Balance in Business

Slide One

INSEAD Alumni Balance in Business

BUILDING
LEADERSHIP COMPETENCE

In the field of gender balance

Find out how

Slide Two

INSEAD Alumni Balance in Business

EMPOWERING
BUSINESS LEADERS

In the field of gender balance

Find out how

Slide Three

INSEAD Alumni Balance in Business

KNOWLEDGE SHARING
& NETWORKING

In the field of gender balance

Find out how

Balance in Business Initiative

The aim of the Balance in Business Initiative is to engage and inspire current and future leaders on why Balance in Business matters, how to implement it and to recognise the value it can create. Our focus is on gender balance

This is a fully volunteer-led initiative run by INSEAD alumni who are passionate about addressing gender balance.

We also believe that by engaging and educating leaders they can become agents for change.

Find out more here...

Balance in Business Awards 2025

2024 BiB Awards - Find out More

Balance in Business Awards 2025

Applications Open 1st November…

Congratulations to the Winners of the Balance in Business Awards 2025

Founding Partner and BiB Awards Sponsor

Meet Dawn Capital

Our story - Diageo

We’re thrilled to be shortlisted for the 2023 Balance in Business Awards. We champion gender equality and believe that everybody should be able to thrive in an environment that values their contribution and celebrates what makes them unique.Javier Ferran, Chairman at Diageo

Reasons for our success:

Championing gender equality is core to Diageo’s performance ambition. We believe that everybody should be able to thrive in an environment that values their contribution and celebrates what makes them unique.
The creation of leading policies and practices have been crucial to Diageo’s progress, including our Parental Leave Policy; ‘Thriving through Menopause’ Guidelines; as well as our Pregnancy Loss Guidelines. We also make it a priority to support our growing Employee Resource Groups, including our women’s network ‘Spirited Women’, who are integral to championing change internally.
Our strategy to champion gender equality has had a direct impact across the business, allowing us to recruit and retain the best employees, achieve better performance, and have a greater impact on society.The percentage of women in our leadership group, including the ExCo, has risen from 38% to 44% since 2020. Twelve years ago, our ExCo was entirely male, proving that our strategy to promote the next generation of female leaders is having a positive and sustainable impact.

Our story - Halma

“Building diverse and inclusive businesses drives performance which is why it is fundamental to achieving our purpose at Halma. Over the past few years, we have made significant progress on gender diversity at all levels of our organisation and have worked hard to create an inclusive environment. We’re humbled that Halma’s efforts have been recognised in this way and look forward to continuing to champion equality for women across our businesses.”

Marc Ronchetti, Group Chief Executive at Halma

Reasons for our success:

At Halma, we knew the most important factor for success was cultivating the right mindset in our leaders and helping them understand how Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) can benefit their business. To jump-start this, we launched a peer-learning programme for colleagues to learn and practice the fundamentals of DEI. We also kicked off an inclusive leadership programme for company leaders to give them practical tools to apply to daily behaviours and decision-making.

Since then, we’ve introduced several initiatives that have had a positive impact in attracting and promoting female talent and levelling the playing field. Namely, our global parental leave policy offers 14 weeks paid leave to both men and women regardless of their sexual orientation (where allowed by law) to care for and bond with a new child. Our Future of Work philosophy promotes more flexibility and greater work-life balance by encouraging remote and agile working arrangements.

We’ve also focused our talent acquisition practices, including working with more diverse recruiters and insisting on diverse candidate slates. Lastly, we set ourselves a stretching target for all our company boards to be within a 40% to 60% gender balanced range by 31 March 2024. To accelerate the pace of change, this year a percentage of every senior leader’s annual bonus will be based on this target.

Our story - HSBC

“HSBC is committed to building an inclusive culture that reflects the diverse communities we serve. This is important to our business and people, and it’s also important to our customers, investors and regulators. We place a high value on transparency so they fully understand our D&I priorities and progress, but also so we can play a global leadership role and inspire others. As a leading global financial services organisation, we believe that we have a responsibility to help drive change.”

