Series Three Episode Ten: Diversity of Age and Data-Driven D&I

Julia: Hello, my name is Julia Streets, and welcome to DiverCity Podcast, talking about diversity and inclusion in financial services. On the podcast we seek to shine a light on positive progress, call out areas requiring further focus, and offer lots of ideas to help drive change. Today I’m joined by Dr. Tiina Likki, Principal Advisor at the Behavioural Insights Team, and Peter Randall, President of the FinTech firm SETL.

Dr. Tiina Likki is a Principal Advisor at the Behavioural Insights Team, or B.I.T, a social purpose company that applies behavioural science to public policy. Tina leads B.I.T’s work on gender equality as well as employment and welfare, and is a passionate advocate for evidence-based policy and experimentation working with private and public sector organisations to empirically test how best to improve gender equality and women’s career progression. Tiina is currently running several randomised controlled trials with UK employers to improve their gender pay gap.

Tiina, welcome to the show.

Tiina: Thank you, Julia.

Julia: Peter Randall is the President of the London-based FinTech firm SETL. SETL is an institutional payment and settlement infrastructure provider using blockchain technology. Peter has been credited with fundamentally changing the European equity exchange market through the establishment of Chi-X Europe. As Founder and CEO, Peter led the company’s growth from an unknown multilateral trading facility to become one of the top five trading venues in Europe. Prior to Chi-X, Peter was COO at Instinet Europe, and Executive Director of FIX Protocol.

Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter: Thank you very much.

Julia: As always, at the start of each episode we invite each guest to take a minute to tell us what they’re up to. So, Tiina, let’s start with you. What are you up to?

Tiina: At the B.I.T what we try and do is apply behavioural science to different complex problems related to human behaviour. In the context of diversity we’re interested on the one hand in how individuals make decisions, why does someone choose the fruit over the donut, or the ice cream, but also why do people decide to apply for jobs? Why does someone decide to ask for a pay rise?. We know for example that there are differences between men and women.

But also what we try and look at is how behavioural science can help us understand how organisations function, and how organisational processes sometimes create disparities based on different characteristics. Based on all of that evidence we have from behavioural science, what we then do is try and actually go into organisations and evaluate rigorously using things like randomised controlled trials, to really see what actually shifts the dial, what actually does make a difference in an organisational setting.

Julia: And Peter, what are you up to these days?

Peter: SETL’s all about trying to make a difference, trying to make a difference in the post-trade space, which is something which puts most people to sleep, but is actually very important. When financial institutions have dealt with each other, markets have dealt with each other, brokers have dealt with each other, insurance has dealt with each other, when that is all done, you’ve then got to record the books and records. You’ve got to make sure that the obligations have been entered into properly and are recorded properly.

That’s something which has never really been a particularly exciting area of city activity, but recently as a result of new technology, that’s changing. Our challenge, if you will, is to bring 21st century technology to a segment of the market which is still basically running COBAL on mainframes. So very exciting, and we see a lot of the same sorts of issues that we’ve talked about earlier on in the introduction to this process, in technology as well as we do in the overall business world.

Julia: I really wish we had the time today to explore how blockchain works. That’s probably another conversation for another podcast, but I think it is fascinating that blend, as you were saying Tiina, about how organisations function from a large scale size, and where the data is behind that. Then also thinking about how small organisations with ambitions become large ones, actually grow over time. Peter, it’s been 35 years I understand, of financial services experience. You’ve worked at both ends of the spectrum in large global trading firms, and also CEO small ones as well.

One of the things we talk about a lot on the podcast, in the context of diversity and inclusion, is also age. There’s a general sort of concern that when we all hit 50, and I have to confess I’m not a million miles away from that myself- you should be surprised by that statement by the way! But, when you hit the age of 50, that there’s a risk you just fall off a cliff. Obviously, we’re delighted to see you haven’t. What’s been the secret of your success?

