Mark Lomas is head of culture at Lloyd’s of London, where he is responsible for all aspects of Lloyd’s culture, engagement, wellbeing, and EDI strategies. He has delivered numerous diversity and inclusion projects in the UK and internationally for organisations across a wide variety of sectors including: The Financial Reporting Council, Lloyds Market Association, the BBC, ITV, DR TV Denmark, the University of Sheffield, NHS Clinical Commissioning Group Boards, Highways England, Bermuda Hospital Board, The Bermuda Human Rights Commission and The Law Society.
“We’ve learned lessons about the importance of an inclusive environment, the importance of developing talent, the importance of gender balance in leadership and the importance of diversity generally to innovation. These are lessons which I think are common across organisations that are doing better in their respective sectors.”
Welcome to Lloyd’s of London
It’s a great pleasure to be able to share some of the work I’m doing here at Lloyd’s of London as gender equality is central to our ambitions around culture, and we’ve been very public about our ambitions, but I’ll come to those later.
Ode to Liliana Archibald
The first female broker was allowed in the Lloyds underwriting room in 1972 and her name was Liliana Archibald. A journalist asked her how was her first day at work with all these men? And her reply was: “The roof it still on!” And I quite like that quote because if the roof did fall off there’s almost no better place in the world for it to be insured than where she was, right? But fast forward a couple of decades, and Lloyd’s had fallen behind societal expectations around culture.
In 2019, there was Bloomberg article which was critical of the culture in the Lloyd’s Market. But since 2019, Lloyd’s has made significant strides in improving gender equality.
What gets measured gets done
Culture is one of the four pillars of the Lloyd’s strategy, and essentially, we discharged a very deliberate plan to improve culture in the corporation and the wider Lloyd’s market. We set a women in leadership target for the wider market in 2023 to reach 35% women in leadership by December 2023.
The data for 2023 will be published shortly. In the corporation, we have surpassed the women in leadership target, so 55% of our executives are women, 42% of our executive leadership group are women, and 39% of our broader leadership are women.
It is important to measure progress. Some may not like targets, and I agree they can be a crude measure, but measurement is an essential part of driving progress on culture. What gets measured, people tend to pay attention to. And while representation data matters, equally we are interested in the lived experience of people in the Lloyd’s market.
So, since 2019, we’ve run a culture survey every two years, and it measures the actual experience of individuals in the Lloyds market. Having started with results that were below the financial sector benchmark in 2019, we saw the Lloyd’s market surpass the financial services benchmark in 2022. And the latest data for 2024 will be published later this year.
Helping women Advance
We’ve seen increasing diversity in our early careers programmes. 46% of our apprentices and graduates are women. Ensuring a robust talent pipeline is important for our market, and we’re seeing the positive impact of what we do. But to make sure this happens, it’s not enough just to start at the early careers at the bottom of the rung. Our Advance programme is a leadership development programme for women and that programme is incredibly effective.
We’ve had 10 cohorts, so over 155 women have taken part. Nearly 100% of the people who go through the programme have moved on to a promotion or a better role in the market. And that’s very important because it helps develop the leadership pipeline for women in the market.
Inclusive innovation
For us, it’s not just about the numbers though. It’s also about innovation. Lloyd’s has lasted over 300 years. And why is that? Because we’ve had to innovate with the changing requirements of society.
Lloyd’s has an entire innovation hub called Lloyd’s Lab, with a 98% survival rate. Many successful startups that have come out of Lloyd’s Lab have been led by women.
Lessons learned in order to do better
We’ve learned lessons about the importance of an inclusive environment, the importance of developing talent, the importance of gender balance in leadership and the importance of diversity generally to innovation. These are lessons which I think are common across organisations that are doing better in their respective sectors.
I think the lesson here is that Lloyd’s is a pretty good example that change is possible as long as you have deliberate intention and targeted action. That’s why today is so important as it brings the opportunity to share best practice by learning from the challenges across a range a wide range of sectors, and to steal with pride the best ideas, so I hope you enjoy it.
Note: The text in this article has been adapted from a presentation at the recent Womanthology Inclusion Thought Leaders’ Event, held at Lloyd’s of London on 28th February 2024.