Mark Tucker, Chairman of the HSBC Holdings Board

Reasons for our success:

At HSBC we focus on impact not on input and that is the essence of why our gender strategy is working. Representation goals are met by a focus on hiring more, losing less and promoting more women. There are 3 actions we take that have been important contributory factors:

We have a long-term goal of achieving gender balance. We set 3–5-year medium-term goals. We have annual short-term goals that are 12-month sprints.
Management Accountability. We set public goals for our ED’s shared in our annual report. ED performance on D&I goals is weighted and indexed to total compensation. Cascaded to Group Executives performance scorecards with a similar link to compensation. Progress on D&I goals is treated equally as progress on other core business objectives.
We report quarterly progress on goals to the Executive Committee detailing both Group and individual performance.

Our story - Law Debenture

“Our priority is to level the playing field for women and men in our organisation, providing a diverse and inclusive workplace, which supports our people to grow their careers in a way that is both meaningful to them and promotes the delivery of our long-term growth strategy.”

Denis Jackson, CEO at Law Debenture

“It’s such an honour to be an inaugural Balance in Business shortlisted company and a pleasure to support INSEAD [Alumni Association] and the Institute of Directors with this vital initiative. We have worked hard, over the last three years in particular, to create a working culture that supports our people at all levels. A key part of this is representation of women at senior levels and a positive gender pay gap position. We know that our diversity directly benefits our clients. For our Corporate Secretarial Services and Pensions businesses, for example, having our women sit in the boardrooms of our clients supports their own diversity and representation. For our other services the diversity of thought brought through having work delivered by teams with an even split ensures innovation and challenge that may otherwise be missing. There is always more to do but we are committed to improving diversity in our workplace.”

Trish Houston, COO at Law Debenture

Reasons for our success:

Trish was instrumental in driving the re-designing of our company policies (2020/21), embedding them BAU so we support all our people. These include:

Improved Maternity Policy, including Support and Return to Work Bonus (we’ve enjoyed 100% return from mat leave in last 12 months)
Health and Compassionate Leave (including flexibility to take time when dependents are unwell)
Menopause Policy, changing healthcare providers to support
Clear career progression (including having flexible working women role models in each of our businesses)
Investment in Learning & Development
Family Healthcare
Employee Led Committees: Social & Sport; Charity + more

Our story - Lloyds Banking Group

“Lloyds Banking Group is pleased to have been shortlisted. There are lots of companies doing so many great things to move towards gender parity and increased diversity. This year, we’ve already seen all FTSE 350 companies achieving 40% women on Boards and, at Lloyds Banking Group, 45.5% of our Board are now women. But we’ve got still more to do – the goal for us is gender parity with 50% of women in senior roles by 2025 and we’ll continue our work to progress towards this.”

Fiona Cannon, Group Sustainable Business Director at Lloyds

Reasons for our success:

Internally, having a clear, measurable goal, that was linked to performance was a galvanising move for our most senior executives. Whilst the agenda had received sponsorship and support from the top in the past, these clear goals gave the organisation much greater focus – and the needed shift from ‘nice to do’ to business imperative.
Having an inclusive culture is enabling us to build a diverse workforce where all colleagues can be themselves. Inclusion and diversity is relevant to everyone.

Our story - M & S

“We’re determined to make M&S a great place to work for women at every level. Over the past year, we’ve made progress by launching our Worklife offering, bringing flexible working to our stores, rolling out our Job Share Finder, introducing free sanitary products for colleagues and welcoming Cheryl Potter to the M&S Board. We now have a female majority Board and a female Co-CEO. It’s fantastic to be shortlisted for the Balance in Business Awards, however we know there is more to do and have exciting plans for the year ahead.”

Sarah Findlater, Group HR Director at M&S

Reasons for our success:

We’ve proactively driven representation into our key succession roles, focusing on roles with a high level of influence and decision-making and in our areas that either lack representation and in those that are central to our business growth strategy.
We’ve invested in the development of our female talent, creating identifiable pathways and improving access to development resources that have been designed around the things our women told us they valued – flexible, bitesize and easy to digest.
Taken a multi-faceted data-led approach – understanding our female representation in our talent pipelines and development programmes, as well as analysing our performance and talent ratings processes to identify and address areas where bias may be influencing decision making which impacts future opportunities of women in our business

Our story - Pennon

“We are incredibly proud to be shortlisted for the INSEAD Alumni Balance in Business Awards, in recognition for the diversity we have within our business. We know from experience that balanced teams are far better at solving complex problems, delivering innovative solutions, and spotting new opportunities, as well as being powerful drivers of resilience. We believe that fostering a diverse and inclusive culture for all is a strategic imperative, and we treat it the same way as we do each strategic priority – setting the tone from the top, holding leaders accountable, and delivering against a clear action plan. We hope that by promoting equality and diversity in our sector we will inspire women and men to consider a career in our fascinating industry.”