Peter: I think the secret, if there is one, is to understand that you’ve got to pace yourself as your age changes, then your experience changes. As your experience changes, then if you’re able and wise you can parlay that into useful insights to help other people, parts of your team, members of the group that you’re involved with. The important thing though is to understand what your own limitations are, and to make no secrets of them. Don’t try and hide them, don’t try and fake things. Be very, very open.

A good example of this was some little while ago. We decided one of the firms that I was with to do a team building exercise. We all went off to the Lake District, and we did something called the Fred Whitton Challenge, which for anybody who wishes to look at it, it’s about 175 kilometres, and it’s about 4,000 metres of climbing. That’s something you cycle in a day. We went round, I was by far and away the oldest, and I went around on my own, and I finished. There was a lot of betting on whether I’d finish, but I finished not because I was stronger because I clearly wasn’t, but because I’d got it between my ears. I finished because, actually, in their way of describing me, I was the grey wolf. I could sit there and I could learn, I could watch, and I didn’t have to compete, but I was able to finish.  I think that that’s about pacing yourself. It’s about understanding that as life changes you change, and as you change, then you can offer a different insight.

Julia: And as you are talking to other sort of employees who are perhaps heading towards their 50s, in some cases even their 60s, what advice do you give them? Because, actually, there’s a degree there of empathetic and vulnerable leadership, if you like. What advice do you say to mostly male colleagues who perhaps are a little kind of siloed in their mentality about their contribution to work?

Peter: I think a lot of these things, Julia, I’m sure Tiina probably has a similar view, but I think a lot of things actually go in cycles. I think it’s quite important to understand what cycles look like. The first time you come into a cycle, you’ve never seen it before, so it’s all new, so that’s very interesting. Second time you come into a cycle, well you have seen it before, and you kind of know a little bit about what you think the outcomes may be, but you’ve now only got two data points. By the third time you come into the cycle you’ve got two data points, so you’re getting better at refining what the answers are.

If we think about cycles, and I think that’s kind of important observation, if we think about cycles it brings us back, I think rather neatly, to I think it’s a Jewish proverb, but it’s one that I think of as being very important. It says a third of your life you learn, a third of your life you earn, and a third of your life you return. You know, on that sort of basis, if you’re in education, in higher education until you’re 25, that’s you’re learning piece. If you’re working at the coal face doing the high stress jobs, that’s till your 50. Much after that it’s about returning, and giving back is not just philanthropy, it’s giving back in terms of your time, your experience. It’s giving back in terms of mentoring. It’s giving back in terms of lots of those things which it’s very easy for people to sort of say, “Well, that’s a luxury. That’s a nice to have.” Actually, I think that’s what makes the difference between successful organisations and organisations that run into trouble. It’s that they’ve forgotten almost, or never bothered to learn, the history of the market or the segment or the organisation, and those, in that other great proverb, those that never learn history are always doomed to repeat its mistakes.

Julia: So that’s probably a good moment to turn to Tiina as well. Because you were talking about the data points, and also organisational behaviour if you like. Tiina, from your experience, is there anything that Peter said that you’d like to comment on? I’m very interested to hear kind of your thoughts around diversity and inclusion in organisational change.

Tiina: Sure, absolutely. I think, Peter, something you said about cycles really resonated with me, perhaps more from a gender perspective than from an age perspective because I think for women typically there’s a first cycle which occurs around the time when you have children, and we see a lot of women taking some time out of the labour market, out of their careers at that point. I think more and more now, organisations are thinking about setting up things like return programmes, or different ways of in the first place just attracting women back when they’ve taken that sideways step. But also, I think there is a consensus that there isn’t enough understanding within organisations around how do you support that cycle. We see that women’s and men’s earnings start to diverge at the point where women have their first child, and basically, at no point will they catch up with men’s salaries.

For instance, in the UK in things like the gender pay gap, which, let’s be frank, isn’t particularly good and particularly in the financial services sector. I think part of the puzzle is really thinking more carefully about these cycles, and thinking about what can organisations do to support women both back, but also when they are out of the labour market with things like shared parental leave, things like … How can we empower employees, if they’re women or men, to think about how they can split that childcare burden a bit differently?

