Inclusion and wellbeing

Our commitment to inclusion and wellbeing

Our purpose as a firm is ‘Investing for the long term. Our futures depend on it’. This helps shape how we think, how we act, and how we create lasting impact for our clients, customers, shareholders and society.

We’re committed to running our business in a responsible way and this in turn influences our Inclusion and Wellbeing (I&W) strategy, which is about fostering a dynamic, multi-faceted and thriving workforce. Bringing together colleagues from different lived experience and with different ways of thinking enables us to build an inclusive culture, strengthen our teams, and enrich our insights into client needs and investment strategies.

Our approach

Our approach to I&W is broad and multidimensional and inspired by the desire to drive change. We have clear goals to:

• Acknowledge, value and support difference in representation, including from an intersectional lens, and cultivate diversity of thought.
• Address any inconsistencies in our existing practices and help reshape talent processes, benefits, and policies to ensure, fair, transparent, and equitable.
• Prioritise the wellbeing of our employees, so they have access to the support they may require at different life stages and moments.
• Drive personal transformation in leaders and employees, enabling them to recognise and mitigate bias, to identify, model, and advance inclusive behaviours that promote wellbeing and facilitate business outcomes.

These goals are centred around four key principles that help identify and prioritise our initiatives:

Talent: Advancing inclusive and equitable policies and practices to attract, develop, and retain a diverse pipeline of talent.

Culture: Cultivating and promoting an inclusive company culture where all employees feel heard, respected, and valued and their wellbeing is supported.

Measuring and reporting on our progress to drive better results and improve transparency and accountability.

Community: Promoting inclusion and wellbeing beyond our business, in the wider industry, with our customers and clients, and in the communities in which we operate

Our measurement

We are proud to be signatories of the Women in Finance Charter, a government backed initiative designed to improve gender diversity in senior management across the financial services sector. We are committed to a long-term goal of gender parity across our workforce, and to increase the representation of women on the board and in senior leadership. We are also committed to the FTSE Women Leaders Review, the Parker Review and the FCA Listing Rules.

To recognise our commitments, and to measure progress in relation to the diverse representation of our people, we currently have goals in place in relation to gender and ethnicity, and hope as disclosure rates increase that we can better monitor representation of other diversity dimensions. In the UK, we also report on gender and ethnicity pay gap.

Find out more in our Social impact report

I&W Council

The Group Inclusion & Wellbeing Council is chaired by a member of the GMC, who is also the Executive Sponsor for Inclusion & Wellbeing. The objective of the Council is to promote I&W in the workplace through helping define, communicate and oversee I&W initiatives across the Group, and by facilitating greater synergy across divisions and locations.

Partnerships

We work with external bodies to help us develop our understanding of issues connected to diversity and inclusion. We have established partnerships with the following bodies: