Diversity, inclusion and wellbeing report 2020

Being a carer - Elizabeth

I’m the only other one here so if anything needs doing, it’s me that does it

“I care for my husband and although he’s quite independent, I’m the only other one here. So if anything needs doing, it’s me that does it. Lockdown put a lot of extra stresses on people. Not being able to spend time together was difficult. I became a grandmother for the first time, and that was wonderful – but I haven’t been able to see my granddaughter much.

But there have been positives, like being at home all summer and going for walks. My husband and I have discovered things where we live that we would never have before. People have been much kinder and more empathetic. Our neighbours had a barbecue and shared food with us over the fence, and I’ve found people in supermarkets much more chatty – it’s not all moaning, although I’ve done my fair share!

At work every employee group has put something on to put people in touch with each other, and we’ve had so much support from HR – there’s lots of advice online about wellbeing and looking after yourself.

I’ve had a couple of carers’ days, thanks to the extra leave that the service provides. I’m a hands-on carer because it’s all the time, but I also wanted to make sure I’m paying my husband attention. 

We’re very conscious that it can be harder for our customers who aren’t online. It’s important to remember that not every generation is online savvy and won’t have felt as connected as others have. It’s important to ensure these people aren’t excluded. During their lifetime everybody’s circumstances change. As you get older, having to care for your parents becomes more likely. For organisations like ours that can give support at such times, they do get the best out of people.”

Being a single parent - Heather

The effect of lockdown on working parents has been huge – for single parents, it’s been monumental

“Under normal circumstances, being a single working parent is hard-going – trying to balance everything so you aren’t letting anyone down or missing anything.

At the start of the first lockdown in March 2020, my children were two and three and required round-the-clock supervision. Initially, I felt that I had been given the gift of time back with my girls. But as time went on, I was struggling to balance the requirements of my role with the requirements of me as a parent.

I replaced their whole social circle and became their teacher, friend, nurse and entire family unit. The effect of lockdown on working parents has been huge – for single parents, it’s been monumental.

When you’re a single working parent in lockdown, the reality is that there are no breaks. Not with cooking the dinner, bathtimes, bedtimes, tantrums, cleaning up the house, doing the shopping or paying the bills.

So, the service’s parents’ network and additional dependents’ days were a lifeline – I don’t know how I’d have coped without them. It’s critical to our values that we make sure people aren’t struggling alone and that employees feel that they are able to speak out and get support where they need it. I value our culture where it’s okay to say things are difficult and people respond with genuine compassion and empathy.

I’ve got more time back now I’m not commuting, and can base my work around the kids. Now I get to put them to bed every night, and I’m the first person they see when they get up. These are the most precious years there are with your kids. You can’t put a price on that.”

Being a carer - Zamin

I didn’t recognise myself as a carer until I came to the ombudsman service

“I was an inquisitive child, and would listen to my parents’ conversations. I realised that they had health problems and that I’d need to care for both of them one day. Then when I was 17, my father passed away. The duties were almost immediate – taking care of bills, medical matters, and how we would sustain ourselves as a family.

I used to work in an organisation where my boss didn’t understand the demands I had as a carer. If there was an emergency, my manager would ask why I couldn’t take care of it after my shift. I would have to use my annual leave to take my mum to her appointments, and I didn’t have any time left over for myself. That affected me psychologically, physically and mentally.

I didn’t recognise myself as a carer until I came to the ombudsman service. Then I realised I had an employer that recognised carers’ responsibilities. On her own initiative, my ombudsman leader noticed I was a carer, and tried to understand what my life looked like outside work.

Last year, the organisation increased the carers’ leave allowance during the pandemic to ten days. I did need the extra time because a lot more needs started to arise during the pandemic. The organisations that support my mum and I had fewer staff – you end up spending a lot more time on hold on the phone, for example.

One of the biggest positives has been knowing that if there’s an emergency, I can deal with it in a few minutes. So I’m very grateful to the service for the support. Caring is a responsibility much like work is a responsibility – and I’m grateful that I can balance both of them.”

Shielding – Katie

I know people are in much worse situations than me – all I’ve had to do is stay at home

“2020 was the year I didn’t leave my house for three months.

I’m on immunosuppressants because I had a kidney transplant in 2019, and when Covid-19 arrived in the UK I knew it would only be a matter of time before I was told I’d be in the ‘at risk’ category.

