ceoforum.com.au: What were the reasons diversity was an important issue for your company to address?
Pierric Beckert: I believe it comes down to good solid business practice. Firstly, if you want to ensure you are attracting the most talented employees, you can’t limit yourself to a particular subset of the available talent. You need to be attractive to employees from diverse backgrounds.
Second, you don’t want your products and services to only have appeal to some groups within the community and not others. That means you have to understand what it is that appeals to different groups in the community, so you can design appealing products and services for those different groups.
If you get your talent right, and your products and services right, in this way, clearly profits will follow, which in turn will benefit your shareholders. I really see diversity as being simple common sense for most businesses.
ceoforum.com.au: How is diversity defined within your organisation, and how did you go about setting targets for diversity?
PB: In Australia it’s primarily defined as gender diversity.
We then looked at four areas when we were setting goals around gender diversity within our organisation. The first goal we set was to increase the number of women at senior levels within the organisation. Second, and related to our first goal, we wanted to increase our attractiveness as an employer to returning parents, and, in particular, returning mothers. Third, we wanted to increase both the flexibility of our employment conditions e.g. part-time work, working from home etc, and the awareness of those conditions amongst our employees. Finally, we also wanted to monitor the gender diversity of our customer segments, as, in some cases, this was changing quite significantly.
ceoforum.com.au: Have women become more significant as a customer segment within the financial services industry?
PB: My view is that, at least in our industry, women have always been important – some research from at least a decade ago has shown that, in terms of who makes the household purchasing decision, women make around 70% of those decisions by value of purchase. In that sense, it has always been important in our industry to have products or services that appeal to women.
ceoforum.com.au: What are the biggest challenges you faced in getting greater diversity within your organisation, and how did you overcome them?
PB: I think flexibility in employment conditions is enormously important if you want to increase the number of women at senior levels. In my case, for example, 50% of my direct reports are now women, and almost all of those would be making some use of our flexibility arrangements.
I see it as vital that leaders in our company are both aware of what tools exist for creating flexible arrangements, and also have the sensitivity and awareness to modify their own behaviours when required to do so. A good example is the scheduling of meetings – you don’t want to do this, for instance, at times when some members of your team are unable to attend, due to their family commitments. These are small things, perhaps, but they do add up.
Technology has helped with some flexibility arrangements e.g. working from home is now easier. At the same time, however, I think management attitudes are even more important, as many flexibility measures, such as part-time work, compressed work weeks and so on, do not rely on technology as such.
Another thing we found was that there was a key difference between men and women in their ability to network within the organisation, and thus to find sponsors and/or mentors to aid their career development. Men tended to be able to do this much better than women, and once we recognised this we addressed the problem by giving women more networking skills and opportunities, for instance by establishing The Women’s Interest Network.
We found, for instance, that even where women did find sponsors or mentors, these relationships were often lost when the sponsor left the organisation, moved internationally, and so on. By tracking those relationships more closely, and following up where required, we were able to improve networking results for women in the organisation.
ceoforum.com.au: It’s interesting that your company, and a lot of other companies, find women are often less effective networkers than men. Outside of the work context, for instance, women are often seen as having better social skills than men, and broader informal networks.
PB: I’m not really sure why women were less effective at networking. In some companies it may be that most of the networking opportunities were around more male-oriented activities, such as sport, but I don’t think that applied in our case.
Perhaps there was something of an attitude among some women that they would be seen as somehow wanting something rather than being self-sufficient. The reality, of course, is that a good networking relationship offers something to both parties, so this fear was unfounded.
It’s a really important issue to address, however. Our experience has been that giving women networking skills and opportunities is even more important than flexible work arrangements in boosting the number of senior women in the organisation.
ceoforum.com.au: What is your personal role in meeting the diversity challenge?
PB: My role has both formal and informal aspects. I am chair of the diversity council within the Australian business, which meets at least once a quarter to debate strategy, set targets, and track progress. Informally, I need to make sure I set a good example and demonstrate the appropriate behaviours. I need to ensure, for instance, that my team shows diversity – more than half of our business unit leaders are women, and 50% of my direct reports are women. Like all our leaders, I also need to demonstrate the right sensitivities and attitudes every day. I think this is important for CEOs, as we can tend to over-emphasise formal communication channels like all employee meetings etc, and forget that our everyday behaviours are also very important.
ceoforum.com.au: What would your advice be to other CEOs facing similar challenges?
PB: What was really important for us was to increase our retention of returning mothers. This was about making them welcome, giving them flexible working conditions, and making sure they were plugged into suitable networks to further develop their careers.
You also need to manage this as any other important initiative in the company – gather the facts, define your objectives and monitor the progress. The attitude from the top, too, is decisive.