Julia: I imagine at the moment that a lot of organisations are thinking about, having done the analysis of their pay gap, and are thinking about how they could improve upon it. Are there some key tips that you give organisations, things they should focus on?

Tiina: I think there’s probably lots of things. I think the first thing that a lot of employers have already started doing is exactly as you say, looking at their data. They’ve now had to produce some key data points around what is the difference in average hourly wages between men and women? What’s the difference in bonus pays between men and women? Typically, what they’re finding is that these gaps are driven by the fact that there are fewer women in the top leadership ranks. I think what a lot of organisations and companies are looking at now is, “Well, how do we get more women into our executive positions?” How do we get more women into the pipelines to sort of middle, top middle management, where they can then start moving upwards?”

I think the answers are going to vary by organisation, but perhaps as just a sort of trailer, I can say a lot of the things that organisations are doing at the moment, the diversity and inclusion initiatives they’ve been spending money on for the past 20 years don’t seem to be really producing the kinds of returns, the results that they were hoping. This is something that I hear daily from diversity and inclusions leads. Look, what can we do that’s different to what we’ve done so far because clearly something’s not working?

I guess I can go into it now, the two key tips that we’re seeing from the behavioural science side of things is, first of all, to take transparency seriously. So really think about how can I make my, for example, recruitment processes, or my promotion processes, such that people understand what, for example, women understand, what is required of me to progress to the next level.

We know from research that women tend to be a bit more ambiguity averse, or averse to a lack of information. The classic anecdote that’s given is that you’re a woman, you look at a job ad, you go, “Oh, I’ve only got nine out of the 10 qualities they’re asking of me, I can’t possibly apply for this job.” And you’ve got a bloke looking at the same job going, “I’ve got five out of 10, I’ll definitely give it a go.” There’s something about that level of ambiguity that men seem to feel more comfortable with.

If we are designing processes, HR processes, talent management processes, can we on the one hand make them much more transparent for the people, but also can we think about transparency from the perspective of the person making those hiring and promotion decisions? That’s another piece, which again from the behavioural science side, we see as really crucial.

Julia: Peter, should I come to you at that point because you’ve been in many organisations-

Peter: Yeah, I’d just like to pick up on one of those points that Tiina made, which I think is really interesting and talk about ambiguity in, let’s say, employment advertisements. Yes, you could say, well, ambiguity could be the reason. Another reason could certainly be risk aversion, that different people have different appetites for taking on risk and for dealing with risk. I think it’s quite important sometimes to be, in some of the job advertisements, to be deliberately vague because  what you want to find is the people who are able to deal with risk, because it’s the risk that you’re actually seeking to introduce into the system.

It seems to me as well that a lot of what Tiina was saying, the rather disappointing results over the last 20 years, you know what that comes back to? It comes back to one really simple word, leadership. It comes back to some people in the leadership position not giving it enough welly, not giving it enough support, not delivering it. In the firms I’ve been involved in, certainly where I’ve had the privilege of being able to influence some of the board appointments, it’s always been absolutely essential that we have senior women directors on The Board, senior non-execs on The Board.

We’ve had senior women throughout the organisation, not for some sort of idea of trying to balance things up, but because we want a diversity because the diversity gives us better decisions. Better decisions mean more commercial success. That’s really why I’m very interested in it. The other thing that I also find very, very significant is the ability to be able to tap into an extraordinarily powerful labour market, which are those ladies that have gone off, have had their children, and now want to come back to work. They are a phenomenal resource. They’re very, very focused. They’re very, very trained. They’re very dedicated, very productive. Most of all, they’re very, very responsible.

There’s a sort of level of looking after things, of nurturing the job, the position that they have accepted with you, that gives you and them the ability to prosper. I think in terms of actually looking at the numbers, we run a tech firm, sure. We’ve got I think about 75 people at the moment, and that’s growing like smoke. We could have had a complete board meeting of the company and all its employees in the back of a London taxi in 2015. Now we probably need a real boardroom.

