On Tuesday February 7 CIPD Scotland delivered a business breakfast on Diversity and Inclusion in Scotland’s capital and financial hub Edinburgh. Working with City HR and Oracle Corporation we were guests of Standard Life. As one of Scotland leading financial services players’ Standard life are at the forefront of building a better workplace which takes care of people, helps them to achieve, and looks to identify and support and include both inside and outside their organisation. It’s part of “Working well.” As we explain in our forthcoming report and it’s the theme of the CIPD Scotland Annual Conference on 2nd March.
Working well is based on building three key pillars for a flourishing workplace. Linking wellbeing and productivity is number one. Secondly it’s building resilience and agility. Third and not least it’s leading well by focusing on how you harness contribution and build capacity.
Part of resilience and agility is building better networks and the collaboration. This is essential to harness different ideas and viewpoints and to keep organisations connected with customers and markets. That requires diversity and inclusion to ensure your people are contributing their talent and abilities. If we are not valued for who we are and what we contribute, we don’t engage as much as we can. When we feel looked after included and developed, we tend to be more productive.
Diversity and inclusion is a key issue for financial services. For a start its well-recognised that in some large “too big to fail” banks the preponderance of a macho testosterone driven culture of risk and “devil take the hindmost” short termism, drove institutions off a cliff. It’s also clear that even in this technical and skilled area of work women still suffer a considerable gender pay penalty. Despite what you hear about a shrinking gender pay gap its still here and it’s biologically baked-in. This is because it opens up as women age and have children according to the Resolution Foundation. Their interrupted earnings and career profiles means that men continue to dominate the higher echelons but also take the biggest share of good jobs and opportunities. But as Lynne Connolly Head of Global Diversity at Standard Life pointed out, the solution isn’t to find “Golden Skirts.” These are senior women who can be accelerated into executive and board positions. However positive that might be, they are a limited pool of talent. However promoting women is a good policy because it has what we might call a “contagion” effect.
Emily Cox from Virgin Money explained in a compelling Q&A session with Andrea Eccles of City HR that dealing with the biggest diversity issue of all gender, would help propel action is other areas. Equalizing the role of men and women in the labour market would also drive productivity by increasing economic growth. Emily co-authored Empowering Productivity Harnessing the talents of women in financial services with Jayne-Anne Gadhia one of the few female CEO is the sector. Emily explained how financial services suffers from ..”a permafrost in the mid- tier where women do not progress or leave the sector. This is not just about childcare. Women are leaving because the culture isn’t right.” Progress has been made. which has been adopted by HM Treasury as the basis of the Women in Finance Charter now signed up to be 93 organisations.
A lot of the resentment and anger in Britain today is down to the feeling that people aren’t being valued or asked to contribute. That impacts society and business fundamentally as we have seen. Sandy McDonald who is head of Sustainability for Standard Life explained that the issue of socio-economic inclusion is just as important. This was a great forum for people and development professionals to access the latest thinking and we had a wide discussion about diversity reflecting on issues like quotas and targets and on progress in our own organisations. We all resolved to do more. We need to.
Sandy Begbie will share Standard Life’s approach at CIPD Scotland Student Conference on Feb 18 in Glasgow
See Professor Cary Cooper on wellbeing and productivity plus how Franklin Templeton, Police Scotland and Age Scotland benefit from inclusion at CIPD’s Working Well For Business Success in Edinburgh, March 2.