Susan Davy, Chief Executive Officer, at Pennon Group

Reasons for our success:

Our employee network groups, which include women, menopause, and new parents’ groups, have given a greater voice to women across the group, involving our female colleagues in driving cultural change.
Education events have supported leaders and teams with managing and being a part of diverse teams and understanding the lived experience of their female peers and colleagues. Managers are also participating in inclusive leadership workshops, which are challenging behaviours and opening new ideas and opportunities.
An improved end to end recruitment process including a refreshed EVP and careers website, gender decoder for our adverts and diverse interview panels, plus working with managers to challenge assumptions and bias has led to a more diverse candidate pool and subsequent hires.

Our story - Schroders

“Improving diversity has fundamentally improved the effectiveness of our organisation. It has enabled us to make better decisions and better meet the needs of our clients. We are proud to have 50% female representation on our Board and having met our 35% female representation in senior management target a year early. In 2022, 49% of our joiners are female showing our commitment to building a sustainable diverse talent pipeline. I’m delighted that Schroders is shortlisted and am excited about our upcoming plans to accelerate change across the industry.”

Peter Harrison, Group Chief Executive at Schroders

Reasons for our success:

We implement data-driven solutions– We use data to build a comprehensive picture of our business, including data on recruitment, retention and progression, allowing us to assess where progress has been made and where there is more to do. Our 2022 employee pulse survey shows 96% of our people are proud to be associated with Schroders, significantly above industry norms.
Our commitment to transparency– Being transparent about our aspiration allows our stakeholders to hold us to account, just as we hold the companies in which we invest to account. Targets, used responsibly, can catalyse change. Having diversity data reporting presented on our financial reporting platform also allows diversity to be central to all business reviews. We are pleased to have met our aspiration of 35% female representation in senior management a year early.
Our I&D strategy is embedded in everything we do– from our people and culture, our wider industry and business engagement, to our impact on communities. Our flexible working charter is one of the many initiatives that we are proud of. Working on a principles-based approach where flexible working is available by default for everyone: not having to have a ‘reason’ to work flexibly ensures everyone is on an equal footing.

Our story - Tate & Lyle

“We are proud of our focus and work on improving gender balance and representation across our organisation, and honoured to be shortlisted for this award. At Tate & Lyle, we know that the key to unlocking our potential is to ensure that we reflect the world we live in and can tap into the strengths that come from the diversity of people that live in the communities we serve. We know that the best way to achieve this is to create a workplace with culture, policies and ways of working that are truly inclusive, supportive and welcoming of everyone.”

Dr Gerry Murphy, Chair at Tate & Lyle PLC

Reasons for our success:

We are vocal and demonstrative in our commitment to creating an inclusive workplace, and this shows in our recent Have Your Say employee survey, where we received our highest score ever on our commitment to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
We are proud and supportive of our ERGs and invest in them by allowing our ERG leaders to dedicate 10% of their work time to ERG related activities. This has resulted in speaker series, cultural celebrations, community work, mentoring partnerships, and improving our recruitment and retention practices.
Our global parental leave policy ensures that anyone who becomes a parent, however that happens for them, has the ability to take the time to bond with their new child and integrate into their new life. We know that people who feel supported in their home lives are better able to bring their best selves to work too, so we all win.

Our story - TESCO

“I am proud that diversity and inclusion is at the heart of Tesco and that Tesco is a place where Everyone is Welcome. It’s really great to have our efforts at improving representation of women across the business recognised by BiB. We have some amazing female talent in Tesco and I am pleased that the positive changes we are implementing are providing them with even more opportunities to get on at Tesco. While we know there is still work to do, I am pleased that we are moving in the right direction, and we are absolutely determined to build on the progress we have made so far.”

