OpinionNov 17 2021

It is fundamental to embed inclusiveness into organisational culture

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It is fundamental to embed inclusiveness into organisational culture
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I am not an obvious champion for diversity and inclusion. However, my journey to becoming chief executive of an investment and savings business with 150 staff tells its own story. 

I attended state schools. Neither my parents nor my grandparents had a university education. A combination of this, my own lack of maturity and some dismal A-level results meant I never went to university either. Instead, I started my career at age eighteen as an office junior with an insurance company called AXA Equity and Law in Southampton and worked my way up. 

The question I ask myself is this: would I have got where I am today if I had been black, female or living with a disability, or perhaps all three?

There are some great examples in our industry of women, people from minority backgrounds and people from a much humbler economic background than mine who are in senior roles in the investment and savings sector. Those people are few and far between though, and their road has been far more uncertain and arduous.

Importantly, an unknown – but certainly large – number of talented people have never even entered our industry, let alone fulfilled their potential in it, because of the roadblocks in their way. Those people have taken their talents elsewhere. 

The investment and savings sector has a problem with minority groups. As an industry, it is nowhere near representative of the population as a whole, and the figures speak for themselves. In London, where the majority of fund managers are based, 18.5 per cent of the population is Asian and 13.3 per cent is black. Yet, in the fund-management industry, 10 per cent of individuals identify as Asian and only 1 per cent identify as black. 

The proportion of female fund managers in the UK has hovered at around 10 per cent over the past four years, and just 4 per cent of money managed is overseen exclusively by women. The pay gap between men and women in fund management is actually the second largest of any sector in the UK, with only investment banking registering worse figures.

Other specific comparators are hard to establish because of a lack of granular data. Look around you (or around your screen in your next Zoom or Teams meeting) and check, for instance, how many of your colleagues have a visible disability. Across the economy, slightly more than half of disabled people were in employment (53.2 per cent) in 2019 compared with just over four out of five non-disabled people (81.8 per cent) and there is no reason to assume that the situation is any better in our own sector.

Despite the educational, demographic and cultural shifts across society that we have witnessed in recent years, it is still far more difficult to rise to the top in the financial services sector if you do not come from a narrow band of the population: white males from wealthy backgrounds, privately educated, with a degree from a select group of universities.

Apart from the inequality of opportunity and unfairness this represents, it means the sector is currently missing out on a huge talent pool, one that offers the life experiences and cognitive diversity that can tap more directly into the way other parts of the population live and think.

That diversity of thinking can help businesses design new products and services that better meet the needs and ambitions of their clients. It also allows the industry as a whole to meet challenges in a way less hidebound by the groupthink that (arguably) led to the worst excesses of the last financial crisis.

Where change needs to happen

In spite of some progress, there is still a long way to go for that awareness and support to translate into more people from diverse backgrounds entering and progressing in the sector. It is fundamental to embed inclusiveness into organisational culture if we want diversity and inclusion to be more than a window dressing. It is critical that this cultural change happens on many levels.

First, it has to come from the top: business leaders must create the framework in their organisation for an inclusive culture to thrive – including changing working practices that preclude certain groups and setting a personal example by openly welcoming and celebrating diversity.

It also has to be enabled and encouraged to happen at a grassroots level. That means empowering employees to take the ball and run with it, so inclusiveness becomes organic and takes on its own form: one that fits the organisation. Encouraging storytelling – getting people in the organisation to share their own experiences – is a key way of shaping that organic change. Storytelling not only gives everyone a voice but opens the door to empathy. Once everyone understands each other, they can make their own decisions about inclusivity, and that is a much more powerful tool than an edict from on high telling someone to be more inclusive.

The third level where change has to be driven is the industry itself: despite my efforts, I cannot get the cognitive diversity I want in my business because the diverse group of people with the relevant experience I would dearly like to hire do not currently exist. We, as businesses, have to come together and talk about how we are going to recruit these people into the industry, and then bring them on. 

Steve Butler is chief executive of Punter Southall Aspire and author of Inclusive Culture: Leading Change Across Organisations and Industries