Our People
Equality and diversity
Equality and diversity is not just about complying with equality legislation. We believe that it is vital for achieving competitive advantage. We need to be close to our customers and provide them with the right products and services. By attracting and retaining a diverse workforce, we will better understand the needs of all our customers and be able to build lasting relationships.
Over the last few years, we have been working to increase the number of women in management and senior management positions across the organisation. At the end of 2008, our group executive committee had one of the highest proportion of women for a FTSE 100 company, and 23.4 per cent of our senior managers were women.
We’re also working to increase the representation of ethnic minorities in the workforce at every level. In 2008, Race for Opportunity* named us as top performer out of 85 organisations for our leading edge race programme. We became the first organisation in the campaign’s history to be awarded Platinum status.
We continue to make significant progress with our disability and sexual orientation programmes. Our disability programme has been ranked first out of 116 organisations by the Employers’ Forum on Disability and we maintained our sixth place ranking in Stonewall’s† Index of the 100 best employers of lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
Diversity
| 2008 |
2007 |
2006 |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Women managers |
41.1% |
40.1% |
38.5% |
| Women senior managers |
23.4% |
21.7% |
20.9% |
| Ethnic minority managers†† |
5.1% |
4.9% |
4.3% |
| Ethnic minority senior managers†† |
2.6% |
2.5% |
1.9% |
| Disabled colleagues†† |
1.9% |
2% |
1.5% |
| Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) colleagues†† |
1.0% |
0.8% |
0.2% |
*Race for Opportunity (RfO) is a national business network of over 150 UK organisations from the private and public sectors working on race and diversity as a business imperative.
†Stonewall is a campaigning organisation that works to achieve equality and justice for lesbians, gay men and bisexual people.
††Shows percentage of whole workforce although not all colleagues have supplied information on race, disability or sexual orientation.
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