Our customer and colleague profile
PrintTo achieve our aims, it is important that we understand the composition of our Board and Committees, our Leadership Group, the wider workforce and our customers by the key protected characteristics, comparing this data with the profile of the population living in the communities we serve. We use this data at local level, enabling our colleagues to plan for their regional activities and their neighbourhood plans.
We remain committed to being open and transparent by publishing this data and the charts on the following pages show this comparison by sex, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, age and religion or belief.
Key Equality and Diversity Metrics
This is what the profile of our colleagues and governance community currently looks like.
Key
Sex
Board & Committees | Leadership Group | Wider Workforce | Wider Population | Customers | |
Male | 42% | 61% | 39% | 49% | 42% |
Female | 58% | 39% | 61% | 51% | 58% |
Compared to the wider population in the areas in which we operate, Riverside has a higher proportion of females in our workforce, customer base and governance community. The composition of our Leadership Group is less representative.
Sexual orientation
Board & Committees | Leadership Group | Wider Workforce | Wider Population | Customers | |
Heterosexual | 92% | 77% | 92% | 95% | 96% |
Gay / Lesbian/ Bisexual | 8% | 23% | 8% | 5% | 4% |
Our workforce, governance community and customers have a similar representation of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people compared to the wider population, however our Leadership Group is much more diverse, with almost a quarter of its members identifying as being a member of the LGB community.
Ethnicity
Board & Committees | Leadership Group | Wider Workforce | Wider Population | Customers | |
White | 82% | 88% | 66% | 75% | 84% |
Ethnically Diverse | 18% | 12% | 34% | 25% | 16% |
Compared to the wider population, we have a much higher proportion of colleagues from ethnically diverse communities across our wider workforce. Our governance community and Leadership Group are less ethnically diverse, as is our customer base, although this varies significantly geographically and by specific ethnic origin.
Age
Age | Board & Committees | Leadership Group | Wider Workforce | Wider Population | Customers |
16-24 | 0% | 0% | 5% | 16% | 3% |
25-34 | 5% | 0% | 20% | 20% | 12% |
35-44 | 2% | 13% | 24% | 17% | 21% |
45-54 | 33% | 45% | 24% | 15% | 19% |
55-64 | 39% | 39% | 23% | 14% | 20% |
65+ | 21% | 3% | 4% | 18% | 25% |
Our wider workforce is generally well spread across the age bands, with lower representation in the youngest and oldest age bands. However, members of our Leadership Group are more represented in the 45-64 age bands, and the governance community is concentrated in the 45-65+ bands. Our customer base is spread across the age bands but has a significantly older profile than the wider population in the areas where we work.
Disability
Board & Committees | Leadership Group | Wider Workforce | Wider Population | Customers | |
No | 92% | 92% | 91% | 76% | 81% |
Yes | 8% | 8% | 9% | 24% | 19% |
We have a significantly lower proportion of disabled people in our workforce, Leadership Group and our governance community compared to the wider population. A slightly higher proportion of our customers have identified as being disabled compared to these three groups, although this is still slightly lower than the wider population.
Religion or belief
Board & Committees | Leadership Group | Wider Workforce | Wider Population | Customers | |
Christian | 61% | 42% | 54% | 50% | 46% |
Other religion | 6% | 4% | 17% | 17% | 11% |
No religion | 33% | 54% | 29% | 33% | 43% |
Compared to the wider population, our customer base has a slightly lower proportion of people identifying as Christian or having a religion other than Christianity, but higher for those with no religion.
Our governance community is less diverse with more people identifying as Christian or as having no religion. Our wider workforce is comparable to the wider population.
Footnote
- The figures shown are for our population as a whole; it is important to note we do have significant regional variations.
- Wider population comparators are based on local authorities where Riverside owns housing, and weighted by stock numbers.
- Prefer not to say / Don’t know responses have been excluded to ensure comparability with data derived from the Census.
- Following the merger with One Housing Group, the Leadership Group reduced in size by almost two thirds, from 104 colleagues to 38, therefore a direct comparison with last year’s data cannot be made.
- Our Board membership has become more ethnically diverse, due to our success of our recruitment campaign
- A higher number of colleagues have shared their sexual orientation data with us, and our Leadership Group is particularly representative of the LGBTQIA+ community, with representation having almost doubled in the last 12 months
- The age of our governance community and Leadership Group members is still in the 45+ age band, and this has led us to identify ways to attract younger people, particularly for governance role vacancies, where we can build up the confidence and skills of junior members, to prepare them to apply for board roles in the future.
Although the representation of disabled people in our customer base is only slightly lower than the wider population, we have much lower levels of representation within our governance community, Leadership Group and our wider workforce, so we have more work to do here to encourage sharing of information.
Our ambition is that the diversity of our workforce and governance community reflects the customers and communities we serve. Our ways of working and pay structures ensure colleagues are paid equally for the work they do, however we still have pay gaps for gender and ethnicity, because women and ethnically diverse colleagues are not evenly distributed over our pay range.
Our most recent Gender Pay Gap data shows an increase in the median pay gap from 9.8% to 10.6%. This is not because of different rates of pay, but due to a high proportion of women across our workforce working in roles in the lower quartile of our pay distribution – especially in Care & Support – and an under-representation of women in upper quartile roles. In fact, over the past year we have seen a decrease in female representation in the upper quartile of our pay distribution from 54.6% to 50.8%.
Considering ethnicity, despite a welcome overall reduction in our pay gap over the year (median pay gap reduced from 18.5 to 15.1%) we have seen representation of ethnic minority colleagues in the upper pay quartile decrease from 25.7% to 18.7%.
Our representation and pay gaps are being been heavily influenced by the integration of our teams following the merger with London-based One Housing Group. This has meant that our structure and role location has changed significantly over the period, which has in turn impacted the make-up of our workforce. The process of integration is continuing through 2024/5, therefore it will be sometime before the makeup of our workforce stabilises.
We are taking a number of measures to address these pay gaps, including:
- Celebrating our female and ethnically diverse role models through WiSH and EMpower colleague groups, to further support confidence, removing any barriers to progression that we will drive through our ED&I and People Strategies.
- Ringfencing a number of development opportunities for ethnically diverse colleagues, through our GEM graduate scheme. In addition, we continue our involvement with the Housing Diversity Network’s mentoring scheme, the Greater Manchester Housing Provider’s BOOST Leadership programme and G15 Programmes aimed at driving cultural change and improving progression and representation in more senior roles within housing.
- Listening to our colleagues, improving experience and providing opportunities for mentoring, growth and progression, working in partnership across housing and with our colleague group EMpower to drive cultural change through our ED&I and People Strategies.
- Continuing to run our ethnically diverse guaranteed interview scheme for all roles over £35k if the minimum criteria for the role is met, along with our GEM graduate programme, and to ringfence a number of opportunities for our ethnically diverse colleagues.
- Celebrating our ethnically diverse role models through our EMpower colleague group to further support ethnically diverse confidence and progression.
- Maintaining our active involvement with the Housing Diversity Network’s mentoring scheme; the Greater Manchester Housing Provider’s BOOST Leadership programme and G15 Programmes aimed at driving cultural change and improving progression and representation in more senior roles within Housing.