We joined Progress Together to support our aim of creating a truly inclusive environment where individuals from all socio-economic backgrounds can achieve their full potential. Our membership also underscores our commitment to provide equitable opportunities to all colleagues and raise the profile of this issue to help drive the pace of change across the industry.

Spearheaded by our Group Management Team sponsor, Tracey McDermott (Group Head, Conduct, Financial Crime, and Compliance), the partnership has enabled us to share and learn from peers regarding best practices to apply to our approach:

• AWARENESS: Hosting leadership-led dialogues and listening sessions with colleagues to understand lived experiences across our global footprint (with this video being one such example).
• COMMUNITY IMPACT: Providing an apprenticeship programme in the UK to attract outstanding early talent, re-define ‘potential’ and promote social mobility. There are currently 23 apprentices on the programme across three different cohorts in the UK. We are also promoting greater economic inclusion through Futuremakers by Standard Chartered (which we established in 2019), enabling opportunities for disadvantaged young people in low-income communities through education, employability and entrepreneurship. From 2019 to 2023, Futuremakers*** has reached over 2.1 million young people including 68% girls and young women through community programmes focused on education, employability, and entrepreneurship.
• DATA COLLECTION: Leveraging Progress Together’s expertise to tangibly measure and capture colleague socio-economic data for the first time. As a result, 36% of our UK workforce have shared details of their background and we look forward to improving response rates as part of our wider self-identification programme.

In 2024, we will continue building awareness and engagement on the topic and widen our talent pipeline through internships and improvements to our apprenticeship programmes. We are also expanding our data collection to include the US to inform local targeted actions based upon the biggest areas of opportunity in both the US and UK. In the long term, we will gather data insights globally to develop a Bank-wide plan. Through our partnership with Progress Together we have seen first-hand the immense opportunities presented by being part of a collective effort to drive socio-economic diversity at leadership levels. Leaders have a valuable avenue to meet like-minded individuals and drive the pace of change across the industry together.

* Social Mobility Progression Report : Mind the Gap, KPMG 2022, KPMG Social Mobility Progression Report 2022 (assets.kpmg)

** OECD. (2018). Intergenerational Mobility. Retrieved from https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/2a346607-en.pdf

*** Foreword – Futuremakers impact report (turtl.co)

As part of the membership, Barclays participated in an anonymous colleague data exercise which benchmarked participating firms against industry peers. The report provided a clear understanding of where we, as Barclays, are in terms of socio-economic representation, where we should aim to get to and potential recommendations to adopt along the way. We have shared these recommendations with our HR teams, socio-economic Employee Resource Group Inspire and other key leaders and influencers across the organisation. This has helped maintain our focus on socio-economic inclusion and the importance of targeted interventions to support attraction, progression and retention of diverse socio-economic backgrounds. You can find out more about our strategy here.

Tristram Roberts, Group HR Director and Group Executive Sponsor for the Socio-economic agenda stated “I am delighted that we have embarked on the partnership with Progress Together to underscore our commitment to socio-economic inclusion. As a member of Progress Together, we are proud to have contributed to the largest socio-economic background dataset in Financial Services, relating to 149,111 employees.”

In 2021, Fidelity launched its social mobility network that is now proudly established globally. The network is responsible for raising visibility on social mobility through events, training and outreach. The network is supported by Senior Co-Executive Sponsors, who provide leadership and accountability, and sit on the Diversity & Inclusion Committee.

Stuart Warner, Social Mobility Co-Executive Sponsor:

“Our social background, defined by schooling, household income and parental occupation, continues to shape our experience into our own professional lives.
Challenging institutional “norms” and building teams where team strength comes from differences, not similarities, is critical for business success and to build an inclusive culture.”

Recent highlights include involvement with: Progress Togethers’ Founding Partners Advisory Group; supporting mentoring programmes for students of Birkbeck University and UpReach; and attending Bright Network Breaking Barriers to attract a more diverse range of candidates. We have also supported over 30 students from lower SEBs on our Fidelity Future Forward Scholarship Programme across China, India, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, paying over $260,000 in financial aid to support Scholars to continue to access Higher Education, as well as hosting exclusive business insight sessions and providing mentorship. These activities have led to 21.3% of our Early Careers offers accepted by those from a lower SEB.

Understanding our people better is an essential step in building a more inclusive organisation. Introducing social mobility questions as part of our diversity data collection process has resulted in a 35% global disclosure rate. Having voluntary demographic questions in our annual engagement surveys also help address differences in employee sentiment. We could identify that 86% of employees from a lower SEB said they could be themselves at Fidelity in our last survey. This anonymised data permits us to create actionable, data-driven future targets.

