World’s best bank for diversity and inclusion 2017: Lloyds Banking Group

Awards for Excellence 2017

“Our whole ethos is to make sure people feel included,” says Fiona Cannon, director of inclusion and diversity (I&D) and of responsible business at Lloyds Banking Group.

You will notice rather than D&I, it is I&D – a nuance that offers an insight into Lloyds’ approach to both employees and customers. With inclusion as the priority, Cannon says, it becomes a culture driven by making sure all employees and clients feel valued. 

It is working. Engagement levels within the firm are high. The bank is frequently voted as one of the top 20 companies in the UK to work for, and this year it wins Euromoney’s award for world’s best bank for diversity and inclusion. 

The drive for inclusion comes from the top of Lloyds. Two years ago, chief executive António Horta-Osório moved responsibility for the I&D function into the group CEO’s office. Senior executives take a lead role. Members of the group executive committee are sponsors for gender, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, ethnicity and agile working, and speak openly on a range of issues, including mental health and managing wellbeing. But much of Lloyds’ success in creating an inclusive culture, thanks to Cannon, has been through supporting its 70,000 employees to engage with each other. 

Through events and discussions, these networks play an important role. For example, to mark International Day to Eliminate Racial Discrimination, the ethnicity network asked people to share where in the world they saw as their heritage, and then put together a map showing the depth and breadth of the backgrounds of Lloyds’ employees. 

“It was a really uniting initiative that had a much larger impact than if we were to have forced employee conversation around racial difference,” points out Cannon. 

Not that Lloyds shies away from tackling these topics, even beyond its four walls. With regards to race, the bank published a report last year called ‘Reflecting modern Britain’ that highlighted how advertising in Britain often under-represents or misrepresents the diversity of the population. It also trains its branch staff to work with and support vulnerable customers. The bank was recently featured in the UK press for enabling a refugee, who faced barriers at many other high-street banks, to open an account. 

When it comes to gender, Lloyds’ internal network has 15,000 members (the largest of its kind in the UK), 1,500 of whom are men. It hosts as many as 50 events each year, adding new topics of discussion including menopause – a subject very few corporations engage with. 

The networks complement measures that track whether or not everyone has the support they need for career progression. As part of its ‘Helping Britain prosper’ plan, in 2014 the bank became the first FTSE100 company to publicly commit to having 40% of its senior management roles filled by women by 2020. It is on track, the percentage currently stands at 32.7%. 

Last year, a BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) Authentic Leadership Programme was launched and Lloyds also seeks to improve diversity in recruits to its graduate and internship programmes. Around 34% of offers in 2016 went to graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds, compared with approximately 20% in previous years.

Tracking progression and equality is not always easy, explains Cannon. “We may not know which of our employees is LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] for example, or if they identify as having a disability or how they identify their ethnic origin, so data collection is not a simple endeavour.” For now, the bank tracks engagement twice yearly, surveying employees anonymously.

That engagement, particularly among its LGBT colleagues, has been increasing each year. Indeed, this year the bank ranked first in the Stonewall Top 100 index of LGBT employers in the UK. 

Internally, it ran a myth-busting campaign around bisexuality. The bank was also the first UK-listed company to extend its private healthcare scheme to include treatment and support for gender dysphoria.  

Perhaps the most ground-breaking work being done by Lloyds, however, involves agile working – Cannon’s personal project. 

“We recognized the world is changing due to digitization and demographics, and the current model of nine-to-five and 16-to-60 linear career progression no longer works,” she says. More than 90% of roles at Lloyds are advertised as open to agile working patterns, meaning that work can be carried out at home, hours can be flexible, the role can be shared, open to reduced hours or a variety of other arrangements. 

The HR director, group operations role is a job share for example, and one of the finance teams uses two weeks on/two weeks off to enable capacity to be increased at peak times. The results have been astonishing. In the Black Horse finance team, home-working has enabled both productivity and colleague engagement to increase by 10%. In SME banking, staged retirement has enabled the risk of an aging relationship manager population to be mitigated and provides opportunities for staff to phase into retirement.