The point is that when you look down the list of people that work for us, yes we have got a good group, a good representation of ladies, that’s great. When we do the numbers, however, the group of women that we’ve got are marginally better paid on average than the similar male employees. We’ve actually got a vaguely positive pay balance, vaguely positive. I mean it’s pretty close, but that’s good. That’s not come about because anybody has sat there and said, “We’ve got to go and do this because we want to get gender diversity,” or anything. It’s gone about because we’ve chosen the best people for the job, given them the job, and paid them what they’re worth.

In some of the cases it’s turned out that that has produced this result. I’m proud of it. We’ve got further to go. We need other people. We need a greater spread of people, but I think we’ve made an effort, and we should continue to work on that. I would council other firms to do the same. It comes to leadership.

Julia: Lots of larger organisations have this constant quest to become more innovative and more agile. There’s this digital transformation journey that everybody’s going through, and therefore they need those skills so keenly, and that talent is in many different places. But one of the fundamental sticking points we’ve come across time and time again is this requirement for presenteeism. I would like to ask you both about your opinion on having flexible working models that will allow that next cycle as you so beautifully put it, about returning working mothers to be able to work in a very flexible way, in perhaps in quite an institutionalised industry as well.

Tiina, let me come to you first of all. Any thoughts around flexible working?

Tiina: Yeah, absolutely. I think flexible working is a buzzword we hear a lot. I think it means a lot of different things for a lot of different people. I think in many places it means basically part-time working is a form of flexibility. I think part-time work is a tricky one because what we seem to be seeing is this sort of penalty, obviously, and overall you earn less if you’re working part-time. I don’t think we understand enough about part-time work and how it affects things like performance ratings. If you’re in the office three days a week, how does that affect, how committed you’re perceived to be, etc?

I also don’t think we know enough about how working part-time affects men and women, for example, differently. There’s some evidence suggesting that there’s actually a larger penalty for men. So if you’re a man who’s working flexibly, you’re perceived as even less committed, which then potentially could mean that actually part-time work becomes a thing, kind of a mommy-track, so men don’t dare take on part-time work, or other forms of flexibility.

Julia: Is that something you’re looking at, or planning to look at?

Tiina: It is something we are looking at as part of some of the work we’re doing that’s together with the Government Equalities Office, who are asking us to look at data from different large corporations across the UK. One of the things we are very interested in is assessing are there these gender patterns in terms of who works flexibly, but also what impact does that have on their ability then to progress in the organisation?

I think my personal opinion on this is that it is definitely the way to go. I think in the modern workplace, people need to be able to work in different ways and different patterns, and I think we see a lot of cutting-edge firms give their staff that sort of freedom to work where they need to work, when they need to work. But I think we don’t understand yet enough about whether that then has a kind of differential impact on different groups.

Julia: And, of course, technology is a great enabler to do that, but also we work in international markets, so the working day gets extended. I know that because I have clients in Australia and also in the States as well. Then it becomes a very, very long working day.

Peter, how do charge your organisation to handle not only the flexible working force, to serve a client basis international, but also have a central office and a central hub?

Peter: Yeah, without wishing to sound like a broken record, I think again it comes back to leadership. It comes back to, do you have a relationship with the employees, or your employees, which allows you to be able to, a) know that they’re doing the work, b) trust them to do the work, and c) know that the quality of the work that they’re producing for you is merchantable quality? The most important thing about all of this though is that we all live very busy lives. We all live next to our machines, our computers or our cellphones, or whatever else, for emails and all the rest of it. The idea that one starts work at nine o’clock in the morning, and finishes work at five o’clock in the afternoon is possibly true if you’re working in a call centre, but anyplace else it’s, I think, rather fanciful to suggest that. How do you value somebody that wakes up in the middle of the night because they’ve got to feed a baby or something and answers a few emails? Is that a different quality of work than somebody who sits in the office and cranks out the same emails during the day? I don’t know.

But as far as I’m concerned in small organisations for sure, as long as the work gets done, as long as there’s proper accountability, and as long as the leadership are okay with trusting people to do it, trustworthy is very important I think in the employment relationship. I think presenteeism is a very overrated sort of metric, which people probably use to hide behind to deliver things.

