Employee care

We are a business based on building deep and lasting relationships with our customers through the efforts of our people. As a relationship-led business, our people are our most valuable resource. We are creating an organisation that attracts, retains and develops the best talent and one that embraces diversity too. We want to be recognised as a great place to work.

Colleague engagement

Our approach is centred on driving colleague engagement. Engaged employees are more motivated to understand customer needs and deliver good customer service. This is one of the ways in which we will rebuild trust in our industry.

We measure colleague engagement on a regular basis throughout our organisation via our colleague engagement survey. In 2010, we achieved a record response rate of 83 per cent of employees across the Group. We also recorded our highest ever employee engagement score. The score increased from 74 points in the first quarter of 2010 to 80 points in the last quarter of 2010. This score is 9 points above the UK National norm, 7 points above the UK Financial Services norm, and 3 points above the High Performance norm.

Union membership

We have agreements with four trade unions – Accord, GMB, LTU and Unite – who collectively negotiate and consult on behalf of most colleagues in the Group. Around 95% of our employees are based in the UK, where they are free to be a member of the trade union of their choice. It is our policy to support employees’ rights to exercise freedom of association and the Group have extensive collective bargaining processes in place across the Group – both in the UK and overseas. We have not identified any overseas operations in which these rights are at significant risk.

65-70 per cent of employees in the UK are currently members of one of our recognised Unions. We believe that a strong working relationship with the unions supports good employee relations throughout the business and leads to higher colleague engagement. We have worked particularly closely with our unions on the harmonisation of employment terms and conditions across the new Group, and on the restructuring of our business. We believe that it is important to involve unions at an early stage in any proposed change, often in advance of prescribed legal consultation timescales of 30 days (where more than 20 redundancies are proposed) and 90 days (where more than 100 redundancies are proposed).

Work-life balance

We want our colleagues to achieve a positive balance between their work and their lives outside work. We help them to do this by providing an opportunity for colleagues to work flexibly. Lloyds TSB had a progressive approach to flexible working, which has now been implemented across the Group. In 2010, we launched a new Lloyds Banking Group Flexible Working Policy which gives all employees the opportunity to apply for a temporary or permanent change of working pattern, at any stage of their career, and regardless of their personal reasons for making the request. Over 30 per cent of our employees across the Group now work flexibly.

Pensions

Pensions form an important element of colleagues’ remuneration. We make a major financial investment in our pension schemes and work closely with the schemes’ trustees to ensure they are properly supported and funded over the long term. In 2010, we paid £700 million into the Group’s pension schemes (excluding the costs of running the schemes). Across the Group, we have 340,000 members of our pension schemes. We provide pensions for 71,000 existing pensioners with another 161,000 entitled to draw pension when they reach normal retirement age.

We are committed to supporting our Final Salary pension schemes and have taken steps to ensure they remain financially sustainable over the longer term. This is a very positive commitment from the Group when many companies are closing their schemes to existing members. In 2010, we introduced a cap on our Defined Benefit schemes to ensure their ongoing viability.

New joiners to the Group are automatically included in the Group’s Defined Contribution scheme, ‘Your Tomorrow’, launched in July 2010. We already have 11,000 members in the scheme. In recognition of the quality of ‘Your Tomorrow’ we were awarded the National Association of Pension Funds’ Pension Quality Mark Plus award. We were also awarded ‘Best Defined Contribution Scheme Innovation’ by the Pensions Management Institute, and short-listed for the Defined Contribution Investment Strategy award.

Learning and development

Investing in our people is crucial to retaining and developing talented individuals. Well-trained, highly engaged people will interact more positively with our customers, and build better relationships with them. In 2010 we provided an average of 5.4 days of formal learning per FTE, a significant increase from 2.9 days in 2009. In our groupwide Colleague Engagement Survey, 77 per cent of employees said they believed they had the opportunity for personal development, and 78 per cent said there are sufficient opportunities for them to receive training to improve their skills.

In 2010 we deployed a new groupwide Learning Management System, ‘Your Learning’, to help simplify employees’ access to learning and development opportunities. Around 98,000 employees accessed learning via this system in 2010. We also redesigned our corporate learning facility, ‘Learning @ Lloyds Banking Group’. This now attracts 1.7 million visits a month.

Developing leadership capability

We make a significant investment in developing the capabilities of our senior leaders. In 2010 we launched new Executive Development and Leadership and Management programmes, delivered in partnership with Chicago Booth, a leading Business School. 73 senior leaders attended the programme in 2010 and we expect a further 50 to attend throughout 2011.

To address the needs of the broader leadership population we have implemented a single Groupwide Leadership and Management Curriculum. Since its launch in April 2010, we have trained 2,875 colleagues face-to-face in a range of topics including Coaching, Change Management and Strategic Thinking.

Diversity and inclusion

We have a strong track record in supporting diversity and inclusion. In 2010, we launched an integrated, leading-edge Diversity and Inclusion strategy across the Group, covering our relationships with employees, customers, suppliers and external branding.

We recognise the need for strong leadership to help embed our approach across the Group. Our Diversity and Inclusion programme is agreed by the Group Executive Committee and the Board on an annual basis. We have also established Executive Sponsors for each of the different strands of our diversity agenda – Truett Tate for gender and work-balance, Mark Fisher for disability, and Angie Risley for ethnic diversity. 

