Special Feature
32 CORPORATE GOOD HEALTH
Special Feature
Winning the culture race
Lloyds TSB’ s Deputy Group Chief Executive Mike Fairey explains why having a sound strategy on race is critical to corporate good health
Mike Fairey Deputy Group Chief Executive
Business is business – that’ s the bottom line and the key driver for us in developing our race strategy. To quote Allan Leighton, Chairman of Race for Opportunity( RfO), which is an employer-led network that aims to help organisations reap the business benefits of having an effective race strategy.
“ We’ re interested in the business understanding that if you’ re good at race then you’ ll make more money.”
We’ ve been working alongside RfO for several years and I was very pleased and privileged to be invited to become Deputy Chair of the campaign in 2003.
When we achieved top billing in the RfO’ s national benchmarking survey on working towards race equality last year, it was an acknowledgement that we’ d made real progress. But more than that, gaining the UK’ s most sought after award in this field, reinforced the passion and commitment among all our people, to keep race high up on the business agenda and in hearts and minds. As a result, our race strategy has added value to our staff and our customers.
Our race strategy focuses on four main areas of activity. These are:
EMPLOYMENT, including recruitment, selection, retention and progression; MARKETING to ethnic minorities as profitable consumers;
SMALL BUSINESSES – how we work with ethnic minority business customers;
COMMUNITY involvement programmes.
On employment we have worked hard to create a culture which allows our ethnic minority staff to prosper and reach their full potential, which is ultimately what we want for all of our staff. In 1998, we carried out some research with our ethnic minority staff which identified that some of them felt isolated and disempowered because of a lack of role models and this was having an impact on their performance and career development. In response to this, we created a suite of career development programmes tailored specifically for our ethnic minority staff, managers and senior managers to give them the confidence and skills to compete for more senior positions. Feedback from the early courses we ran showed that the opportunity to network with other ethnic minority staff and share experiences was very engage SPRING ISSUE 2006