Equality & Diversity

Juggling work and a family isn’t easy. To help with the demands, we support all parents who have to use crèche facilities, regardless of location, by offering discounted childcare vouchers as part of our benefits package. We even have a specific intranet site for first-time parents, families who are relocating and parents with children who are growing up.

The first ten weeks of maternity leave are paid as full pay for eligible employees. All maternity benefits apply to those adopting and fostering long-term as well as natural parents. What’s more, we’ve extended paternity leave to two weeks at full pay.

In addition we pay a £200 return to work bonus to eligible employees. We're proud of the fact that most of our new mums choose to return to work after maternity leave.

We know there's more to life than work so we’ve developed flexible working patterns to suit our business and our people. Depending on circumstances, we may be able to offer you part-time, term-time, job share, annualised hours, flexi-time, home working and a compressed working week. Around 30% of our people work part-time, and many full-time employees also make use of our other options.

We really are nationwide. That means we represent every section of Britain's community – including people with differing personal and religious beliefs. Currently, over 7.5% of our employees are from an ethnic background, compared to an industry benchmark of just over 7%. And over 8% of those on our Nationwide Management Development Programme are from ethnic minority backgrounds. Thanks to our continual efforts to improve our figures, ‘Race for Opportunity’ awarded us Silver status for our 2009 submission; remained in the Top 10 for the Private Sector and were ranked second place alongside other entries from financial organisations.

‘Opportunity Now’ awarded us Platinum status for the second year running for our focused activity in promoting gender equality. Currently, women make up over 70% of our workforce, over 63% of our managers (more than double the financial services industry benchmark) and 28% of our senior managers. We also firmly support the work of the Equal Opportunities Commission on closing the pay gap between men and women. Our annual Equal Pay Audits make sure our drive for equality is backed up by what we pay. Much better than the national and industry norm, our results also outshone those of our competitors. What’s more, all our core policies are free from gender bias.

We want all our people to feel supported at work so we’ve joined Stonewall, the leading national lesbian, gay and bisexual organisation, as a Diversity Champion. In fact, we’ve been named fifth-best financial retail services provider in Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index of the UK’s top 100 employers of lesbians and gays. All our terms and conditions have been closely examined to make sure they embrace same sex partners – and our Pension Scheme was one of the first to issue pension entitlement to same sex partners.

Our ‘Positive About Disabled People’ two ticks symbol underlines the fact that disability is no barrier to success here. We offer members and employees with disabilities the same level of service and opportunity as non-disabled members and employees. We have a dedicated team that focuses on meeting the needs of disabled employees and members – whether that's through better access or the right equipment, updated policies and procedures, alternative formats for literature, education and training, or awareness raising.

Our youngest branch manager is 19, the eldest is 62. Over 12% of our workforce is aged 50 or over. So you can see we’re very open-minded about age diversity. We recognise the experience and qualities age can bring to our business, which is why we introduced flexible retirement up to age 75 and are a founder member of the Employers Forum on Age. It's also why, in 2003, our former Chief Executive was the first to sign up to the Break the Age Barrier Pledge and encouraged other businesses to follow suit.

We’re continually promoting diversity awareness in our workplace. As part of that, we rolled out a diversity training video, ‘Valuing Everyone’. As well as receiving a great deal of positive feedback from employees, it won three gold awards from the International Visual Communication Association for its creative and inclusive approach.