Lomas hails market progress on bettering culture as Dive In marks 10th year

Dive In Festival will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year with a focus on the sustainability of inclusive talent pools, Lloyd’s head of culture Mark Lomas told The Insurer.

This year’s theme is ‘A sustainable future: the next 10 years’, signalling the importance of engaging with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) topics in order to build a more diverse and inclusive cohort to face future industry issues.

“We’re mindful that with geopolitics and climate change, the world is becoming ever more complex and interconnected, and diversity and inclusion is an essential ingredient for building resilient businesses,” said Lomas.

“That was key to us, choosing that title of ‘A sustainable future: the next 10 years’. We absolutely firmly believe that leveraging the broadest pool of talent is how we’re going to come up with some of the solutions needed for a fast-changing, interconnected and complex world.”

Having grown from 18 sessions in 2015 to more than 130 events across 48 countries this year (including Greece, Mauritius, Namibia and the Philippines for the first time), Lomas highlighted the role of the festival in broadening conversations around DEI in the insurance sector, from gender and ethnicity to social mobility, neurodiversity and mental health.

“Dive In has played a key role in getting some of these topics broadly discussed across the industry. I think the awareness and focus on DEI and talent sits behind some of the really important improvements that we’ve seen across the market in the last few years,” he added.

Lloyd’s market policies and practices return in March found that the Lloyd’s market had hit the 35 percent short-term target for the proportion of women in leadership roles, although it again fell short on its one-in-three hiring ambition to increase ethnic diversity.

“This is the 10th anniversary of Dive In, so we really wanted to celebrate the success of Dive In and reflect on the achievements, while being really clear that there is more to be done,” Lomas continued.

“We’re really starting to get to proof points that allow us to prove to the talent of the future that we’re modernising, we’re more diverse, and we’re becoming more inclusive. When we think about how Dive In comes together, it is certainly the best example of cross-industry collaboration that I’m aware of.”

In addition to the market policies and practices return, this year’s Lloyd’s culture survey identified a sustained reduction in instances of inappropriate behaviour in the Lloyd’s market over the past two years.

“Evidence-based policy and action is always more important. If you cast your mind back to the first culture survey in 2019, the market was below the financial sector benchmark on most most indices. It’s now ahead on most indices,” said Lomas.

“One of the things that I’m most proud of, in terms of the progress in the market, is that when we measured the culture survey this year, 13,400+ people contributed. In 2019 that was 6,000-some, so engagement with the culture survey has more than doubled.”

While engagement does signal a changing attitude towards culture, the real results lie in action taken to improve career progression opportunities and workplace behaviour.

“With the data that we do have, we also understand there are areas where we need to improve focus. For example, underwriting is an area which is less diverse than in the broader market. The succession pipeline is less diverse and is ageing five years out in contrast to the pipeline for actuarial and finance,” Lomas said.

“We’ve achieved the women in leadership target, we now need to think about what's next. Dive In provides a vehicle to have all those discussions, and the data really informs how we take intelligent, targeted action in the future.”

Lomas concluded that as Dive In grows globally, conversations become more mature and more nuanced, with sessions covering a broader topic of events that reflect interest in particular global regions.

“I think what we’re going to see through this year’s Dive In is that the breadth of diversity is a real strength to support product innovation, and to pivot as the world has new complex risks. It goes back to that idea of this sustainable talent pipeline, which we need to measure.”