I think on the other hand though, there’s also got to be that understanding that … at this point I suppose I get accused of going on a tech rant. There is a very real technical problem that very often because systems have been designed to do things, the only things that those systems can do are those things they were designed to do. If you’ve got a problem, which isn’t contemplated or wasn’t contemplated by the original developer of the system, it’s almost impossible to fix it. It’s very, very difficult to do something that’s not on the system.

So, for example, if you ever tried on one of the well known shopping websites to buy a holiday. No, you can’t. Why not? Because they were never coded to deliver holidays. You can buy a book about holidays. You could buy swimming trunks and suntan lotion and sunglasses, but you can’t buy a holiday. Why not? Because they’re not coded to do it. You can try as much as you like, you’ll never do it.

I think one of the things that we’ve got to be very mindful of as we go forwards, and I certainly see this from my own perspective, is that very often the answers that are given in multiple choice type tech interactions are designed for a very, very limited and narrow group of people and consumers. We’ve got to be much more inclusive. We’ve got to be much more able to accept that certain people have different views, and older people sometimes can’t see things properly. They can’t hear things properly. They find double negatives very confusing.

These are things which as the community gets older, these problems will become greater. We’ve got to be really thoughtful about lots of our technology as well as our working practises.

Julia: Again, coming back to the digital transformation journey, and the appetite for organisations to try and be more innovative in the way that they serve their customers as well. It strikes me there, from what Peter was saying, was that requires some corporate reimagination, if you like. Tiina, do you see organisations rethinking and then thinking about how they encode, and I mean that in its broadest sense, some of its practises in order to be able to drive change and therefore embrace new talent coming through?

Tiina: Certainly we do. I think we’re in a lucky position in the behavioural science team in that we get approached by organisations who’ve understood the importance of diversity, and who really want to find new ways to tackle the problem. I should say diversity and inclusion, so they’re thinking about this in a broader way. I think what they’re coming to us for is saying, “Look, we want to try some innovative things. We think we’ve got the data. We understand sort of our gender differences in terms of pay, in terms of progression, can we use some of this rigorous methodology to test some tweaks and changes to our existing processes?”

I think definitely there’s demand. I would agree with Peter that a lot of it comes down to leadership. I think, in particular, the word I like to use in this context is humility. So leaders, especially if they are sort of pale male and not necessarily representative of some of those groups they’re trying to support move up in the organisation, it’s so important. I can really tell the difference between leaders who kind of talk the talk versus the leaders who walk the talk, and they’re typically the ones who come in saying, “Look, I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, or a member of a minority.” Or, “I don’t know what your experience is like, tell me what it’s like.”

I think that’s where you really get good leadership, and they’re also often the leaders who then are willing to put in place actual structural changes, and some actual social accountability. I think that the second point I wanted to make is around the importance of having some accountability mechanisms in organisations. I don’t mean just having a D&I lead, as important as that is. What I mean is having someone, ideally a senior leader in the organisation, whose job it is to monitor progress, who can ask for data, who can question decisions that have been made, who can go to people saying, “I noticed that on this short list for this executive position there were no women,” for example, and say, “Why is that? Why did you not request the headhunters to give a 50/50 short list?” And so to have someone in that kind of senior position who has the power to go in and question, I think is what again, from the behavioural science side, seems to be really the way forward.

Julia: Let’s take a moment to turn to Cynthia and Robert for some research to support the discussion today.

Robert: In 2015, Laurence Leyden wrote an article called “Bringing 21st Century Technology into Banking.” The article is about four essential elements of 21st century banking, all of which still ring true today.

Cynthia: The four elements are, one, convenience. Putting the needs of the customer first before the wants and needs of the bank. Banks that can’t be flexible in adapting their services to suit consumer convenience risk jeopardising long-term success and sacrificing market share.

Two, relevance. Communication must be personalised and relevant to the context of the customer, with real time banking and maximised self service, underpinned with personalised tailored advice when needed.

