Fiona Cannon of Lloyds Banking Group explains the journey to its first ethnicity pay gap report

To understand more about the bank’s approach to collecting this data and how it intends to close its ethnicity pay gap, REBA carried out a short Q&A with Fiona Cannon, group sustainable business director at Lloyds Banking Group.

Q. One of the challenges employers often have is sourcing ethnicity data – often they don’t know the ethnic make-up of their workforce. So, how did you initially go about collecting ‘disclosed’ data?   

A. Ethnicity data is really important – it allows us to understand the make-up of our workforce and what’s happening at each stage of the employment relationship. We’ve been collecting ethnicity data for more than 15 years and increased our focus on this in preparation for introducing ethnicity goals in 2018. 

The categories we use mirror the Office for National Statistics, so we can track against the external labour force. Clearly communicating why data is being collected and how it will be used is key to building trust and engagement. We use practical examples to bring to life how sharing data will enable us to support our colleagues more effectively.

Q. Your ethnicity disclosure rate is 83% – what else are you doing to encourage more colleagues to disclose their ethnicity?  

A. Every year, we run a data disclosure campaign and we also make sure that data capture is part of our recruitment and onboarding process. 

Since we introduced our ethnicity goals in 2018, data disclosure has increased by 5% to 83% currently. While we are pleased that a growing proportion of our workforce are happy to share their ethnicity data, it’s important that all colleagues feel comfortable to share their data and bring their whole selves to work, so we will continue to work hard on improving this further.

Q. Your data reveals that under-representation of minority groups at senior levels is the cause of your pay gap. What processes have you put in place to better support progression/recruitment in senior roles?

A. We have roughly 40 Black colleagues in senior management roles out of a senior management population of roughly 7,000 colleagues. To help address this, our new public goal, complementing our broader 2018 Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic goal, will help us to specifically increase Black representation in senior roles from 0.6% at senior grades to at least 3% by 2025, to align with the overall UK labour market.

Over the last few months we’ve been working closely with new recruitment partners to help us reach Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic talent, and have upskilled our recruiters, hiring managers and third-party suppliers to ensure they understand our expectations and have the tools to hire inclusively.

But recruitment is only one element of this. We’ve also refreshed how we track what happens during each stage of the employment relationship to ensure we can identify challenges and opportunities smartly and act on these accordingly. This includes reviewing our people policies and processes to identify any risks of potential bias and increase inclusion.

We also need to nurture and develop the talented colleagues we already have working at Lloyds Banking Group to create a pipeline of future leadership and future role models. So far, we’ve launched a new Talent Identification Programme for our Black senior managers and have converted our existing Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Career Development and Authentic Leadership programmes to a virtual offering during 2020, to ensure focus continues on supporting talented colleagues to progress during the pandemic. It’s a good start but we’ve still a way to go.

Q. How pivotal has your race education programme been? How has this helped?

A. It’s key part of our work on culture. So far, our Race Education Programme has reached over 4,000 senior managers since the launch of the Race Action Plan in July. Following this, 350 staff from people-facing teams such as HR have benefited from bespoke training – another 500 are scheduled to attend early this year. Our Specialist Teams training has been designed according to organisational needs. It’s founded in the deepening of awareness around race, ethnicity, religion and culture. As one attendee reported afterwards, ‘I am just glad that it's woken me up to what some people face. Now I know what I can do to help, starting with educating myself more on this subject and being more aware of what's going on around me’.

In addition to helping specialist staff spot and act on racism – whether micro-aggressive, overt or structural – it’s helping our people to overcome fears around ‘saying the wrong thing’. Our programme continues to gather momentum with the launch of line manager training in the spring. It will offer a deep dive into the development of skills, empathy and ability, all key to recognising and taking action to eliminate bias.

More on ethnicity pay gap reporting

You can read the Lloyds Banking Group’s ethnicity pay gap report here. It includes information about how it calculated its gap, breakdowns of its findings according to different minority groups, and further details about how it intends to improve its ethnicity pay gap.

The government consulted on whether to introduce mandatory ethnic pay gap reporting – similar to that seen for the gender pay gap – in October 2018. The government is still analysing the feedback.