large scale global project which I actually own, which is amazing. I am looking at the whole of Barclays and implementing an employee opinion survey to test the water to see what people think about Barclays and how engaged people are.

What does your current role involve?
At the moment I am coordinating the employee opinion survey which is a survey that Barclays conducts every year. It surveys 120,000 people worldwide and it’s essentially a temperature check to see how engaged people are. It’s an amazing role - I can’t even describe how wonderful it is to own this project. I get to see the whole of Barclays so I get to look at the organisation and see all of its different parts. On a day-to-day basis I do so many different things, from dealing with comms to look at the strategy we have in place to make sure the survey is communicated and that we get a great participation rate, to working with the lead coordinator in each of the different business units to make sure that they have the correct diversity questions for their country, or that the questions about their business unit are specific and correct. It’s a very varied role and it’s great. I love it.

What do you enjoy most about your job?
I think what I really enjoy about my job at the moment is the fact that I get to see the whole of Barclays so I get to interact with people all over the world every single day. So just for example, today I was on a call with Emerging Markets, so talking to people in Dubai. Earlier this morning I was re-arranging a call I had with ABSA, so that’s South Africa and I’m having that call on Thursday now, so it’s really the global outlook. Now I don’t just think about one business unit or what happens in the UK when I am asked a question, I think about its impact globally and that’s the really great thing about what I’m doing.

Can you outline any interesting projects you’ve been involved with?
Where do I even start? One of them I suppose would be when I was tasked with implementing an employee relations database to track all of our employee relations cases. That was an international project as well because the cases were based in the UK but also in India. I was the team leader, so given an awful lot of responsibility. I had calls with India, calls in this team, regular meetings just to try and understand the problem, what the issues were the different legislation in both countries, and then to try and put in place a solution, which we did and it worked really, really well.

What support and training have you had since joining?
We’ve had so much support and training. The first week we are given a schedule and it sets out all of the training that we will have initially and then over time it sets out monthly training sessions. In addition, if we are interested in doing any additional training we can do that and we also have a £2000 training budget which we can use on whatever we want. Support and training is definitely not a problem, and in fact we’ve just had it coming out of our ears there’s so much of it.

What qualities do you need to succeed at Barclays?
To succeed at Barclays you need to be extremely hard working and extremely ambitious. There are so many opportunities here you just need to be able to reach out and grab them, so you need to be knocking on doors and networking and just grabbing whatever comes in front of you.