We have four colleague diversity networks, which support our diversity and inclusion strategy with their unique understanding of their members’ views and issues. We provide support, and budget, for the networks, which are: WIN – Women in Networking; GEM – Group Ethnic Minority Network; ACCESS – Disability Network; and RAINBOW – Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Network.

Gender equality

In 2010, Sir Winfried Bischoff, Chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, became a founding member of the ‘30 per cent club’, a new initiative encouraging UK companies to aim for at least 30 per cent female representation on their boards by 2015. In addition, we joined the FTSE 100 Cross Company Mentoring Scheme in 2010, which aims to increase the number of female Non-Executive Directors. Alongside our continued sponsorship of the First Women Awards, and the Asian Women of Achievement Awards, we also run the Lloyds Banking Group Inspirational Women’s Network.

We are working with our unions to understand salary differences between genders. We are committed to monitoring salary differences on at least an annual basis, and share the outcomes with our unions.

Ethnic diversity

We continue to increase the representation of ethnic minorities at management levels in the Group. In 2010 we:

• increased membership of the Ethnic Minority colleague network (GEM) to almost 1,500 members;
• sponsored leading-edge research and thought leadership with the Runnymede Trust – ‘Snowy Peaks: Ethnic Diversity at the Top’ which provided insight into ethnic minority success and talent at senior levels;
• supported community talent development through our work with Mulberry School in Tower Hamlets, a Bangladeshi girls’ school.

Disability

Our approach to disability focuses on:

• providing support to employees and customers with disabilities;
• helping to meet disabled employees’ aspirations through career development, mentoring and building public awareness.

We have a dedicated Personal Development Programme for disabled employees who need to build skills such as confidence and assertiveness. The programme helps delegates understand the impact of disability on their lives in and outside of work. We also have online resources providing support to employees with disabilities, such as information and guidance on our workplace adjustment scheme.

In 2010, we launched a new career development site for disabled managers, to equip them with the skills they need to reach senior management positions. We also sponsored and launched the Radiate Network with the disability charity RADAR – the UK’s first network for senior disabled leaders. This year, we are delivering a new workplace adjustment programme which ensures that we enable disabled colleagues to maximise their potential. The programme comprises a revised policy and guidance for physical and non-physical adjustments, end-to-end case management and a centrally held budget for adjustments to ensure they are made promptly.

Sexual orientation

Lloyds Banking Group was ranked as the top private sector employer in the UK in Stonewall’s 2011 Top 100 Employers for lesbian, gay and bisexual people. The Group was also named as Top Scottish employer by Stonewall Scotland. In 2010, we delivered our first product advert targeted at the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, featuring a gay couple. We also sponsored the largest ever global study of LGBT consumers, the ‘2010 Out Now Global LGBT Study’ involving 23 countries and over 8,000 respondents in the UK alone. The findings provided practical insight, along with good examples of best practice, that will help inform our own approach.

Generational diversity

As an organisation, we are developing our thinking on generational diversity. We have already put a new retirement planning policy in place which gives employees flexibility when planning their retirement. It offers various retirement options including:

• Late retirement, where colleagues can work beyond their scheme pension age whilst continuing to make pension contributions.
• Flexible retirement, allowing colleagues to draw on pension benefits whilst continuing to work for the Group.
• Flexible working, allowing colleagues to adjust their work hours, patterns or location to meet their changing needs.

Well-being

Our employee well-being strategy aims to prevent work-related illness, promote a psychologically sound working environment through good people management and practices, and provide colleague support and health advice at times of need.

We work with a range of professional external suppliers to provide our employees with an integrated and industry-leading range of support and information. For example, our Employee Assistance Programme is provided by an independent healthcare supplier that offers employees a free and confidential counselling service. This includes debt counselling, information on personal money matters; legal information on areas such as consumer rights, neighbour disputes, divorce law and litigation; health and well-being; guidance on issues related to younger members of the family, and the elderly and their carers.

Our focus in 2010 has been to support managers and employees with the demands of organisational change. We have revitalised our colleague well-being intranet site to enable employees to more easily access our range of support services and training materials. Going forward, we aim to maximise the use of management information available to us – including absence statistics, Assistance Programme usage, and Colleague Survey data – to enable us to target specific interventions in the most appropriate way.

Health and safety

We are committed to achieving the highest standards of health and safety for our colleagues, customers and anyone who visits our premises. In 2010, we focused on harmonising our health and safety policies and processes across the Group. We launched a Lloyds Banking Group health and safety training suite that will support our aim to achieve ‘world class’ standards in managing health and safety across our organisation.

• We delivered a legally compliant harmonised Group policy and Health and Safety website.
• We delivered new statutory health, safety and fire training packages for senior leaders, line managers, new starters, Fire Marshalls and incident controllers, and all employees.
• We delivered monthly health and safety internal communications to all employees highlighting risks and risk mitigation strategies.
• We recorded accident rates well below the national average.

In 2011, our focus is on embedding the new model, training and standards.

Diversity Data

Group accident rates