Ken Murphy, Group CEO at Tesco

Reasons for our success:

Exec resourcing improvements
- These improvements have been supported by ongoing positive changes to our senior hiring practices, including a step introduced early in our process that challenges our hiring managers’ and agency partners’ thinking ahead of recruiting; and taking a bi-annual, aggregated view of the candidate diversity of our shortlists for senior leadership roles and Promotion forms require leaders to illustrate what they’ve done to consider a diverse shortlist
- Changes to exec resourcing together with gender targets for Global Senior Leaders have led to 36% external senior appointments and 48% internal senior promotions were female last year
Targeted & focused interventions to develop diverse talent
- Our Diverse Talent Community helps us develop our emerging talent colleagues who are from an underrepresented community get on, by addressing barriers, providing colleagues with the tools, support and visibility to drive their career forwards.
- For our second cohort of 246 colleagues, we have extended this community to other areas of the Tesco Group and opened it up to more underrepresented communities. To help address the barriers and challenges faced by many Black colleagues in the workplace, we have also put a spotlight on the Black learning offer. In line with Tesco’s Black Action Plan commitments.
- Within our Diverse Talent Community, we have 54 colleagues participating – 29% have been promoted and 23% have experienced broadening moves since being part of the community. 94% of participants told us that they are now clearer on their career aspirations and have a career plan since joining the community.

Our story - Diageo

Reasons for our success:

Championing gender equality is core to Diageo’s performance ambition. We believe that everybody should be able to thrive in an environment that values their contribution and celebrates what makes them unique.
The creation of leading policies and practices have been crucial to Diageo’s progress, including our Parental Leave Policy; ‘Thriving through Menopause’ Guidelines; as well as our Pregnancy Loss Guidelines. We also make it a priority to support our growing Employee Resource Groups, including our women’s network ‘Spirited Women’, who are integral to championing change internally.
Our strategy to champion gender equality has had a direct impact across the business, allowing us to recruit and retain the best employees, achieve better performance, and have a greater impact on society.The percentage of women in our leadership group, including the ExCo, has risen from 38% to 44% since 2020. Twelve years ago, our ExCo was entirely male, proving that our strategy to promote the next generation of female leaders is having a positive and sustainable impact.

Our story - Halma

“Building diverse and inclusive businesses drives performance which is why it is fundamental to achieving our purpose at Halma. Over the past few years, we have made significant progress on gender diversity at all levels of our organisation and have worked hard to create an inclusive environment. We’re humbled that Halma’s efforts have been recognised in this way and look forward to continuing to champion equality for women across our businesses.”

Marc Ronchetti, Group Chief Executive at Halma

Reasons for our success:

Our story - HSBC

“HSBC is committed to building an inclusive culture that reflects the diverse communities we serve. This is important to our business and people, and it’s also important to our customers, investors and regulators. We place a high value on transparency so they fully understand our D&I priorities and progress, but also so we can play a global leadership role and inspire others. As a leading global financial services organisation, we believe that we have a responsibility to help drive change.”

Mark Tucker, Chairman of the HSBC Holdings Board

Reasons for our success:

We have a long-term goal of achieving gender balance. We set 3–5-year medium-term goals. We have annual short-term goals that are 12-month sprints.
Management Accountability. We set public goals for our ED’s shared in our annual report. ED performance on D&I goals is weighted and indexed to total compensation. Cascaded to Group Executives performance scorecards with a similar link to compensation. Progress on D&I goals is treated equally as progress on other core business objectives.
We report quarterly progress on goals to the Executive Committee detailing both Group and individual performance.

Our story - Law Debenture

“Our priority is to level the playing field for women and men in our organisation, providing a diverse and inclusive workplace, which supports our people to grow their careers in a way that is both meaningful to them and promotes the delivery of our long-term growth strategy.”

Denis Jackson, CEO at Law Debenture

“It’s such an honour to be an inaugural Balance in Business shortlisted company and a pleasure to support INSEAD [Alumni Association] and the Institute of Directors with this vital initiative. We have worked hard, over the last three years in particular, to create a working culture that supports our people at all levels. A key part of this is representation of women at senior levels and a positive gender pay gap position. We know that our diversity directly benefits our clients. For our Corporate Secretarial Services and Pensions businesses, for example, having our women sit in the boardrooms of our clients supports their own diversity and representation. For our other services the diversity of thought brought through having work delivered by teams with an even split ensures innovation and challenge that may otherwise be missing. There is always more to do but we are committed to improving diversity in our workplace.”

