Our people are at the absolute core of everything we do and inclusion is paramount to us as a company, and the values we hold. We made a pledge in our 10 Commitments to Antiracism that we would expand our pay gap reporting to include ethnicity and are proud that we are taking this step forward in our efforts to create greater transparency on our journey to greater gender and ethnicity balance.
The pay gap reports are an incredibly insightful lens for us to review our progress in building our company and the culture that supports diversity. The pay gap reports, in turn, show how we are rewarding and compensating our workforce and highlights areas for improvement. This is the first year we have accompanied the report with action plans making us more accountable on how we intend to reduce the pay gaps, and we will update these year-on-year alongside our future pay gap analysis and reporting.
UK 2021 Gender Pay Gap Report
In the spirit of honesty, I’m disappointed that our results have not shown a more material up-tick over the past few years, despite the changes to our gender pay gap being positive, the pace of these changes continues to be an area of improvement. A long-term goal of ours was to increase and grow our female talent from within the company organically. That meant for a number of years our GPG actually grew as our female representation in the lower to lower-mid quartiles grew out of balance with the female representation in our senior leadership. We are now starting to see some slight shifts in our pay gap as our more junior colleagues are being promoted, and therefore helping to reduce our pay gap.
UK 2021 Ethnicity Pay Gap Report
This report counts as Chapter 1 in our Ethnicity Pay Gap journey. It highlighted what we thought to be true – we do not currently have enough ethnically diverse talent in mid-senior levels, particularly that of our black colleagues. This is something we are working to address through the development of our Future Leaders Programme for our Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic colleagues and have enhanced our focus on recruitment.
We have and continue to invest a significant amount of resource in trying to address some of the reasons for this representation gap, from seeking out great diverse talent to providing reverse mentoring and coaching opportunities. Combined with our focus on nurturing and developing the phenomenal talent we have in our company to allow people to build their careers. We have come a long way over the years and we confident we are doing a lot of things right, but the changes we are making are not quick fixes, and won’t deliver a pleasing immediate upward trend. We are determined that our efforts are sustainable and create equal and fair opportunity and career progression for all our people.