Our people

We’re proud of the people who work at Skipton Building Society. With their enthusiasm and dedication to customers, our colleagues strive to provide excellent customer service. Plainly and simply, without them, Skipton wouldn’t be Skipton.

That’s why we’re committed to creating a working environment where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive and be happy. Scroll down this page to find out how we are encouraging and supporting a culture which promotes diversity, encourages healthy bodies and minds, and hopes to inspire the next generation.

Diversity and Inclusion

Encouraging a diverse and inclusive culture is a really important part of our core values. We appreciate the value our colleagues’ unique differences can bring. We seek to attract, develop and keep hold of talented people who, together, will help us build a stronger Society that’s able to help our customers today and in the future.

Awareness

We’re committed to raising awareness of Diversity and Inclusion in communities in an effort to make sure everyone is seen and heard. We take part in events throughout the year which help improve the understanding of different cultures. Events like our National Inclusion Week in September, where our theme was ‘everyday inclusion’. Colleagues were given training on unconscious bias and encouraged to talk about their own experiences. And more publicly, we also show our support for events such as Pride, which recognises our LGBTQ+ colleagues, customers and friends.

Accessibility

We’re working to improve awareness and understanding of both the mental and physical disabilities faced by our colleagues. We’ve joined the government’s ‘Disability Confident’ scheme and set ourselves a target of becoming the most accessible building society by 2020. We are also working with AccessAble, an organisation that provides Accessibility Guides on thousands of venues across the UK.

Find out more about Accessibility

Working practices

We’ve set up a number of Diversity and Inclusion groups to help us embrace diversity right across our business. This includes looking at how we can better accommodate cultural practices and behaviours to allow our staff to follow their beliefs at work as they would at home. On top of this all our colleagues are invited to join groups and discussions to help improve the lives of colleagues from different backgrounds. Our LGBTQ+ network is a great example. And we’re not just focussed on improving understanding. We’re making tangible changes right now. For instance, we’re committed to addressing the issues that drive our gender pay and bonus gaps and we’ve put a number of measures in place to help improve them in the longer term.

We have our 2019 gender pay gap report as a PDF download if you’d like to take a look.

Women in Finance

When we signed the Women in Finance Charter, we agreed to a number of pledges that we can measure over time. It also demonstrates our commitment to gender equality and supports our belief that diversity of thought results in a better Society for our customers.

Find out more about Women in Finance

Healthy minds

We believe that a happier and healthier workforce is better for our customers. When our colleagues are in a good place, we think they can more effectively help you find your good place too. We continue to focus on maintaining good mental health and have trained more than 70 colleagues as mental health first aiders. They’re able to support colleagues by noticing signs of poor mental health and talking through any issues.

Healthy lives

We know work life balance is really important to our colleagues, so we’re working towards creating a culture of flexible working, to allow colleagues more control over their time with working patterns that suit individual lifestyles.

We're working towards creating a better future. One where our communities, our customers and our colleagues can all thrive. When we welcome a new colleague into the Society, we aim to look at their potential as much as their ability. Through apprenticeships, internally designed leadership courses and programmes to aid in skills development, we give our people the tools to help grow and develop their careers.

Supporting leaders and creating new leaders

Through our work with the Building Societies Association, seven of our senior leaders have studied for a master’s degree in Strategic Leadership at Loughborough University. We’re also helping the next generation of leaders with our Aspiring Leaders programme. All our training is developed in line with our culture and values.

Connecting Our Future

Our apprenticeship programme, Connecting Our Future, is designed to help the next generation of Financial Services colleagues. As a Society that cares, we feel we’re in a good position to help apprentices gain the right skills in the right way. Apprentices experience working in 5 different areas of the business while completing a Business Administrator Apprenticeship at level 3. The programme has been designed to demonstrate how different departments work together in order to provide a great customer experience. At Skipton, everything we do, including training the next generation, is done with the customer in mind.

Modern Leadership programme

Our Modern Leadership programme aims to help our current leaders realise their own career ambitions. By taking ownership of their own journey, they can identify goals and the areas of their own performance that they want to improve.

We prefer this type of learning because it creates different leaders with different strengths and viewpoints. We don’t develop ‘identikit leaders’.