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The bank's diversity and inclusion culture is evident in its HR management processes, from recruitment, talent development, and succession planning to compensation and benefits.
This article is brought to you by Societe Generale
Societe Generale (SocGen) is one of Europe’s leading financial services groups, with over 126,000 employees of 152 different nationalities in 65 countries. As a large-scale group with such a strong workforce, ensuring the quality of working life, equity and inclusion, and professional development of the teams is a key factor in supporting employee development within the Group and improving performance.
As a responsible employer, diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) is at the core of SocGen’s values. Its goal is to nurture a culture devoted to the respect, recognition, and promotion of all talents, regardless of belief, age, disability, parental status, ethnic origin, nationality, gender identity, sexual orientation, or social origin.
SocGen is therefore committed to ensuring the neutrality of its HR management processes throughout the entire employee journey, from recruitment, talent development, and succession planning to compensation and benefits.
Fostering a cross-generational workforce
To build a sustainable pipeline, SocGen starts engaging talent from their early career stage. The bank has enhanced outreach with university students through campus events, company visits, and event sponsorships. At the campus recruitment events, VR technology has been leveraged to attract the young talent and share a taste of employee experience at SocGen.
Candidates are offered diverse opportunities according to their qualifications and experiences, such as internships for current students studying towards a bachelor's or master's degree, trainee programmes that have no limit on work experience requirement.
After attracting employees to join the bank, the next focus is to foster an adequate environment and awareness at the workplace to integrate employees from different generations.
Recognising the value of each generation, SocGen strives to create an inclusive environment for all generations and bridge the gap in between.
To achieve this, the bank has launched ‘The Cross-Generational Network', which focuses on:
- promoting inclusive ways of working,
- raising awareness of generational differences,
- embracing new technologies, and
- building a cross-generational community.
Supporting employees’ growth and development
As today's talent emphasises continuous learning and career advancement, providing robust learning opportunities is crucial to retain them.
Aimed at inculcating curiosity and a growth mindset in all employees, SocGen has ensured that learning is pervasive and available to everyone who might benefit from it, while respecting different learning styles in how employees absorb and consume information, different levels of access to information, and different motivations to learn.
With this in mind, SocGen has adopted a user-centric approach, and implemented a holistic assessment to design the development offerings that cater to the diverse needs and styles of employees. Input from management, managers and all staff, as well as feedback from stakeholders, have also been integrated to iterate the prototype until it gets right from a user perspective.
SocGen then provides different modes of development for the best fit of employees, covering standard development, on-the-job development, and self-development. Hybrid training is available for all employees to upskill themselves for the future of work anytime, anywhere. For high-potential employees at different career stages, tailored talent development programmes are in place. Meanwhile, various promotion and internal mobility opportunities are also open for interested employees, with corresponding training resources supporting them.
Rewarding employees fairly
Apart from growing and developing people, right compensation and rewards are also key to enhance employees' engagement.
Based on a total rewards approach, SocGen offers attractive remuneration and benefits programmes, including fixed and variable pay, comprehensive leave policies, above-market pension schemes, work-from-home arrangements, and many more.
Employees are assured of being paid based on their performance and behaviours, with their salary and potential discretionary bonuses being reviewed annually.
To further ensure pay equity, SocGen conducts an annual equal pay review to examine any pay difference in equal or similar jobs/roles. This approach helps close the pay gaps and ensure any differences in pay are owed to legitimate reasons like experience.
Valuing neurodiversity
SocGen understands that there is a wide range of neurological differences between individuals, including how people think, process information, communicate, and interact with others.
Seeing “Differently Abled” as one of its five priority areas in DE&I, the bank has made a dedicated effort to raise awareness in the workplace by establishing the Great Minds Neurodiversity Network, and celebrating neurodiversity with a series of initiatives, such as introductory sessions and insightful discussions.
Walking the talk from the top and involving all levels of the organisation
All these approaches have paid off. Through its efforts made in talent acquisition, succession planning, and talent development over the past few years, the representation of diversity at SocGen has considerably improved across corporate levels, particularly at the MD level, management committee members, and key position incumbents.
For SocGen, DE&I is not just a nice-to-have, or a CSR effort, but a bank-wide initiative. The financial services group believes DE&I holds as much importance as other business initiatives, and this benefits the business entirely through diversified and improved quality of thinking and collaboration. In a nutshell, to build a more diverse and inclusive workplace, everyone in the company has a role to play.
As such, this sees active allyship from the senior management, with each DE&I network being sponsored by the regional Management Committee members, and MDs and Directors showcasing strong involvement or interest in the network by attending and/or encouraging others to attend events.
While HR helps in the framework and questions relating to strategy, the momentum continues to be staff-driven, created and sustained by the employee network themselves.
The DE&I mindset is also specifically cascaded down to line managers. By doing so, they are encouraged to be supportive of their staff who may want to attend DEI events during the workday.
"We want to achieve a change of mindset, and we believe that consistent efforts will make a difference in the long run,” emphasises Mukta Arya, Chief Human Resources Officer, Asia Pacific, Societe Generale.
“The implementation of our diversity and inclusion strategy has taught us to be perseverant and consistent. Having passionate employees and senior management supporting this strategy also makes a big difference. We are convinced that engagement at all levels of the organisation is essential in order to achieve a diverse and inclusive mindset."
Photos / Societe Generale
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