We are proud to have been recognised by the FT Advisor’s Championing Social Mobility Award and Social Mobility Foundation’s Top 75 Employers Index. Our current priority supported by our 2024-2027 strategy, is to increase data collection so that we can measure progress and set targets. We are committed to making Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion everyone’s responsibility and to truly integrate this into the business, including our people structures, processes, and policies. We remain dedicated to having a diverse talent pipeline so that we are representative of the communities we operate in and the clients we serve.

Our partnership with Progress Together has been instrumental to our growth in this area: we’ve received insights into new research to help us identify strengths and opportunities; we have shared best practice amongst the industry; and continue to move the dial to strengthen social mobility across the Financial Services sector.

Progress Together has ensured best practice is shared amongst members; this has greatly benefited our efforts to champion progression of those from a lower socio-economic background.

Our Social Mobility workstream raises awareness of the importance of socio-economic diversity and we are proud to have signed the Social Mobility Pledge and to feature on the Social Mobility Employer Index. One of our internal initiatives has highlighted senior role models from lower socio-economic backgrounds during a Social Mobility Awareness Day roundtable.

As a Progress Together founding member, we have contributed to Bridge Group research on socio-economic background impacts in finance.

Many of our clients ask about our DE&I work during their due diligence and social mobility is a particular area of interest. We believe that our Drive programme is a commercial differentiator for Man Group and encouraging diversity in all forms is vital if we are to attract and retain the best minds to work for us and our clients.

Progress Together is a truly collaborative organisation. It has followed its purpose, as originally set out, to share best practices for tackling the socio-economic diversity challenge at senior levels. It engages subject matter experts, who facilitate workshops and produce toolkits that help drive impactful change.

The guidance that Progress Together has provided has been hugely beneficial to our social mobility work.  The mentoring circles, the portal and the opportunity to work alongside other organisations have all added value to our work.

We’re proud of the increased overall focus in the area of Social Mobility across the organisation.  This has been driven by:

EDUCATION SESSIONS – this has included Senior Leaders sharing their personal stories of social mobility, spotlight articles on social mobility activity and colleague stories.  Within our ‘Meet the Leaders’ sessions we have interviewed our CEO, Andy Briggs, our CFO and Social Mobility sponsor, Rakesh Thakrar, the CEO of Progress Together, Sophie Hulm and the CEO of The Social Mobility Foundation, Sarah Atkinson.

THE INTRODUCTION OF SOCIAL MOBILITY CHAMPIONS – this is a group of over 40 Champions who meet monthly.   We work with the Champions to amplify the key messages from the social mobility strategy, the activities that drive the strategy and to highlight any barriers to social mobility.

VOLUNTEER ACTIVITIES – colleagues have been utilising their 3 annual volunteer days to support social mobility, this has included mentoring and coaching activities.

DATA COLLECTION – we have made improvements to how we collect social mobility data, linking this to our HR system to enabling more in-depth analysis.

Benefits from this work include the fact that 60% of people applying for roles at Phoenix have answered the social mobility questions, we are on track to analyse our social mobility data by our half year point, enabling a clearer view of the diversity of our organisation.  One of our main goals for this year is to continue to raise awareness across the business, to increase completion rates enabling analysis of the data and the production of a Class Pay gap report.

In the 3 years since the first application to the Social Mobility Index, Phoenix Group have moved from position 41 to position 14 in 2023, providing a benchmark of our progress in this area and identifying areas that we still need to focus on.

Within twelve months, just under 50% of all our colleagues have shared their socioeconomic background with us. It was a proud moment for us to feature in Progress Together’s first annual data report in 2023, particularly as we were the company with the highest percentage of colleagues from working-class backgrounds and lowest percentage of colleagues from high socioeconomic backgrounds. Our Q1 2024 Pulse survey also showed that there is no difference in colleague engagement levels on the basis of socioeconomic background.

One of our 10 Society diversity and inclusion priorities this year is to ‘become a thought leading employer for social mobility’. We are one of 5 pilot firms participating in the Accelerated Progress Programme and are entering the Social Mobility Index for the first time to identify areas for improvement in our work on social mobility. We’ve also set up our Social Mobility colleague network and are excited to see them go from strength to strength in 2024.

It’s been a pleasure working with Progress Together so far. We’ve particularly found the in-person events enjoyable, and a great way to network with other member firms and access leading best practice and research.