Three, responsiveness. There must be a consistency of message and service delivery, which employees should be empowered to deliver. Employees need access to all the latest and most relevant data, if they are to respond accordingly.

And, finally, reliability. Banks cannot afford to have an unreliable reputation. Recent research from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that consumers expect the same quality experience as that provided by large internet companies. Reliability is at the very core of quality experience.

Robert: A 2017 article in Financial News clearly highlights that city executives over 50 are most definitely not over the hill. With many years of experience in managing people, understanding issues, making decisions, and dealing with problems, 50-somethings have a huge amount to offer the financial services sector. Opportunities include non-exec roles, consulting, training, and positions in startups. Other options include teaching, lecturing, or even politics. This may also be the perfect time to retrain or develop skills in relatively new areas such as FinTech.

Julia: Thanks Cynthia and Robert, and links to the research can be found on our website, Divercitypodcast.com, where you can find all our episodes, and sign up for early notifications of future recordings. Please do follow us on Twitter, @divercitypod. DiverCity Podcast is also available on BrightTALK, and all good podcast channels. We’d love a rating, it all helps promote the show.

Just thinking about some of the dynamics at play when it comes to finding talent, the role of recruitment firms is clearly very key. Peter, do you brief your recruitment firms differently?

Peter: Oh, yes, very much so. I think one of the quick wins, one of the early lessons that I would identify is that if when you’re recruiting somebody, you go and choose the recruitment firm, and you don’t ask them what they’re policy is about recruiting a good diverse mix of people, and what their success is at doing that, then effectively all you’re doing is just propagating the old prejudices. You really do need to work quite carefully at asking that question right up front.

This again goes back to a sense of yourself, about who you want to work with, and who are the sort of people you want to work with. Clearly a good recruitment firm that has a good track record of recruiting across the spectrum is very powerful.

Julia: Thinking about the impact, which is always the big question to finish on, which is how do you evaluate the impact of diversity and inclusion?

Tiina: I think evaluation is key. We were just talking now about recruitment. There was an interesting study in the Harvard Business Review very recently, which showed quite depressingly that adding one woman on a four candidate shortlist did absolutely nothing to increase the chances of a woman being selected. So, basically, that woman still gets considered as a token person, a token woman, and is kind of still sending that implicit message that really what you want to do is hire a bloke.  It’s not until you add at least two women out of four that you’re actually starting to see that the chance of hiring a woman go up. That’s an example of something where, by using an actual experimental design, researchers were able to evaluate and say, “Actually, it does matter how you construct short lists. Just having a woman on a short list doesn’t necessarily make things better.”

I think that’s the approach that we try and put forward and help organisations with when it comes to other diversity initiatives. Again, research suggests that networking programmes and initiatives, where you bring women, for example, together to talk about things and hear talks, etc, seem to be very helpful for white women, at least in the American context, but seem to do very little to help women from other minority groups to progress.

The converse is true for mentoring programmes. It seems, at least again in the US, that offering mentoring programmes doesn’t really support white women, but seems to support minority women. I think we’re at the start of starting to understand these things, and what we need to do in the tech sector and financial services sector is really, when we are introducing these initiatives, actually have ahead of time thought about how am I going to measure this in a meaningful way, rather than just asking people did they like the programme. Because most people will say, “Yes, I liked it.” I chatted to other people like me. And actually look at, did it change something meaningful in terms of who gets promoted, in terms of who sits on the ExCo etc.

Julia: It’s been a really fascinating discussion. I know you’re both incredibly busy, so I just wanted to take a moment to thank you both, Tiina and Peter, thank you.

Peter: You’re very welcome.

Kieron: This episode of the DiverCity Podcast was produced by me, Kieron Yates, on behalf of Julia Streets Productions. Thanks to Cynthia Akinsanya and Robert Pinto-Fernandes for their insights. You can find out more about the guests on this week’s show on our website, divercitypodcast.com. Whilst you are there, you can also sign up to our newsletter for all our latest updates.

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