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An address by Sylvia Chrominska
Executive Vice-President
Human Resources and Public, Corporate &
Government Affairs
Scotiabank
Presentation to Catalyst Canada
Toronto, Ontario
April 4, 2007
“For Scotiabank, improving the status of women, and ultimately all employees, regardless of gender, race or religion simply makes good business sense.”
Check Against Delivery
On behalf of Scotiabank, I am delighted to be here today and to have the opportunity to share with you the story of Scotiabank’s Advancement of Women Initiative.
As I’m sure is the case with everyone else here today, I was extremely disappointed by the findings in Catalyst’s most recent census.
It’s disheartening to learn that despite the unprecedented levels of education and professional expertise, the representation of women in leadership roles is increasing at such a slow pace.
And it’s even more surprising that in today’s highly competitive global markets, we as Canadian business leaders want to ignore the talents, insights and potential contributions of half the population.
But things can change. I am extremely encouraged by what we at Scotiabank have been able to achieve over the last few years with perseverance and determined effort.
And I’d like to congratulate Catalyst for the significant role it continues to play in providing knowledge and insight into this issue and the work it does with organizations to help them make fundamental and sustainable change.
Certainly, our Bank looked to Catalyst for help in getting us on a path to make change.
I know from personal experience that positive outcomes can be attained if businesses make a commitment to advancement of women strategies.
As the head of Human Resources at Scotiabank, I know that good intentions, unfortunately, are not enough to get results.
Like so many companies, for years, our Bank has struggled with trying to bring about the kind of changes we wanted and needed. In the end, we did find a way to achieve our goals in advancing women at our organization, but it wasn’t easy.
Today, I want to share with your our story. About how we struggled with the issue – and what we did to get meaningful results.
Let me start by telling you a little bit about Scotiabank. We are one of North America’s premier financial institutions – and this year we are celebrating our 175th anniversary.
Something that people don’t know about Scotiabank is that we are also Canada’s most international bank, with 57,000 employees, serving 12 million customers in some 50 countries around the world.
We have a strong track record of financial success. Over the past decade, our total returns to common shareholders have averaged 20% per annum.
To put that in perspective, according to a global measure of the relative performance of the 400 largest companies in global financial services, we ranked number one in North America and number two in the world over the past three, five and 10 years.
Our goal is to be the best Canadian-based international financial services company. Success for us means not only creating shareholder value, but also building long-term relationships with our customers and having engaged employees.
And that last point is really what advancement of women is all about.
To provide some context, let me go back a few years to the early 1990s, when Scotiabank first started to tackle the Advancement of Women as a priority.
As a federally regulated organization, our effort was originally grounded in the need for the Bank to have certain stipulated representation of designated groups, including women.
We recognized even then that there were many systemic problems with the advancement of women within our Bank.
They weren’t problems unique to our Bank, but problems that were consistent across many industries, like the stereotypes about women’s abilities or motivation to lead, family responsibilities and lack of child care support, lack of effective mentors and the old boys network to name a few.
As a result, in 1993, we decided it was time to make a change and like many organizations back then, our work began with the creation of the Chairman's Taskforce on the Equality of Women.
While our Bank’s Taskforce served to raise organizational awareness of this issue, very little meaningful progress was made.
In fact, after 10 years of trying, women still held less than 20% of senior management positions and we lagged behind our competitors.
This was somewhat embarrassing and extremely frustrating because the Bank was beating the competition on many fronts. But on this, we were sadly lagging.
And as I look back to that time, a number of key things were lacking. Our original efforts were rooted in compliance – rather than a business imperative. There was no accountability and there was not enough reinforcement and visible sponsorship from the top.
No targets were set, and tracking of progress and metrics was questionable.
In retrospect, we naively thought that if we eliminated the obvious biases from our policies and programs things would change.
We avoided setting targets because we were concerned about a negative backlash within the Bank.
Another point, and one I want to come back to, is that our efforts back then were focused on our domestic operations.
In looking back, this was somewhat misguided in that, what we were really trying to achieve was a major cultural change for the whole organization, not only in Canada, but also internationally.
