FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
STRATEGIC REPORT
GOVERNANCE
• As part of our executive sponsorship programme, 18 female colleagues were matched with an executive sponsor at Just to provide mentorship, advice and support for their development. Feedback from this programme was excellent: “It has made me step back and consider my own career a bit more, as in think about what I want and think about what I need to get there.” We will expand this programme in 2022 to include colleagues from a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic background. • Every member of our executive and senior leadership team took part in D&I workshops. The aim of these workshops was to raise awareness and understanding of D&I more broadly and issues around race and ethnicity at work in particular. Participants committed to individual and shared action plans following the workshops. • We launched a reciprocal mentoring programme whereby colleagues from a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic background mentor a member of our executive team – once again, to raise the awareness and understanding of our most senior leaders around race and ethnicity issues at work as part of our commitment to the Race at Work Charter. • Our executives have hosted a series of open sessions called Just perspectives, attended by colleagues from across the business and supported by our employee networks and D&I Champions. These sessions have covered a wide range of D&I topics, including race, disability, LGBT and allyship, menopause and social mobility. These forums have provided an excellent way to engage colleagues across the business on our D&I agenda to build momentum to support progress. • For the fourth year in a row, we co-hosted a session as part of DiveIn, the festival for diversity and inclusion in the insurance industry. Around 1,450 people attended the session which was hosted and facilitated by Giles Offen and focused on the topic of allyship. COLLEAGUES FEELING PROUD TO WORK AT JUST, WITH OUTSTANDING LEVELS OF ENGAGEMENT During the year we continued to communicate and engage with colleagues through a range of mediums – from “Conversations with the Board”, via Microsoft Teams (see page 30 for more details on the Board’s approach to colleague engagement) and leadership video updates, through to an offsite gathering for hundreds of colleagues and investing in Pawprint, our new sustainability partner and eco companion for colleagues. BestFest In January we took part in the Best Companies annual survey and were delighted to achieve our highest level of employee engagement since starting to take part in the survey in 2009. In September we recognised this fantastic achievement with a festival style celebration called BestFest. The event was held outside at Lingfield in Surrey with music, games, food, drinks and most importantly our colleagues – some of whom had not seen each other in person for 18 months!
STRENGTHENING TALENT, CAPABILITIES AND INCLUSIVITY We are committed to supporting the personal and professional development of every colleague at Just. Everyone has access to unlimited on-demand learning material and content via our corporate LinkedIn Learning licence. Since we launched LinkedIn Learning in February 2020, 80% of colleagues have activated their accounts, engaging with over 78,000 videos and 3,500 hours of content. All colleagues complete mandatory e-learning modules to ensure that we comply with regulatory and best practice standards in areas such as General Data Protection Regulation, financial crime and money laundering. We refreshed the content of these modules this year to ensure that it aligned with the latest regulatory requirements. We also offer a wide range of targeted development opportunities for colleagues across the business. For example, we sponsored 58 actuarial students to achieve qualifications through the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and supported 11 colleagues to study towards Chartered Insurance Institute qualifications. We also supported 20 colleagues through apprenticeship programmes, utilising our apprenticeship levy. We continue to invest significantly in leadership and management development programmes and initiatives, recognising the crucial role of people managers particularly in leading productive, engaged and healthy teams. Some examples include: • Continued to roll out our flagship leadership and management development programmes – Just Lead and Just Engage – with 35 participants in these programmes over the past year. These modular programmes include delivery of content aligned to key learning objectives linked to our leadership standards, as well as individual and group coaching sessions, with plenty of opportunity for peer-to-peer learning. • 31 people managers from across the business have taken part in the level five leadership and management diploma delivered in partnership with an external learning consultancy. • We have engaged with external specialists to deliver leadership development sessions for our senior leaders focused on topics including resilience, diversity and inclusion, and storytelling. We continued to make strong progress with respect to our commitment to building a diverse workforce and an inclusive culture at Just. Once again, we increased gender diversity at senior levels from 24% to 27% and are on track to deliver against our ‘33 by 23’ pledge as a signatory to the Women in Finance Charter that 33% of our senior leaders will be female by 2023. As at the date of this report the percentage of women on our Board has increased to 40% (from 30% in March 2021). Our gender pay gap reduced between 2020 and 2021 – the mean hourly wage was down from 35.8% to 34.4% and the median hourly pay gap reduced from 33.5% to 31.3%. These figures reflect an increasing proportion of women at senior levels in Just. As a signatory to the Race at Work Charter, we appointed Giles Offen, Group Chief Digital Information Officer, as executive sponsor for Race. Under his sponsorship, we have publicly committed to increasing the percentage of senior leaders from a Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic background to 15% by 2024, in line with the percentage in the broader UK population. We have also voluntarily published our ethnicity pay gap report alongside our gender pay gap report. Our progress against our diversity and inclusion (“D&I”) strategy and targets is underpinned by a wide range of initiatives with engagement from colleagues across the business. Examples include: • 30 colleagues have taken part in the actuarial mentoring programme, either as a mentor or a mentee, with ten mentees/mentors in 2019, 2020 and 2021. This programme is primarily designed to support the development and retention of women within the actuarial profession. A further 62 colleagues have taken part in the 30% club cross company mentoring programme, connecting female talent with experienced mentors from outside of our company.
This was a superb event. I am not a social animal but I still really enjoyed myself and mingled with lots of colleagues. Being able to walk around freely and enjoy what was on offer worked really well. 10/10, I wouldn’t have changed a thing!! Colleague comment from feedback survey
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