This charter is a pledge for gender balance across financial services. It’s a commitment to work together, across our industry and with Government, to build a more balanced and fair financial services industry.
Organisations who sign the charter have made a clear commitment to improve diversity, to ensure that women are able to progress into senior levels, to set targets to support this work and to regularly report on their progress. On 23 June 2020, Leek Building Society became an official signatory to the charter committing us to:
At Leek Building Society, we’re committed to creating a diverse and balanced workforce because we know different people bring different ideas, skills and perspectives.
We’re better equipped to put our members first if we have a diverse workforce of talented people that’s representative of the communities we live and work in. We want everyone who works for us to feel engaged, valued and respected and to experience that their potential is not in any way limited by their background, gender, age, race, disability, religion or sexual identity.
When we signed up for the charter in July 2020, we had 40% female representation within senior management. Over the last four years we have challenged ourselves to continually improve our employee proposition, and our practices to become even more inclusive.
A few examples of this are:
We first met our target of 45% female representation in our senior management team in April 2023, and have continued to broadly maintain this across 2024.
Maintaining a target of 45% in a relatively small workforce is a challenging and ambitious target, well above that seen by many other building societies and signatories to the Women in Finance Charter.
Regardless of the target we set for ourselves, we are deeply committed to the pledge for gender equality, and value inclusion and diversity as being an integral part of our strategy for the future.
That strategy includes initiatives to support our progress around succession planning, recruitment and flexible working. In particular, over half of the individuals within our succession plans are female, and two thirds of the participants on the Aspiring Leaders 2023-24 programme were female.
We continue to ensure that our recruitment and selection processes are inclusive, and actively promote flexible working within our Society – something which many of our colleagues do. This has been enhanced through the offer of hybrid working for all of our non-branch employees. We also robustly support the physical and mental health and wellbeing of our staff – something that was recognised by the CIPD within their prestigious awards in 2023, and again in the Top 50 Inspiring Workplaces awards 2024.
We will continue to put the diversity of people, thought and outlook within our teams at the heart of our business strategy. We are proud of what we have achieved since joining the Charter and are committed to continuing our approach to supporting female progression and development, and improving diversity generally within financial services.