Clearly we needed to do more. So in 2003, we re-launched our initiative. Easier said than done. We were asking for cultural change from fairly skeptical group of men and women who had been down this path before.
Still, we decided we would set ourselves a tough goal. We want to be recognized as a leader in the advancement of women in all countries where we operate as part of our strategy to be a global employer of choice.
We knew that to be successful, we needed to engage all business leaders by speaking in terms that resonated with them. So, we started with a solid business case.
We knew that actively engaging our business leaders was key. We needed to develop a business case that articulated the value of diversity and advancing women and we needed to speak in terms that resonated with the business.
With women comprising 73% of our workforce, it was obvious that women were underrepresented at senior levels. As well, our internal research told us that women were less satisfied than men on a number of fronts.
We also knew – in fact it’s widely known – that employee satisfaction leads to customer satisfaction, which leads to better business results.
And when we looked at the educational background and performance of our women, we knew they had the skills, proven performance levels, and aspirations to contribute at more senior levels.
Another compelling argument was Catalyst’s own research which shows that organizations with diverse management teams experienced better financial performance.
We set up a Steering Committee of passionate, senior level women, representing all business lines.
The short term goals for our Canadian effort were to meet Government benchmarks and to achieve a respectable position among our competitors.
But, as I just said, we had a much loftier vision.
Our business case was based on three fundamental objectives.
- improving business performance
- maintaining our competitive position in the war for talent
- leveraging the existing talent pool
With the recommendations of the Steering Committee, and the insights from our own research and that of Catalyst research and with best practices in hand, we formulated our Advancement of Women strategy.
The strategy envisioned launching the initiative in Canada, and ultimately making it a global issue.
The strategy itself is comprised of seven strategic elements.
First, we started with a clear commitment to our strategy from our senior management, in particular our CEO, Rick Waugh.
We understood that it was absolutely vital to get buy-in from the most senior levels of the organization and securing them as visible and active champions to the cause.
Without this type of visible commitment, it would have been much more difficult to have created momentum, secured buy-in and achieved the type of results required to secure meaningful, sustainable change.
Commitment alone does not yield results. As I mentioned earlier, Scotiabank holds its leaders accountable for the success of the AoW initiative through a comprehensive system of goal setting, tracking and an evaluation process – called the accountability framework.
Accountability for women’s advancement is documented with targets on the People Quadrant of the balanced scorecard.
The People targets, as well as the performance goals in the other three quadrants -- Financial, Customer and Operational -- are tied to compensation and reviewed annually.
Our third area was mentoring programs. We recognized that we needed to do a better job of providing career development support to women by fostering mentoring relationships across the organization.
We do so through formal mentoring programs, and by supporting all mentoring relationships through the development of an online mentoring toolkit that resides on HR Passport, our employee website.
The toolkit is available to all employees, regardless of location, gender or level.
We knew that women do not have the same opportunity to network and are not as comfortable doing so as men are.
And so, it was important that we create these opportunities for women to make connections; to get visibility and gain access to female role models.
We achieved this via the ScotiaWomen’s Connection Networking events. Four times each year, networking events for women at the manager level and above are held whereby women can participate in person, or via a live, global webcast.
These corporate events have become an impetus for the formation and creation of local networking events. A network-in-a-box’ toolkit on HR Passport helps to support these local networking efforts.
More and more, we hear of networking events sprouting up across the Bank where women get together to meet, network, develop meaningful connections – and then watch the global webcast being launched in Toronto, with one another.
Much of our focus has been on women at senior levels. However, to further embed the AoW initiative into the Bank culture, we recognized that it was necessary to extend deeper into our existing talent pool to identify and prepare aspiring leaders to help them be ready to take on bigger roles.
And so, the process of making leaders accountable for feeder pool targets is underway.
We also clarified the career advancement process. We took steps to clarify our policies and procedures surrounding career advancement to ensure that all employees are on equal footing.