Trish Houston, COO at Law Debenture

Reasons for our success:

Trish was instrumental in driving the re-designing of our company policies (2020/21), embedding them BAU so we support all our people. These include:

Improved Maternity Policy, including Support and Return to Work Bonus (we’ve enjoyed 100% return from mat leave in last 12 months)
Health and Compassionate Leave (including flexibility to take time when dependents are unwell)
Menopause Policy, changing healthcare providers to support
Clear career progression (including having flexible working women role models in each of our businesses)
Investment in Learning & Development
Family Healthcare
Employee Led Committees: Social & Sport; Charity + more

Our story - Lloyds Banking Group

“Lloyds Banking Group is pleased to have been shortlisted. There are lots of companies doing so many great things to move towards gender parity and increased diversity. This year, we’ve already seen all FTSE 350 companies achieving 40% women on Boards and, at Lloyds Banking Group, 45.5% of our Board are now women. But we’ve got still more to do – the goal for us is gender parity with 50% of women in senior roles by 2025 and we’ll continue our work to progress towards this.”

Fiona Cannon, Group Sustainable Business Director at Lloyds

Reasons for our success:

Internally, having a clear, measurable goal, that was linked to performance was a galvanising move for our most senior executives. Whilst the agenda had received sponsorship and support from the top in the past, these clear goals gave the organisation much greater focus – and the needed shift from ‘nice to do’ to business imperative.
Having an inclusive culture is enabling us to build a diverse workforce where all colleagues can be themselves. Inclusion and diversity is relevant to everyone.

Our story - M & S

“We’re determined to make M&S a great place to work for women at every level. Over the past year, we’ve made progress by launching our Worklife offering, bringing flexible working to our stores, rolling out our Job Share Finder, introducing free sanitary products for colleagues and welcoming Cheryl Potter to the M&S Board. We now have a female majority Board and a female Co-CEO. It’s fantastic to be shortlisted for the Balance in Business Awards, however we know there is more to do and have exciting plans for the year ahead.”

Sarah Findlater, Group HR Director at M&S

Reasons for our success:

We’ve proactively driven representation into our key succession roles, focusing on roles with a high level of influence and decision-making and in our areas that either lack representation and in those that are central to our business growth strategy.
We’ve invested in the development of our female talent, creating identifiable pathways and improving access to development resources that have been designed around the things our women told us they valued – flexible, bitesize and easy to digest.
Taken a multi-faceted data-led approach – understanding our female representation in our talent pipelines and development programmes, as well as analysing our performance and talent ratings processes to identify and address areas where bias may be influencing decision making which impacts future opportunities of women in our business

Our story - Pennon

“We are incredibly proud to be shortlisted for the INSEAD Alumni Balance in Business Awards, in recognition for the diversity we have within our business. We know from experience that balanced teams are far better at solving complex problems, delivering innovative solutions, and spotting new opportunities, as well as being powerful drivers of resilience. We believe that fostering a diverse and inclusive culture for all is a strategic imperative, and we treat it the same way as we do each strategic priority – setting the tone from the top, holding leaders accountable, and delivering against a clear action plan. We hope that by promoting equality and diversity in our sector we will inspire women and men to consider a career in our fascinating industry.”

Susan Davy, Chief Executive Officer, at Pennon Group

Reasons for our success:

Our employee network groups, which include women, menopause, and new parents’ groups, have given a greater voice to women across the group, involving our female colleagues in driving cultural change.
Education events have supported leaders and teams with managing and being a part of diverse teams and understanding the lived experience of their female peers and colleagues. Managers are also participating in inclusive leadership workshops, which are challenging behaviours and opening new ideas and opportunities.
An improved end to end recruitment process including a refreshed EVP and careers website, gender decoder for our adverts and diverse interview panels, plus working with managers to challenge assumptions and bias has led to a more diverse candidate pool and subsequent hires.