I knew it was for the best, but when I was first told I’d have to not leave my house for 12 weeks, my old life of commuting to London, working in an office, seeing friends and going out, started to feel like a dream.

I worried about my parents, both of whom have underlying health problems, and my father-in-law, who was about to undergo treatment for cancer. And I worried about what the virus would do to people’s lives.

But when I wasn’t worrying, or working, I realised I had more time to myself to check in on friends and family, and enjoy the peace and quiet of sitting in my garden. I used to spend four hours a day on trains, now I could spend it reading or cooking or watching films. I started to feel lucky.

It was really helpful that the service provided me with a large monitor, as much of my work involves editing and proofreading. Having regular catchups with my team, and joining in with network events and webinars helped me feel connected to colleagues and the service more widely.

I’ve got friends working on the NHS front line, and others whose livelihoods have disappeared because the industry they work in has gone. I know people are in much worse situations than me – all I’ve had to do is stay at home. But the support we’ve had has really helped.”

Covid-19 may have accelerated a shift in the way people work. We want to make sure we use it as an opportunity to create positive change.

Organisations across the world have been re-thinking their physical office space needs, and the role that the office will play in the future. And we’re no different. We’ll apply what we’ve learned from this experience, from smarter working, and from other organisations, to our future plans.

We’re also mindful that being able to bring people together in one place has benefits that are difficult to replace – particularly those related to social interaction, a feeling of belonging, wellbeing, knowledge sharing, and learning.

We’re continuing to explore potential options and models for future ways of working, that focus on our physical property, smarter working, and our digital capability.

External recognition:

• Best Diversity and Inclusion Strategy at the HR Excellence Awards
• Inclusive Culture Award, and Overall Winner (public sector) – Joint Winner, at the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion (enei) Awards
• Employee Network Group of the Year – Embrace network, at the Inclusive Companies Awards

In 2020, despite not being together physically, our staff networks have had more of an impact than ever – in the support they’ve provided to colleagues, each other and the wider community.

Our racial and cultural awareness network Embrace was honoured for the second year running with an award for its work, demonstrated in its communications and Let’s Talk About Race events, attended by hundreds of colleagues.

As the pandemic unfolded, our mental wellbeing network continued to provide opportunities for people to talk about how they were feeling – training more mental health first aiders, and delivering both mental health first aid and their regular drop-in sessions online.

We’ve seen more people attend networks’ events, which have all been run virtually. The year saw the launch of our neurodiversity group (to raise awareness of variation in the brain regarding sociability, learning, attention, mood and other mental functions), and disability event #purplelightup – our biggest event of the year, attended by almost 400 people.

Our Enable network held an event on shielding during lockdown, our LGBT+ network held a virtual Pride, our Muslim network gathered to discuss inclusivity at work, and our Jewish and Christian networks collaborated to raise awareness of Yom Kippur.

Our Giving Something Back committee organised ‘Ombudsrun’ races, ‘crafternoons’, and raised money for our charity partner Papyrus, for its work on suicide prevention among young people. It worked with our local volunteering partner, East London Business Alliance, providing toys for children at Christmas, donating to local foodbanks, and befriending isolated older people by phone and letter.

Blind spots, barriers and boldness: how we get to where we want to be

Ombudsman manager Reena Anand and ombudsman leader Constance Chinhengo are co-chairs of our racial and cultural awareness network, Embrace. Here, they talk to principal ombudsman, quality director and executive sponsor Richard Thompson.

Constance: In terms of racial awareness and equality, what do you think we’re currently doing well, and where could we be better?

Richard: Our day job is about fairness – treating everyone fairly, whatever their background. We’re a large organisation made up of different cultures, and fortunate to have that as a starting point. We’ve worked hard over the past year on talking about race, inequality and inclusion, and what all those things actually mean.

The sessions we ran last autumn for all managers across the service helped facilitate discussions in their teams, and external speakers came to talk to us about achieving equality in the workplace – it’s not enough to be ‘not racist’, it’s about re-thinking the systems we have in place and creating equal access to opportunity.

I wouldn’t say we, as an organisation, have nailed everything completely, but it definitely feels like we’re in a different place to where we were twelve months ago when it comes to understanding these things. Our perceptions have shifted quite fundamentally.

