The organisation
Lloyd’s is a specialist insurance marketplace that dates back to the 1680s. It started as a coffee house by the river Thames and became a home for maritime intelligence. Today it works with thousands of companies worldwide, representing millions of people, providing knowledge, resources and leadership to tackle societal risks.
The problem
Lloyd’s came under scrutiny, from external campaign groups and media amid the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020, for its historic involvement in enabling the transatlantic slave trade. As a centre for maritime insurance in the 17th century, Lloyd’s facilitated Britain’s slave merchants to manage their risks during the height of the slave trade, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
On 10 June 2020, Lloyd’s chairman made a statement acknowledging the firm’s history. He also committed to improving the company’s intake of diverse talent going forward.
At that time, Lloyd’s set a company-wide goal to meet a one-in-three hiring ambition for ethnically diverse groups throughout the group of businesses. “The chairman took brave action to be one of the first corporates to apologise for its role in the transatlantic slave trade,” remembers Mark Lomas, head of culture. The statement laid out a series of commitments to review and improve company culture for current and future diverse employees, working in collaboration with black and minority ethnic groups.
The method
To put the commitments into practice, Lloyd’s embarked on a journey of “researching, reflecting and responding”, Lomas describes, to better understand its history and how that impacted its workforce. As part of that work, the company hired an archivist to assess its documents and map the scale of its role in the slave trade.
“Often people think of Lloyd’s as an insurance company, and therefore we have this Hogwarts-like library of artefacts. It is simply not the case,” he says. “The archive helped us understand what we did and didn’t have.”
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Lloyd’s also partnered with Johns Hopkins University and professional network Black Beyond Data to contextualise its role in the transatlantic slave economy through a digital humanities archive. The project team consulted an advisory board, made up of UK cultural institutions, as well as more than 200 ethnically diverse colleagues across the insurance market, to understand what the archive should look like and how to shape a meaningful response.
The research project ended after two years, culminating in the launch of Lloyd’s multifaceted Inclusive Futures programme in November 2023. Broadly, the programme aims to “support ethnically diverse groups from the classroom to the boardroom”. As part of that work, Lloyds has committed to investing in young diverse talent through a school engagement programme, to set them up for future careers at the company.
“The school engagement programme is designed to do two things,” Lomas says. “To make careers in insurance far more understandable to a hugely diverse talent pool, while being very open about Lloyd’s history, and to highlight the opportunities in insurance.”
Bursaries are due to be provided to 200 undergraduate students over the next three years. An early-years talent pool is also going to be created over the next 10 years, as Lomas explains: “The early-careers talent pool is another flagship initiative of Inclusive Futures. It will create a pre-assessed talent pool of black and ethnically diverse groups, and give first dibs on that exclusive talent to our founding partners.”
People in the middle of their careers are to be supported by a mentoring programme, Accelerate, as well as a master’s degree subsidy. Meanwhile, Lloyd’s has committed to creating succession plans for its founding partner companies – Howden, Chubb, AXA, MS Amlin, TMK Beasley, Hiscox and Arch – to feed ethnic minority talent onto its board.
“We’ll do initial succession planning and then develop that executive pipeline, literally from classroom to boardroom,” Lomas explains. “The founding partner companies will explore their succession plans and capability requirements going forward, and the board talent pool will map five areas where they need capability or lack diversity. They will then actively start building a more diverse, board-level talent pool.”
Taking a three-pronged approach to improving diversity over the next 10 years, the admin of setting up the programme was “a labour of love”, Lomas comments. “As you can imagine with a group of companies, it can be a bit complicated. But when you have partners who are absolutely dedicated to the outcome, you get over all these hurdles.”
To ensure the success of the programme, Lloyd’s created a governance group made up of delivery partners, founding partners and Lloyd’s board members. “The governance group provides both feedback and friendly challenge,” says Lomas.
The result
The launch of the Inclusive Futures programme has created not only a more diverse company at Lloyd’s but improved diversity among its marketplace. “The corporation has achieved the one in three hiring ambition,” Lomas says.
In the year leading up to 2023, 17% of the company’s new hires came from an ethnically diverse background. This increased to 21% in March 2024. Meanwhile, the representation of ethnic minorities in the Lloyd’s workforce increased more broadly from 11% to 13% in the same time period.
Further, “the number of applicants we’ve had from ethnically diverse backgrounds has increased,” Lomas explains, and data shows that more applicants are willing to share their ethnic identity with the company than previously – 11% of applicants refused to supply their ethnic identity this year, compared with 22% last year.
Although he’s hesitant to attribute this progress to Inclusive Futures alone, Lomas states: “What really pleases me is that we can see that our efforts – in being open and transparent around Lloyd’s history, coming up with a really meaningful response, being very active as an inclusive employer, and having a top-to-bottom plan around inclusive recruitment – are shifting the dial.”
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This culture has translated to Lloyd’s market, where the number of firms that monitor ethnicity has gone from 76% in December 2022 to 99%. The proportion of ethnically diverse people within the firm’s market has gone from 9% to 13% overall. In leadership, representation has risen from 5% to 9%.
While some organisations might not have the same resources as Lloyd’s, Lomas encourages other employers that want to address their historical links to slavery to “be prepared to consult with people in your organisation, your sector and the communities around you, about what’s going to be meaningful”.
He adds: “Our efforts prove that if you can operate as a collaborative unit, you can make change faster. That is exactly what Inclusive Futures is set up to do: to use collaboration strength to fast-forward progress.”
This article was published in the September/October 2024 edition of HR magazine.
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