Our story - Schroders

“Improving diversity has fundamentally improved the effectiveness of our organisation. It has enabled us to make better decisions and better meet the needs of our clients. We are proud to have 50% female representation on our Board and having met our 35% female representation in senior management target a year early. In 2022, 49% of our joiners are female showing our commitment to building a sustainable diverse talent pipeline. I’m delighted that Schroders is shortlisted and am excited about our upcoming plans to accelerate change across the industry.”

Peter Harrison, Group Chief Executive at Schroders

Reasons for our success:

We implement data-driven solutions– We use data to build a comprehensive picture of our business, including data on recruitment, retention and progression, allowing us to assess where progress has been made and where there is more to do. Our 2022 employee pulse survey shows 96% of our people are proud to be associated with Schroders, significantly above industry norms.
Our commitment to transparency– Being transparent about our aspiration allows our stakeholders to hold us to account, just as we hold the companies in which we invest to account. Targets, used responsibly, can catalyse change. Having diversity data reporting presented on our financial reporting platform also allows diversity to be central to all business reviews. We are pleased to have met our aspiration of 35% female representation in senior management a year early.
Our I&D strategy is embedded in everything we do– from our people and culture, our wider industry and business engagement, to our impact on communities. Our flexible working charter is one of the many initiatives that we are proud of. Working on a principles-based approach where flexible working is available by default for everyone: not having to have a ‘reason’ to work flexibly ensures everyone is on an equal footing.

Our story - Tate & Lyle

“We are proud of our focus and work on improving gender balance and representation across our organisation, and honoured to be shortlisted for this award. At Tate & Lyle, we know that the key to unlocking our potential is to ensure that we reflect the world we live in and can tap into the strengths that come from the diversity of people that live in the communities we serve. We know that the best way to achieve this is to create a workplace with culture, policies and ways of working that are truly inclusive, supportive and welcoming of everyone.”

Dr Gerry Murphy, Chair at Tate & Lyle PLC

Reasons for our success:

We are vocal and demonstrative in our commitment to creating an inclusive workplace, and this shows in our recent Have Your Say employee survey, where we received our highest score ever on our commitment to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
We are proud and supportive of our ERGs and invest in them by allowing our ERG leaders to dedicate 10% of their work time to ERG related activities. This has resulted in speaker series, cultural celebrations, community work, mentoring partnerships, and improving our recruitment and retention practices.
Our global parental leave policy ensures that anyone who becomes a parent, however that happens for them, has the ability to take the time to bond with their new child and integrate into their new life. We know that people who feel supported in their home lives are better able to bring their best selves to work too, so we all win.

Our story - TESCO

“I am proud that diversity and inclusion is at the heart of Tesco and that Tesco is a place where Everyone is Welcome. It’s really great to have our efforts at improving representation of women across the business recognised by BiB. We have some amazing female talent in Tesco and I am pleased that the positive changes we are implementing are providing them with even more opportunities to get on at Tesco. While we know there is still work to do, I am pleased that we are moving in the right direction, and we are absolutely determined to build on the progress we have made so far.”

Ken Murphy, Group CEO at Tesco

Reasons for our success:

Exec resourcing improvements
- These improvements have been supported by ongoing positive changes to our senior hiring practices, including a step introduced early in our process that challenges our hiring managers’ and agency partners’ thinking ahead of recruiting; and taking a bi-annual, aggregated view of the candidate diversity of our shortlists for senior leadership roles and Promotion forms require leaders to illustrate what they’ve done to consider a diverse shortlist
- Changes to exec resourcing together with gender targets for Global Senior Leaders have led to 36% external senior appointments and 48% internal senior promotions were female last year
Targeted & focused interventions to develop diverse talent
- Our Diverse Talent Community helps us develop our emerging talent colleagues who are from an underrepresented community get on, by addressing barriers, providing colleagues with the tools, support and visibility to drive their career forwards.
- For our second cohort of 246 colleagues, we have extended this community to other areas of the Tesco Group and opened it up to more underrepresented communities. To help address the barriers and challenges faced by many Black colleagues in the workplace, we have also put a spotlight on the Black learning offer. In line with Tesco’s Black Action Plan commitments.
- Within our Diverse Talent Community, we have 54 colleagues participating – 29% have been promoted and 23% have experienced broadening moves since being part of the community. 94% of participants told us that they are now clearer on their career aspirations and have a career plan since joining the community.