The guidance that Progress Together have 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 Leader 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.

TSB’s leadership behaviours reinforce a culture of respect and accountability through personal action and integrity. Empowering TSB’s leaders to role-model inclusive behaviours and challenge those who don’t.

In 2023, TSB launched the Social Mobility inclusion network, a group of colleagues who advocate for and support those from lower socio-economic backgrounds to achieve their full potential. Progress Together’s CEO joined our CEO and network for Social Mobility Awareness week in the same year as part of a panel and led a fantastic conversation with leaders opening this topic. Since then, the network has continued to highlight role models and use storytelling to promote awareness of social mobility, the challenges colleagues have experienced, and how to overcome them. The network has received support and endorsement from senior leadership, including the Chief Operating Officer, who is the Executive sponsor of the network and a Non-Executive Directors, who shared their personal social mobility story, to engage senior leaders in an interactive discussion on the topic.

The network has three main goals for 2024 supporting TSB’s strategic aims in relation to socio-economic diversity and mobility: Educate, Engage, and Empower

1. Educate: Increasing understanding of social mobility within TSB, highlighting why it’s important, using events like Social Mobility Awareness Day and senior role models in the bank to inform colleagues.
2. Engage: supporting TSBs volunteering initiatives to deliver school workshops, to educate children from lower socio-economic backgrounds and improve their money confidence.
3. Empower: mobilising colleague listening circles, to amplify the voices of those from lower socio-economic backgrounds and allowing them to share their experiences and insights.

TSB is proud to play its part in making a positive difference in the financial services sector and beyond and is grateful to Progress Together for this opportunity. TSB would recommend other organisations to join Progress Together, as it is a valuable network that helps to move the sector forward in a meaningful and impactful way.

A 2020 report commissioned by the City of London revealed that the Financial Services sector was a particularly challenging place for people from lower socio-economic backgrounds to advance their careers.  We joined Progress Together because of their commitment to socio-economic diversity and mobility in the financial services sector.

Access to peer learning opportunities to enhance our social mobility strategy and actions has been invaluable. This has allowed us to compare ourselves with our peers and take specific steps to enhance initiatives like our diversity data disclosure.

Insights from Progress Together helped to inform our decision to change our original Social Mobility data questions to better align to industry norms. And this year, we’ve seen a 400% increase in colleague response rate to those new questions with almost 70% disclosure across our business. This has been a success due to the partnership between our networks, our HR team and focus and drive from our senior leaders.

Our main goal for 2024 remains to better understand our people and build a targeted strategy to address any socio-economic barriers within TSB. We will use the report and analysis from Progress Together to support any improvements.

Progress Together have created an environment where we can evaluate and benchmark our progress against other firms in the sector and share our achievements and challenges with them. TSB are proud to contribute to making a positive difference in the financial services sector and beyond.

Progress Together have played an important role in challenging FCA proposals and the importance placed on Social Mobility within that review. As an organisation they’ve created a practical and useful resource centre, hosting conversations that are commercial and timely.

A more strategic focus on diversity and inclusion within our people strategy and the establishment of our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Network have enhanced our culture and supported our strong company values. We’ve seen evidence of increased psychological safety for our people – sharing stories, speaking up and being more open – with our 2023 employee engagement survey showing that 90% of employees feel they can be their whole selves at work, and supporting our Platinum Investors in People accreditation.

We saw Progress Together as a unique opportunity to work with sector peers to help remove barriers and support talented people to progress, regardless of their background. We knew we don’t have all the answers, and this would enable us to learn a huge amount and help shape change in the industry.

The ability to share knowledge, learning from others, and networking within our industry have been instrumental in helping us make good progress to date. Our membership is also raising the profile of this subject across the Group, from our Executive Committee and Board through our workforce, prompting discussion, debate and action. Social economic background has now been identified and approved by our Board as one of three strategic priorities from a diversity perspective, where we are setting targets, benchmarking externally and measuring progress.

During 2023, we launched Ignite, a new programme, focused on supporting the development and career progression of individuals in under-represented groups. The way we approach early careers is also changing and we are working with a more diverse selection of schools and colleges to help encourage greater levels of socio-economic diversity coming into financial services at younger ages, helping to level the playing field for all in the sector.

One of our biggest successes so far is our data collection campaign resulting in 76% of our people completing their diversity profiles, including data around gender identity, race and ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, religion and socio-economic background. This helps us understand our workforce, measure the progress we’re making and identify where change is needed. Building on this remains a priority going forward.

For those at the start of the journey or already well on the road, we all need to learn from successes and challenges to help attract and retain the best talent to support our industry in the future. It is an area where we need to work together; sharing and collaborating to help move forward, making a difference today but also for the generations to come.

The 5 point pathway has been helpful in ensuring we centre out efforts on the key elements that will further progression, typically we’ve been more focussed on attracting and recruiting diverse talent, but in actual fact we have reasonable levels of SE diversity as an organisation overall, our issue lies with progression through each of the grades.

Recognising this, we are keen to learn and leverage from Progress Together and other partner organisations on the interventions we, and they, are putting in place to ensure we close the progression gap.

Social Mobility Day 2023 was the first time we’d hosted a one-bank event on this topic. Sophie Hulm CEO, joined our Executive Sponsor to talk about the business case for SE diversity and the barriers faced by those from lower income backgrounds. This event saw great reach and took the conversation to a new audience.

Too early to call out any specific outcomes, but our focus on gathering quality data and insights on socio-economic diversity has helped us to gain senior leader buy-in and as an organisation which has a really significant focus on data it helps us to build the business case for socio-economic inclusion.

• Continue to build out our one-bank data set
• Complete further Gap analysis of external research to add to our plan
• Raise greater organisational awareness and fluency on the topic of socio-economic diversity
• Leverage the expertise of our working group
• Better establish the business case for socio-economic diversity and define what a target might look like