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.

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.

Flexible working

Flexible working was a key aspect of working at Skipton even before the pandemic, with many colleagues able to adopt flexible working patterns or work from home where possible, and take up to 3 days per year to volunteer in their local community. Whilst we are an organisation that really values strong, trusting relationships between colleagues and with customers, we see the Society as being more flexible than ever as a future workplace, enabling many colleagues to work from home for much of their time whilst also encouraging them to connect face-to-face periodically to create, collaborate and socialise together. Even our customer-facing colleagues, such as those working in our branches, are able to work much more flexibly now, helping customers in different ways such as by telephone or video conferencing.

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 we are also working with AccessAble, an organisation that provides Accessibility Guides on thousands of venues across the UK.

Find out more about Accessibility

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.

Healthy body and mind

Our colleagues voted for Mental Health UK to be our chosen corporate charity and we work in partnership with them to educate, inform and support colleagues and customers alike. Hundreds of our colleagues recently attended workshops run by our great charity partner.

We continue to focus on maintaining good mental health and have trained more than 50 colleagues as mental health first aiders. They’re able to support colleagues by noticing signs of poor mental health and talking through any issues. We're also rolling out mental health training to all our people leaders, ensuring they know how to support their team when they need it most.

We also support our colleagues’ physical wellbeing, with yoga videos, discounts for gyms and fitness advice. Finally, as you may expect, we often run financial wellbeing sessions for our colleagues to help them manage their finances.

We’re really proud to have won independent accreditations for our commitment to our people and the culture we endorse. We're seen as having ‘World Class’ levels of employee engagement by Best Companies and are seen as ‘High Performing’ by the provider of our Employee Opinion Survey, as well as the highest award possible from Investors in People, Platinum.

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; coaching and mentoring, education support; talent development programmes; internally designed leadership courses and programmes, we give our people the tools to help grow and develop their careers. We pride ourselves on innovative approaches, such as our Parent Mentoring programme and connecting with different sectors and organisations.

Supporting and developing leaders

Through our work with the Building Societies Association, 12 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 Graduate and Aspiring Leaders programmes.

Networked Leadership programme

Our Networked Leadership programme aims to help our leaders take the Society forward, learning about themselves and how they lead in an ever-changing world. By taking ownership of their own journey, developing strong relationships inside and outside the Society and identifying their own vision and goals; they develop and improve their leadership. We prefer this type of learning because it develops diverse leaders with different strengths and viewpoints, able to take the organisation forward.

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.