CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Women in Finance Charter – two years on

At The Fry Group, we encourage our colleagues to bring their whole, authentic selves to work.

Everyone is welcome – bringing different knowledge and perspectives to make our culture richer and our business stronger. Awareness, openness and respect are the pillars on which our global mindset is built, driving a positive change in our local communities.

In 2021, we became proud signatories of the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter with the ambition to achieve a 50/50 balance of gender diversity across the group. 

Our charter commitments : 

1. Our Head of People, Kellie Plummer is responsible and accountable for diversity and inclusion at The Fry Group.
2. Our target was to achieve 30% women in senior leadership by 01 April 2023. We are pleased to report that on 01 April 2023, women make up 31.25% of our senior leadership team.
3. Looking ahead, we have set a target of 40% women in senior leadership by 31 December 2025.
4. Our commitments and targets are published here on our website, and we will update our progress annually.

Our progress 

Each year, we will set actions to support our diversity and inclusion progress. Our actions are focused on hiring more, promoting more, and keeping more women in our company. The priorities we identified, and actions taken this past year include: 

Embedding fair and inclusive hiring practices – we continue to evolve our hiring practices to ensure they are fair and inclusive. In addition to using a variety of testing tools to help us understand more about a candidate’s work style preferences, we strongly encourage the use of diverse shortlists for interview, and diverse interview panels. 

Commitment to equal pay – as part of our commitment to equal pay and increasing pay transparency, we introduced a comprehensive global pay benchmarking and job evaluation tool in 2023. These tools ensure we have a robust and objective way to examine salaries against external market data and peer group comparisons to make better pay decisions. In 2024, we will be undertaking our first gender pay gap review. 

Building an inclusive culture – it is important to us that our policies and practices support colleagues through different life stages and promote a healthy work and life balance. This is why we have made most of our benefits available to everyone from day one of their employment. In November 2022, we launched a helping hands loan facility to give our colleagues access to help during the cost-of-living crisis. In addition, we have introduced menopause cafes and plan to expand work in this area during the next 12 months.  

Nurturing and empowering our talent – our colleagues’ development is important to us, and we are focused on ensuring everyone has equal access to opportunities. In the last 12 months, we have financially supported nearly 20% of our global workforce through exams and qualifications. The uptake for professional study support continues to grow and we are delighted to see so many of our colleagues engaged in professional development and learning. 

Raising awareness about diversity and inclusion – we have repurposed the role of our wellbeing champions who are now actively engaged in running campaigns throughout the year to raise awareness about important topics and to roll out healthy workplace initiatives. The wellbeing champions are helping to normalise conversations about various topics and ensure wellbeing is at the forefront of what we do as a company. 

Going forward 

For many across the world, 2022-2023 has been a challenging time. While we are proud of our progress, our work does not stop here. Each year, we plan to make steady progress and expand our focus to address equality and representation. Through ongoing monitoring, we will communicate our progress and deliver initiatives that are focused on improving equal opportunities, diversity and inclusion.