Equality & diversity
The outlook is fair
We want everyone to feel welcome here. So we treat our people the same way we treat our 13 million customers – with fairness, openness and warmth. We’re determined to make sure every single employee thoroughly enjoys working at Nationwide and has equal opportunities to progress – whatever their background or personal circumstances.Our commitment to diversity goes all the way to the very top of the business. We serve a hugely diverse group of customers across the country, and we firmly believe our internal community should reflect that diversity. We know that having a diverse workforce makes commercial, social and ethical sense and we've seen how the best results come from encouraging a good mix of people to each bring something different to the job.
Here are some of the practical steps we're taking to make sure our values are cemented in action.
Parenting
Work/life balance
Race & religion
Gender
Sexual orientation
Disability
Age diversity
Ongoing training
Parenting
Juggling work and a family isn’t easy. To help with the demands, we support all parents who have to use crčche 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.
We’ve also increased maternity pay to ten weeks' full pay for eligible employees, and in 2003, we extended maternity leave to 52 weeks. 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.
We're proud of the fact that most of our new mums choose to return to work after maternity leave – on average more than two thirds of those who come back to Nationwide do so part-time.
Work/life balance
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 can offer you part-time, term-time, job share, annualised hours, flexi-time, home working and a compressed working week. It’s a selection that’s proving popular. Around 30% of our people work part-time, and many full-time employees also make use of our other options. We believe a happy team with balanced lives creates a `win-win' situation for everyone.
Race and religion
We really are nationwide. That means we represent every section of Britain's community – including people with differing personal and religious beliefs. Currently, over 9% 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’ recently awarded us Bronze status.
Gender
‘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 56% of our managers (more than double the financial services industry benchmark) and 27% 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.
Sexual Orientation
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 third-best financial 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.
Disability
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.
Age diversity
Our youngest branch manager has just turned 22. The eldest is over 60. Nearly 14% 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 Chief Executive was the first to sign up to the Break the Age Barrier Pledge and encouraged other businesses to follow suit.
Ongoing training
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.
