Our pay gaps are largely due to the shape of our workforce. We have a higher representation of white and male employees at more senior levels and a higher representation of ethnic minority and female employees at more junior levels.

So what are we doing to change this?

The diverse talent pillar of our D&I strategy sets out the practical actions we’re taking to improve the recruitment, retention and progression of female and ethnic minority employees at all levels – from future talent to leadership. These include:

Diverse Talent:

We’re working to actively recruit, retain and progress a diverse workforce at all levels and nurture and support diverse talent into the wider real estate industry.

Our actions to support this include:

• Introducing our inclusive recruitment process for all leadership hires – This includes reviewing job descriptions for bias, consistently undertaking structured interviews, using employee interview panels, assessing candidates on inclusive leadership behaviours and setting gender and ethnic diversity shortlist targets for our recruiters and agencies. 
• Thrive career development programme – At Landsec we have over 50% female representation at management levels and below, but lower representation in leadership. We’ve taken a proactive approach to addressing this with Thrive – a development programme to encourage our talented and capable mid-level women to drive their careers and achieve their aspirations with us. Our third cohort started in spring 2023 with an additional 14 women going through the programme. 
• Launching Landsec Futures – Our internships and bursaries programmes are supporting our Diverse Future Talent objectives, with nine interns welcomed to Landsec so far and seven university bursaries committed to real estate students from underrepresented backgrounds.  

Inclusive culture

We’re taking steps to create an inclusive and supportive culture to ensure everyone is enabled to perform at their best. This includes:

• Inclusive policies and benefits – We have a range of policies and benefits to make sure that all of our people are supported. Examples include offering enhanced pay for adoption, maternity, paternity and shared parental leave. We also work with Peppy Health to provide app-based pre- and postnatal, fertility and menopause support.
• Our affinity networks (Diaspora and Landsec Women) – Our affinity networks help us to create an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive and have a rewarding career. Each network has a dedicated budget and a sponsor from our executive leadership team who champions the network at executive level. Landsec Women and the Diaspora network, focused on gender and race equality respectively, also collaborate together on initiatives. These include providing mentoring opportunities for predominantly female ethnic minority students through the Diverse Leaders Network.

Foundations

To make sure our D&I activity is impactful, we are led by data and evidence of what works in everything we do and being transparent about our efforts so that our colleagues and our partners can hold us accountable. In practice, this means our actions are informed by:

• Tracking recruitment data trends – We track gender and ethnicity trends for candidates at each of the four main stages of recruitment: Applied, telephone interview, second interview and hired. Doing this helps us to understand how diverse our candidates are, and to see what else we need to do to promote more diversity across the recruitment process.
• Sharing our diversity dashboard with all colleagues – Our diversity dashboard allows us to understand the representation of employees by gender and ethnicity in different areas and levels of our business. All colleagues are able to view the dashboard to understand diversity in their own business areas and understand anonymised trends such as recruitment and promotion trends to understand where action needs to be focused in their business area. 
• Implementing targeted D&I action plans – Following the launch of our D&I strategy in April 2023, each of our business areas has developed a targeted action plan for their business area, dialling up action in the areas most relevant to them based on their data and wider business priorities.

To find out more about our wider diversity and inclusion actions, take a look at our diversity and inclusion pages.