Constance: Do you get a sense that it’s one thing knowing that discrimination and racism is wrong, and another to understand the different levels at which it might operate? Are people beginning to understand that?

Richard: Over the last year, it’s been more in our consciousness than ever. In every decision we make or every meeting we’re in, we’ve been focused on ensuring we’re truly being inclusive and valuing diversity of both background and thought.

I’ve personally been reflecting on microaggressions. That drip-feed, which sends certain signals to some colleagues and different signals to others. “Micro” underplays the impact: it’s the daily lived reality that becomes the sum of people’s experience, and can make a profound difference to people’s thinking and the choices they make.

Reena: It seems like a lot of the things we want to happen will require some brave decisions and stepping out of our comfort zone. Are we prepared to try things we’ve never tried before?

Richard: When you’re in a sizeable organisation, it can be difficult to make changes quickly. But if anything’s come out of the last year, it’s how quickly we can respond to the unknown and adapt to new situations. If you’d asked pre-pandemic how long it’d take to transition the service to fully remote working, you’d have been given a long timetable. In the event, we shifted in a week, with many colleagues never having worked from home before!

That should make us feel bold about trying new things. So we’re currently looking to get more Black, Asian, and minority ethnic colleagues into senior management positions, working on talent management in underrepresented groups, and – recognising our responsibilities as an employer as well as a service – we’ve updated our unreasonable behaviour policy to make our people to feel more supported if they experience discrimination or unreasonable behaviour.

Constance: You’ve talked about how much better we want to be but do you think we’re focused on the right things? Do you think some of the things we have in play now will support how we get there?

Richard: I’m very aware that as a white middle-aged man there are likely to have been fewer barriers for me in my life and my career. If there’s one thing we could crack to make a difference, it’s ensuring that all colleagues, regardless of background or lived experience, feel like they have the same chances. Our HR team is focused on understanding what the data is telling us about progression, and what more we can do to make a real difference.

Ensuring talented people make careers here, whatever their background, is something we must focus on as we look ahead. Mass complaints about payment protection insurance (PPI), the issue that drove our widescale recruitment, and to a large extent made us a more diverse organisation, are now coming to an end. Even though we’re in a totally different place now to when PPI started, diversity remains front of mind as we plan for the future.

Constance: I was thinking about who I am mentoring at the moment, and how sponsorship and networking often help with progression. What are your reflections on that?

Richard: That’s an interesting point. At the moment, everyone is busy juggling both work and home life, and remote working makes sponsorship harder. I’ve been thinking about the longer-term impacts of lockdown – all our worlds have contracted and it’s now much more difficult to engage with people who aren’t in our established networks.

We’ve lost the unplanned opportunities and interactions you get from simply working in the same space. Many have come up with creative ideas and ways to replicate that as best we can, but we all have to work to find those opportunities. It raises important questions about the support we may need to give people at the moment. I’ve been lucky enough to benefit from having an advocate in a previous job, so I recognise what’s at stake. We need to think about how we balance the benefits of flexible working, and the benefits of contact.

Reena: We’ve often talked about the importance of our service reflecting the diversity of voices that come to us for help. It’s one thing to listen but it’s another thing to be heard – what does that mean for us as a service?

Richard: It’s a core skill for us to be able to listen, and really hear what our customers are telling us.

When we talk about race and diversity, the more we listen, the better we can empathise with others. I think most people start from the right instincts, they wouldn’t wish someone to be treated differently. The problem is our blind spots, the things we haven’t faced or even thought about, because we haven’t had to deal with those barriers ourselves. But by talking and listening, you improve your chance of being able to do something about it.

As an executive team, we have a responsibility to show that this is more than just words – it’s committing to understanding the issues, and driving the change that we want to see. It’s right that people hold us to account on this, and keep us focused on the job in hand.

16.1% for median pay (2019: 17.9%)

24.5% for mean pay (2019: 28.6%)

Few organisations currently publish their ethnicity pay gap. This year, we’ve chosen to do so, because our values and commitment to fairness mean we want to be transparent about how things stand, and what we’re doing to improve.

Over the last ten years, our organisation had to transform in size and structure due to the scale of the PPI mis-selling scandal. To meet this challenge, we drew on the wide and diverse pool of talented people who could access our base in East London, and from that point our service became increasingly ethnically diverse. 

