Championing equality is at the core of Legal & General as an organisation. Inclusive Capitalism is our strategic vision and purpose that is embedded in our DNA. We believe in using our capital and stature to do good in society and for the benefit of our clients, shareholders, and our people. Our focus on diversity and inclusion is important because ensuring people have fair and equitable access to opportunities is the right thing to do. We focus on regular, progressive improvements in our workforce’s diversity and our culture’s inclusiveness. The work of our employee resource group – Culture Club – has a huge impact on our progress as an organisation.
At Culture Club, we celebrate and promote cultural diversity, authenticity, equality and allyship. We want to create a space where our members can engage in open dialogue and collaborate to foster inclusion, learning, and understanding.
Main Priorities and Activities:
- Attracting, developing, and retaining a culturally diverse talent pool
- Ensure there are equal opportunities for everyone who works here
- Fostering a culture of inclusion, where everyone can perform at their best
- Encouraging a data-driven approach to our analysis, engagement, insight, and action
- Ensuring our policies and processes reflect best practice for hiring culturally diverse talent
- Establishing mechanism for identifying and addressing talent retention issues
- Continuing and extending our mentoring programme
- Defining and developing our allyship programme
Events and Activity:
One of the ways in which we connect and collaborate both internally and externally, is by hosting a number of events and activities across our different office locations. Across the years, we have held a number of successful events that have raised awareness to our cause.
On May 25th, we celebrated World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development by hosting a session where colleagues will share personal wellbeing stories around cultural customs.
We were joined by an external yoga teacher, who walked us through various meditation, breathing and yoga exercises and explained the history of yoga. We explored the links between yoga and personal wellbeing, whilst hearing stories of wellbeing practices across different cultures.
Last year, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush arriving in Britain on 22nd June 1948. We celebrated our shared history with stories, Caribbean food, and heard from special guests from the Caribbean Social Forum. We made sure to highlight local experiences, and in our Cardiff offices, we displayed boards from Windrush Cymru, an organisation that supports local Windrush elders and tells their stories across the country. Furthermore, the stories were displayed in English and Welsh to ensure all colleagues in Cardiff were able to read them.
As well as marking anniversaries with events, we hold month long celebrations to mark events such as South Asian History Month. We celebrated this with an external event with intersectional panellists, dancers, drummers, music, food, quizzes, saree draping with the South Asian Heritage Month Co-founder as a special guest. Over 1200 of L&G employees engaged with these celebrations.
