The first step of the process was to review our question set, which we benchmarked against the latest Government Census data (2021). As a result of the review, we added additional options and questions to ensure every colleague could fairly reflect themselves in the form.

We also took the opportunity to review our socio-economic questions as part of this review and used the Social Mobility Commission guidance to update our choices for: Occupation of your main household earner; which type of school did you attend and were you eligible for free school meals?

We created a project brief outlining what we wanted to do, how to do it, and who was needed from across our business to support the campaign. This included our Communications and Engagement teams, Design and Marketing Teams, HR, and Senior Leaders. A key stakeholder to consider was our Data Protection Officer (DPO). We knew that there has always been a nervousness for colleagues to share sensitive personal information. By working collaboratively with our DPO early, we were able to be clear on how the data would be captured and stored, how we would use the data, and exactly what questions we were asking. We used this to be open and transparent in our communications.

We ensured that the form was embedded into our HR system, creating a consistent approach to collection and a golden source of data and also created a step-by-step guide on how to access and complete the form within the HR system to support colleagues.

Our internal Design team helped create some unique branding for the campaign called ‘This Is Me’ which will now be consistently used for any future campaigns. Through Progress Together we were able to see examples of best practice – one idea we utilised was adding a charity incentive to the campaign. For every employee profile completed during the month of the campaign, we pledged to donate £1 to our Ardonagh Group charity partner which was Samaritans at the time.

Our campaign was adopted by the rest of the Ardonagh Group. At the time this saw 1,244 colleagues from across Ardonagh update their data and an increase of some form of data completion in Advisory to 55%. We are now looking at every aspect of our employee lifecycle to see where we can promote our DEI data. Our form is included in our onboarding process for every new colleague joining the business. We also have a DEI Mandatory Training module that includes the promotion of data completion, and our latest figures show that we now have 70% of colleagues who have completed some form of DEI data. Specifically for socio-economic background (SEB) data we are sitting at 47% completion.

We joined Progress Together in 2022 following feedback from our Colleague Community Groups, they were researching external networking groups to support our DEI Strategy and at the time we had yet to focus on socio-economic diversity.

To support our commitment to driving DEI within Ardonagh Advisory, we hired a dedicated DEI Manager in 2023. Working closely with Progress Together we have been able to unlock the opportunities to realign our DEI Strategy. The dedicated Member Toolkit has been a great source of inspiration for not just our approach to socio-economic diversity but our overall DEI Strategy. Our Strategy has been realigned into four key pillars: Talent Acquisition, Culture, Leadership, and Data. We have utilised the toolkit to prioritise best practices and focus our activities.

The Mentoring Circles sessions have been very useful in hearing what other businesses have been doing with social mobility and being able to network to understand what initiatives they have put in place to drive meaningful change. The face-to-face sessions in Swindon and London have proved very beneficial. A good example is another member sharing how they undertook their data campaign; they focused on individual business areas instead of going out to all colleagues in one go. This saw much better engagement in those business areas and encouraged Senior Leaders to sponsor and share stories on their SEB. This is an idea we will be taking forward this year to drive engagement and higher data completion.

By being a member of Progress Together we have been able to learn more from others leading in this space and how we can accelerate our socio-economic diversity actions. Understanding socio-economic diversity is the ‘golden thread’ to driving positive change for other diversity characteristics and will be key for us going forward.

Progress Together has helped us understand the steps we need to take to make progress on this agenda, through regular calls, webinars and events. We started by collecting data in August 2022 via a standalone survey. We were guided by Progress Together on the question to use (we focus on parental occupation aged 14). We launched a campaign of all-staff communications in the months leading up to the survey, letting people know we were going to be sending out the survey and why. Progress Together were helpful in providing details for a short information sheet on why this is important and why this question.

Our Executive sponsor for social mobility, Paul Fulcher, Group Capital Management & Investment Executive, shared his own story of his socio-economic background and all of our Executive Committee shared their responses to the question – the actual occupation of their parent and then how this mapped to the different categories.  Sharing the response in this way really helped to engage our staff in the topic and providing their own data. We had a 78% response rate to the survey which we were delighted with.

We analysed our data and used this to guide our next steps – recognising that our issues were more at the graduate level and in particular in entry into professional areas (e.g. our actuarial teams). Our graduate recruitment process was adjusted to focus on a more diverse range of universities, to not focus on experience from unpaid internships, and we widened the criteria to a 2:2 rather than a 2:1.

We also submitted our data to the Bridge Group study and analysed our pay gap, which we will continue to do in the future.

We are working with Progress Together on our actions for the coming year and we plan to continue to build our Just Mobile Network of supportive peers, consider our graduate recruitment process further, collect data from our applicants so we can understand if we need to take action and continue to work on supporting our people from lower socio-economic backgrounds to progress their careers at Just.

We would recommend working with Progress Together to any organisation wishing to start or progress their journey towards greater social mobility. The team are knowledgeable, supportive, passionate and at the forefront of campaigning on this issue and we’ve been delighted with our experience of working with them.

From our recent colleague survey, we know we have a good level of socio-economic diversity compared to the broader financial services sector but, in line with other firms, diversity does decline with seniority.  To ensure we continue to support our own colleagues, we recently launched a Social Mobility community (BOOST) to explore how we support the progression and retention of colleagues from the different socio-economic backgrounds. We’ve seen great engagement already with a growing number of colleagues signing up to join the BOOST community, demonstrating significant engagement on the agenda and a real need for more to be done in the social mobility space internally.