Today, nearly four in ten of all our people are from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. This is much higher than many public and private organisations, and something that we’re proud of. Our diversity is one of our strengths. 

So we’re disappointed that our data indicates we have an ethnicity pay gap – a difference in average hourly pay for white people compared to those from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. Based on the same 5 April 2020 snapshot date as our gender pay analysis, our ethnicity pay gap was 16.1% for median pay and 24.5% for mean pay.

What is a pay gap?

A pay gap is not the same as equal pay, whether for gender or ethnicity. An organisation's pay gap reflects the profile of its workforce, and typically the difference between what various groups of people earn, irrespective of their role or seniority. Equal pay is the legal requirement for people to be paid the same for performing the same work.

We have relatively fewer people from a Black, Asian, and minority ethnic background in senior roles, and fewer who have been here a long time. We’ve done analysis of equal pay at grade level and are confident we don’t have an equal pay issue.

What’s creating the pay gap, and how are we closing it?

It’s likely that part of this disparity is rooted in the transformation of our service described above. Length of service tends to correspond with higher pay, and of those colleagues who have been with us the longest, a smaller proportion come from minority backgrounds. Part of today’s picture, then, reflects a past when we were a less diverse organisation. And as our mass PPI operations conclude, and our service changes again, we expect that this may also change our diversity.

But our early analysis suggests this doesn’t account for all of the gap. We don’t yet have the full picture, and have further work to do to explore the data, understand what it tells us about the causes of the gap, and to take targeted and meaningful action to close it. 

In the meantime, we have a number of interventions underway as part of our action plan. To help us do more, we are committed to:

• Better understanding the underlying factors that have a bearing on career progression and length of service.
• Better understanding the relationship between ethnicity and performance and appraisal ratings.
• Evaluating whether to have a specific target for more Black, Asian, and minority ethnic representation among our senior leaders.

We know that the results of the steps we’re taking, and plan to take, may take some time to show in our data. We’re committed to doing all we can, as soon as we can, to ensure everyone at our service has the same opportunities to flourish and succeed.

Our ethnicity pay gap – more detail   

(Pay data as at 5 April 2020. Data looks at the average hourly pay rates and actual bonuses paid for white people compared to colleagues from a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background. Data includes only those who have reported an ethnicity, including “Other”, and excludes anyone who reported ‘Prefer not to say’ or ‘Not stated’. ‘Ethnic makeup of the organisation’ data differs slightly from our diversity data in ‘the ‘our progress’ section as the data uses a different snapshot day to be comparable with data in previous years’ reports).

Median and mean – what’s the difference?

The median pay gap uses the range of hourly earnings (whether by ethnicity, or gender, in the case of our gender pay), and finds the midpoint. The mean pay gap percentage represents the difference between the mean hourly earnings of each ethnicity or gender. 

The median is usually felt to be a more representative measure of pay gaps, as it is less affected than the mean by very large or very small values.

The data we used for our ethnicity pay gap analysis and gender pay gap analysis was a snapshot of the organisation on 5 April 2020, which is the date required by law for the gender pay gap. 

Gender pay gap

6.2% for median pay (2019: 6.8%)

5.9% for mean pay (2019: 6.6%)

This year we’ve further reduced our median gender pay gap to 6.2%. We’re pleased with our progress but determined to continue to close the remaining gap.

(Data as at 5 April 2020)

Women in Finance charter

We’re committed to achieving gender balance at all levels of our service. We’ve set a target of having 50% female representation in our senior roles by December 2023, reflecting the gender balance of the UK as a whole. 

This table shows our gender balance in December 2020, compared with December 2019.

Through looking at our data, we know that although fewer women apply for senior roles, they tend to be more successful at interview. We’re examining how we attract more women to apply for these roles, and are encouraged by the increasing proportion of senior roles held by women.

We remain signatories to HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter, which over 350 organisations have signed to commit to improving gender diversity at senior levels of the financial services sector.

Here you can download our staff diversity data for 2020. It’s a snapshot of our staff as at 7 December 2020, covering gender, age, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and religion.

In the full data download, please note that our ombudsmen may be at manager, senior manager or executive level. People included in “our ombudsman panel” are also included in other relevant columns. “All our other roles” means people who aren’t at manager, senior manager, or executive level. Percentages greater than 0%, but less than 1% are rounded up to 1%. Other percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number.