“I had managers in my face yelling at me” and that “the sales pressure from management was unbearable.”Īnother former employee told the LA Times: “We were constantly told we would end up working for McDonald’s… If we did not make the sales quotas … we had to stay for what felt like after-school detention, or report to a call session on Saturdays.”Ī lawsuit against Wells Fargo alleges that “employees who failed to resort to illegal tactics were either demoted or fired as a result.”Īs the guidance suggests, incentives matter a lot when they are highly salient, or foremost in the employee’s mind. One former employee interviewed by CNN reported, These goals loomed large when supervisors threatened salespeople who failed to meet them. The answer is, it rhymed with ‘great.’ Perhaps our new cheer should be: ‘Let’s go again, for 10!’” “I’m often asked why we set a cross-sell goal of eight. Unmoored from what his salespeople could realistically achieve, the CEO justified this goal on the basis of a simple rhyme, telling shareholders in the bank’s 2010 annual report: Specifically, they were told to sell at least eight accounts to every customer, compared with an average of three accounts 10 years earlier. “In cases where the goal of an incentive is to encourage a particular behavior, agencies should ensure the incentive is salient to individuals.”Īs early as 2010, Wells Fargo imposed extremely aggressive sales goals on its employees. Repeated reminders of terrifying incentives

What would it mean to apply these behavioral insights to the Wells Fargo situation? Here, I draw from White House guidance on how to implement lessons from behavioral science into government policy to identify situational factors that contributed to the fraud. Although many honest Wells Fargo employees realized that opening fake accounts was wrong and refused to do so, it is also the case that other employees who considered themselves honest participated in the fraud.

This makes cheating more likely to happen in some situations than others. Behavior is often a function of the situation in which you make the decision, even factors you barely notice. Social science research suggests that ethical behavior is not about who you are or the values you hold. Robert Galbraith/Reuters Situational cheating A cable car passes the Wells Fargo Bank headquarters in San Francisco.

Fake bank statement wells fargo