Alison Gaskins (AG): As Chair of the Legal Diversity and Inclusion Council, I am ultimately responsible for fostering a culture in legal in which we can share and appreciate our perspectives and differences, and where colleagues can properly express who they are. My predecessors, Judith Shepherd and Erica Handling, did an outstanding job running D&I in the past and so it makes me think that there is something in the lawyer role that shares kinship with this effort, possibly because in the classic sense, lawyers have to operate without prejudice, taking a big picture view in all we do.
Bob Hoyt, Barclays Group General Counsel, is very passionate about collaboration. He sees legal as being uniquely placed to work across all boundaries and siloes within an organisation, and diversity is a great place to see this in practice.
GC: Is your diversity and inclusion strategy primarily driven by internal factors, external pressures or both?
AG: Definitely both. We want people to feel very comfortable working at Barclays. The same is true within legal – we want people to thrive, whoever they are and whatever they feel.
We have the aspiration and objective to be the employer of choice for D&I. It is not an HR-driven agenda; instead it comes right from the Barclays Executive Committee and is prevalent through our culture, activities, communities and as part of our day-to-day narrative.
Internally, we have five global agendas covering Gender, Disability, Multigenerational, Multicultural and LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) and we have internal employee networks assigned to these five agendas. These are each sponsored by a member of the Executive Committee, so we have very senior sponsorship and leadership, which gives them a profile.
Externally, ultimately we are a customer-facing organisation, and one key thing you want to present back to your customer is a mirror image of local communities and themselves. Is there connectivity, sameness, a rapport… and is it felt? Even with our products and client services we try to bring in D&I. We think about vulnerable customers with innovations like talking ATMs and Skype-based banking using sign language. Our UK branch network is very innovative from a D&I perspective. We also launched a Barclays card mobile capability at Gay Pride in London.
GC: What is the impact of diversity on perceptions of the company?
AG: We try and engage with external organisations such as Stonewall and Working Mother. Where there are opportunities to actually seek recognition from them, we actively pursue this.
We offer a lot of in-house training and we take opportunities to get that externally referenced as well because it is important to validate our progress without it becoming a numerical exercise. External affirmations help endorse what we are already doing.
GC: What is the role of the in-house Legal team in creating diversity and inclusion initiatives? Can the Legal team have an effect on the identity of the organisation?
AG: My predecessors Judith Shepherd and Erica Handling were hugely influential in this space, and created a connection in the mind of the organisation regarding the effectiveness of legal in this whole agenda, primarily (but not exclusively) from a gender perspective. If you think about the role lawyers play as custodians of managing risk, there is a sense that what legal takes seriously is a mark of what Barclays takes seriously – a connection of influence there.
We think about our functional role in two ways: one is ensuring that lawyers feel part of the central agenda of the organisation and are not working in isolation. That goes back to there being a natural affinity of value here – legal working without boundaries across Barclays.
The other is our commitment in Barclays and in legal to dynamic working. Dynamic working can be defined as a method of making sure that all colleagues can structure and balance their work and life successfully. Flexible working often constitutes a change in your working hours, while dynamic working may be just doing the same hours from a different place. It becomes about the value of outputs, not where and how. People associate flexible working with the working mothers agenda, so dynamic working pushes it to a broader meaning and audience.
With our dynamic working and multigenerational working (responsibility for elderly parents can be a big factor), we try to acknowledge that people are both parents and carers. These discussions can start with our well-funded employee networks, which are driving that agenda for change.
GC: Multigenerational working sounds interesting. What are the specific challenges involved in introducing a commitment to this?
AG: Our multigenerational agenda has been part of Barclays’ diversity strategy for years. The core of the agenda is to support colleagues through each stage of their lives and careers. We do this in many different ways. Through our employee network groups; for instance, the Working Family network (which supports working parents and caregivers), the Emerge network (colleagues who are in the early stages of their careers, primarily Generations X and Y) and our Military network (colleagues who are typically entering banking as a second or third career). Or through the dynamic working campaign, which is about helping people manage their working lives.
And then also through various other programmes and initiatives, like our ‘Be Well’ campaign, which supports good health and wellbeing, and Barclays’ ‘Bolder Apprenticeships’ programme, which aims to address the increasing rate of older – generation unemployment.
We’re soon going to have five generations working together in the workplace and so I think you will see a keener focus on how we foster more intergenerational understanding. This will certainly be one of our focus areas at Barclays.
GC: What are the key challenges you face around getting buy-in across departments?
AG: One challenge we face at Barclays is trying to remain impactful within a very complex, global organisation and operating structure. We have colleagues with multifaceted roles in Barclays and it is, at times, challenging for global diversity campaigns to touch different individuals in a real and authentic way.
However, the biggest challenge is not the buy-in, it’s getting people to figure out what to do. We don’t have an army of people behind the employee networks – it is astonishingly small in terms of people driving the agenda. But it needs to be led from the top down and embedded in every part, irrespective of how big or small you are. It is about whether people feel accountable at all levels and all areas. It is not about the job title – everyone needs to feel responsible. That’s where employee networks step in, because people are deciding for themselves what works. It becomes an inclusive approach.
A really big part of all this is that anyone can be a part of the network group. You just need to be sympathetic.
GC: What are the future challenges for Barclays in regards to D&I?
AG: D&I takes time to permeate, and part of it is not knowing what’s on the horizon: you can’t always anticipate huge societal changes. Our multigenerational programme is a really good example of that − increased retirement age and longer working lives were there far earlier than anyone actually started thinking about them as an employer. It is about seeing those societal shifts happening, and ideally pre-empting them. In our Emerge network (with millennials), we talk a lot about what it means to be a millennial, and then a large, 325-year-old organisation like Barclays looks at that and thinks ‘What do we do? We aren’t geared up for that type of employee!’ But the reality is that they are coming, they are here. We are trying to plan for the unexpected.
The other question is how you keep momentum going. You have to keep your nerve. You need someone at the helm who is senior enough to carry clout and credibility, but if that figurehead leaves, you have to keep on. It needs to be about more than one person.