Through our membership with Progress Together, we can leverage the support, insight and best practice form our peers across financial services to help us build a truly diverse, equitable and inclusive business supporting colleagues, customers, and communities from all socio-economic backgrounds.

Getting this right is at the heart of our purpose of helping Britain prosper – after all, a more inclusive society is a more prosperous society, and a diverse business is a better business.

At SJP, we are committed to building an inclusive environment that enables everyone to thrive- from how we attract, retain, and develop talented people who are growing their career or business with us, to meeting the unique financial planning needs of our clients. Achieving this requires us to have a deep understanding of the barriers faced by historically underrepresented groups and a clear picture of our community and where we may be missing diverse perspectives.

In 2021 we launched our voluntary diversity data survey. Since then, we are pleased that over 74% of our core employee base have shared their data with us. Over the past three years we have run campaigns to highlight the importance of sharing this data and the actions we have been able to take off the back of it, this includes a specific campaign on socio-economic data.

As part of our approach to socio-economic diversity, we are focused on supporting young talent entering the financial services industry. Action we are taking includes:

• Setting up an online platform to encourage the next wave of financial advisers. It is a resource-packed site for students and careers advisers to learn about becoming a financial adviser, featuring careers advice, free tools from training providers, and more. Our goal is to reach at least 5,000 students in the first year, supported by webinars and promotional activities.
• Our Financial Advisor Academy running a Virtual Work Experience programme in August 2023, reaching over 321 students. We are excited to do it again in July 2024 with an aim of engaging with 500 students. To complement this, around 30 students joined us in our Knightsbridge office in London for a week of in-person Work Experience, working on a variety of projects from research to generating marketing materials.
• Hosting 3 students from lower socio-economic backgrounds in London during April 2024 for three days of work experience followed by six to twelve months of mentoring. This experience will also connect them with our Early Careers team and signpost them to further opportunities within SJP, such as internships. We also have volunteer mentors from across the business and Partnership who are engaged in mentoring work through social mobility charity Envision.

Whilst we know we are at the start of our journey with this, and there is more work to be done, we are pleased with the progress made to date. Our focus remains on increasing our voluntary diversity data responses from employees, and using the insights from this to take meaningful action and are looking forward to continuing our relationship with Progress Together to support this work.

Progress Together places a lot of focus and importance on data and this aligns with the work that we are doing at Skipton Building Society. Our approach on D&I is data driven and evidenced based. This is crucial in helping us make decisions regarding initiatives that will make a difference to colleagues at the Society. We are looking forward to using the many services provided by Progress Together including the Firm-To-Firm Mentoring Programme as a mentor and mentee. When submitting data for the annual benchmarking report, we had some initial concerns about sharing data as like most financial institutions we have a lot of internal processes to protect sensitive data. The Progress Together team was extremely cooperative, knowledgeable, and professional in supporting us to ensure we had the confidence to share our data.

We are extremely proud of the progress we have made with data collection from our colleagues. In a few months of collecting data on social mobility we have achieved over 60% declaration rates. We also have an employee resource group (The Social Mobility Taskforce), comprised of four subgroups working on outreach, recruitment, retention and data. The group is chaired and sponsored by a member of the Executive Board. We used our Progress Together membership and hosted an online seminar on social mobility and career progression. It was an inspiring and insightful session as colleagues heard from Richard Rowntree (Progress Together – Board member) and our Executive sponsor on the importance of data, measuring progress and the impact of social mobility on their career journeys.

If you want to accelerate progress in social mobility, which in turn will have an impact across all diversity characteristics, then the support and focus provided by Progress Together will help you shift the dial faster, benefitting colleagues from all backgrounds and the financial sector.

With so many competing priorities, and the current financial climate, it is important to have the support of an organisation that keeps you accountable on progress – what gets measured gets done!

Regular networking with other companies introduced by Progress Together has been invaluable. Gaining insights of what works well and any potential obstacles from others in conjunction with using the Tool Kit has allowed us to build some tangible plans with effective results.

While having a socially economic diverse Executive Team, additional sponsorship from our UK Chief Underwriting Officer and Chief of Staff who really understand the importance of Social Mobility has brought the topic to life using their own personal stories.

Furthermore, education and communication have been key to our significant rise in declaration rates to 68% in February 2024. Social Mobility is high on our agenda it was the topic of discussion at a dedicated senior leaders’ session recently, enabling them to talk to various business areas more confidently. This was followed by a talk from the sponsors in an UK All Employee call and as a result, we have seen employees volunteer to become social mobility ambassadors.

This year, we have submitted our first data set to Bridge Group. Following the report later this year we will build more detailed action plans for 2025. This includes building on actions already undertaken such as removing all non-essential qualifications from job adverts (and associated candidate screening) and removing any insurance related scenarios from our Early in Career recruitment assessments (graduate and apprenticeships); both of which are aligned to Progress Together and Bridge Group best practice.

The Progress Together cross company mentoring scheme is of appeal this year, learning from other companies and talking through ideas and challenges is beneficial.

Since the collection of declarations, we now have a better view of our employee make up which in conjunction with the Bridge group data will allow targeted actions to enhance our diversity of thought.

Internally we are aiming for a 75% declaration rate this year and we are well on our way to achieve this.