LGBT: The Global Oversight Board

Our business relies on how well we embrace the skills, experience and perspectives of everyone at Barclays to enrich relationships with our diverse customer base, drive innovation and make better decisions. Understanding the power of diversity enables us to unlock everyone’s talent, improve business performance and deliver a sustainable and successful future.

Based on feedback and insight from colleagues across the organisation, the Global Oversight Board has identified three key priorities to focus efforts over the next 18 months: strengthening our global Spectrum Allies programme, an initiative through which employees can actively participate in a visibly and vocally supportive network for LGBT colleagues and their communities; (2) improving communications within the LGBT space, including regularly publishing updates from the Global Oversight Board, broadening the scope of the Spectrum app and profiling LGBT role models at all levels throughout the organisation; and (3) more directly engaging and supporting LGBT clients and customers, through our marketing and advertising campaigns and by up-skilling our frontline staff on LGBT-related topics.

Disability: ‘This Is Me’

Mental health conditions affect 1 in 4 people in the UK every year, with 1 in 6 in the workplace also affected. Of those, 9 in 10 are stigmatised because of their condition - which can affect productivity, morale and engagement.

‘This is Me” launched in May, 2014 and is the Reach disability colleague network’s flagship campaign for 2014. It aims to tackle stigma and end the culture of silence that surrounds mental ill health. Featuring real colleagues talking about their personal experiences, it promotes conversation and provides resources for colleagues and line managers . Building on our work towards becoming the ‘most accessible and inclusive Go-To bank’ and our involvement in the government’s Disability Confident campaign, it has received praise both internally and externally and truly aligns to the Values.

Multiculturalism: “Embrace” all cultures, all faiths, all people

Towards the end of last year we issued a challenge to the members of our cultural awareness networks: come up with a fitting name for our new unified Barclays multicultural network. We received an impressive number of suggestions and we are delighted to announce that, by popular vote, the new name is Embrace.

Embrace is dedicated to championing Barclays' ambition to be the Go-To bank for multiculturalism, ensuring that we value, respect and maximise the diversity of all colleagues, customers and clients.

It brings together two key legacy networks -- CIBWIM's Cultural Awareness Network (CAN) and the RBB and Barclaycard Cultural Diversity Network (CDN) -- and our nationality and faith-specific networks, now called ‘forums’: Africa Forum, Muslim Forum, Christian Forum and the Jewish Forum.