One such example is the creation of the “leader profile” which outlines key leadership experiences and competencies that would be beneficial for individuals aspiring to senior-executive roles.
We now come to our seventh and final strategic pursuit, leveraging external presence.
By sponsoring and partnering with organization’s that foster women’s advancement, we provide Scotiabank women with access to external networking forums as well as provide them with the opportunities to connect and give back to their respective communities - further positioning Scotiabank as a destination employer for women.
So, how did we do?
When we first launched our strategy in 2003, our representation of women at the senior management level was 18.9%. By 2006, we had reached 31%.
Representation of women at the most senior Executive Vice President/Corporate Officer level increased from 26.7% in 2003 to 36.8% in 2006.
Employee satisfaction rose 9 points and return on equity in the same period went from 16.6% to 22.1%.
And as importantly, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that while these results were being achieved in Canada, AoW really struck a chord throughout our organization with all of our employees.
We’ve now launched the Advancement of Women Initiative globally – beginning in many of our largest international operations including Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Bahamas to name a few.
We now have five female country heads and the Regional Senior Vice President for our Asia Pacific region is a woman.
And, I’m just back from a trip to Chile and Peru – where the primary focus of my meetings with employees and business leaders was this issue.
In Chile – a country led a female president – they are experiencing tremendous cultural change – not only in business but socially as well.
I had the pleasure of participating in a local networking event. One of the often cited concerns of women there was around dealing with the potential backlash from men. I reiterated to them the importance of a compelling business case.
As well, I spoke to a group of 100 or so business leaders who I believe are generally engaged in raising the level of discussion around discrimination and diversity more broadly in that country.
In many of these countries we are the only large employer who is setting out to tackle this issue, and it’s my sense that our bank will see real success in all these markets.
It’s hard to take 3-plus years’ of effort and summarize it into a brief speech. But I would say that the success of our initiative was directly linked to the following factors.
Engaging multiple champions. By empowering leaders and engaging highly visible, influential advocates from various levels, business lines and backgrounds, we have been able to entrench support throughout the organization.
This enabled us to introduce and execute on AoW initiatives up, down and across the Bank.
Leveraging existing business processes, programs and platforms. By speaking the language of business and embedding the pursuits in existing processes, we are successfully engaging business leaders, reinforcing the ‘business value’ of the work, and increasing the rate of acceptance and implementation across the organization.
And finally, providing leadership and support while encouraging local creativity. Providing the vision and overall direction, while allowing for business line specifics, we are benefiting from the creativity of grassroots development, sharing best practices across the organization and creating momentum.
As an organization with presence in some 50 countries, it was critical that we delivered a strategy that provided a sound framework, yet was replicable and respectful of cultural and regional differences.
These three success factors have truly differentiated the Advancement of Women initiative from our previous efforts, enabling us to deliver unprecedented results.
I am sure that all of you know that advancing women is not just about targets or numbers. It really involves a massive culture change. And it doesn’t happen quickly.
It’s about capturing the skills, knowledge and abilities of the broadest possible talent pool. Truly embracing diversity means everyone is enabled to contribute to their potential.
You as business leaders are at the forefront of directing change. You need to examine your own employment policies and programs and ask – are they free from bias, are there any discriminating factors at play?
You need to ask yourselves how you, as leaders, can ensure that all employees have an equal opportunity to compete, and to succeed in the workplace.
I’m extremely proud of the strong progress that Scotiabank has made, but recognize our work is not done.
With close to 57,000 employees worldwide, we want to strengthen our global employer of choice status and that, to me as I said earlier, that means being an employer of choice in every country in which we operate.
We know that we must sustain the great results achieved in Canada and build on them by extending deeper into the talent pool and ensure that all leaders are accountable for developing the next generation of leaders.
And we want to increase the momentum of our international efforts by supporting the advancement of women globally.
Our goal is to provide all Scotiabank employees around the world with a consistent and high quality employment experience.
For Scotiabank, improving the status of women, and ultimately all employees, regardless of gender, race or religion simply makes good business sense.
I ask you to take on the challenge.
Thank you.
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