Colleague diversity

The Group is committed to nurturing a diverse, inclusive workforce where colleagues with different perspectives work together for the benefit of our customers, the communities we operate in, our company and each other. Our goal is to for our leadership and wider workforce to be representative of colleagues from all backgrounds, disciplines and experiences. To achieve this, we work hard to hire colleagues from a diverse range of backgrounds and to support them to progress through our organisation. Through our #CountMeIn campaign, we monitor colleague diversity through voluntarily declared data on gender, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, social mobility, religion and family & caring responsibilities.

Through partnerships with external organisations focused on different elements of diversity, we continue to raise awareness and build understanding required to foster an inclusive culture. We’re proud that in our last engagement survey 83% of colleagues agreed that they could "be who they are" at Hastings and 95% said leaders treat them with dignity and respect.

Gender diversity

We acknowledge that we have more to do to improve gender balance within our senior leadership roles. We are signatories of the Women in Finance Charter supporting the progression of women into senior roles in the financial services sector by focusing on the executive pipeline and the mid-tier level. We are also signatories of the 30% Club participating in both their Mission Gender Equity and Mission Include cross company mentoring schemes. We met our commitment of having women in 30 percent of senior leadership positions by our 2021 target.

To sustain our progress and improve in the future, we have a long-term strategy (agreed with our board in Q1 2021) to give women the best environment to succeed. The three areas we are committing to taking action on include:

Supporting our female talent to progress through the organisation
Attracting the best senior leaders to join us
Opening up more opportunities for aspiring female leaders to join us through any of our early career initiatives.

Progress so far

In 2022, we promoted another female leader to our Executive Committee as Chief Customer and Operations Officer. Our commitment to developing talent from within is demonstrated by our healthy promotion rate of female colleagues into senior leadership roles – this has been above 40% consistently since Q2 2021.

We’ve re-established our partnership with Women in Data and now have three workstreams led by our talented female leaders to improve our talent pipeline. This includes working at grassroots level in schools to build interest and encourage participation in STEM subjects and offering summer internships for female university students in STEM subjects. We also provide support and learning material for existing colleagues looking to pivot into a career in data and building community by connecting existing female colleagues in data roles with each other to create a sense of belonging.

Each year we’re proud to support International Women’s Day and participated in the 2022 year’s theme to #BreakTheBias. As part of this, three of our female leaders who’re at different stages of their careers participated in a panel discussion on the topic of gender bias.

We also offer a range of flexible working options and generous maternity and parental leave policies, along with introducing a successful menopause support group raising awareness of this important topic and the impact it can have on women’s physical and emotional wellbeing.

Women in Finance Charter

When we signed up to the Charter in October 2019, we had 26.6% female representation.

As of 31 December 2023, we have 31% female representation in senior management. We have met our Charter target ahead of our deadline. In the coming year, we will work to sustain and improve on this target.

The Women in Finance Charter for 2024 can be viewed here.

Ethnic minority diversity

We’re committed to doing more to attract and support more ethnically diverse colleagues. We held listening sessions to understand colleague perception of what we’re doing well and what we could do better to support ethnic diversity inclusion. We shared our action plan with colleagues of actions we are taking. These include:

Focus on development and career progression – we expanded our participation in the 30% Club cross mentoring programme to include colleagues from an ethnic minority programme in their Mission Include programme.
Respect at work – we launched a new dignity at work policy stating our expectations around standards of colleague behaviour.
We provided a “Conversations about race toolkit” for teams to use in discussing this important topic.
We plan to voluntarily complete an Ethnicity Pay Gap report.
We’re including “inclusive leadership” as part of our people leadership fundamentals for all people managers.