Supporting Our Employees

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, our management teams acted quickly to protect the health and safety of our employees, rapidly transitioning to a remote work model. Frequent surveys kept us in tune with how employees fared throughout the year and what resources we could provide — from technology and office equipment to expanded health and wellness support — to ensure that employees had what they needed to stay connected and engaged.

To continue providing employees with critical training and professional development opportunities as they worked remotely, we introduced Degreed, an online educational platform. Through artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, Degreed directs employees to educational opportunities based on their job responsibilities, goals, and interests — helping build their knowledge and skill sets.

In September, we launched Bravo, a global reward and recognition program that empowers employees to recognize one another for outstanding contributions. Through Bravo, stories surfaced of employees’ remarkable efforts to support clients and colleagues during the pandemic. In just four months, Bravo recorded more than 13,000 awards, highlighting employees whose performance truly stood out.

Addressing Racism, Inequality and Social Injustice

In the 11 years since we officially launched our Global Inclusion Center of Excellence, State Street has championed equal opportunities for individuals with diverse backgrounds and unique perspectives. In early December, we launched a voluntary self-identification effort, “Count Me In,” which encourages employees to self-identify their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, preferred pronouns, and disability and veteran status, where allowed by local laws. This voluntary data will help provide a clearer picture of our progress toward building a more diverse and inclusive State Street.

For the fifth year, we were proud to have been chosen for inclusion in the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index, a reference index used by investors examining gender equality issues at public companies.

The Bloomberg index of 380 companies measures gender equality across five pillars: female leadership and talent pipeline, equal pay and gender pay parity, inclusive culture, sexual harassment policies, and pro-women brand. For the fifth consecutive year, we earned a score of 100% on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index as a “Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality,” recognizing our goal of building a more LGBTQ-inclusive workplace.

As society reckoned with the painful reality of systemic racism, a core team of employees came together to formulate our “10 Actions Against Racism and Inequality,” announced in July by Chairman and CEO Ron O’Hanley. These measurable, actionable tenets are part of our global plan to be a leader in promoting greater equity in our industry and our communities.

State Street’s 10 Actions augment our existing diversity and inclusion goals by seeking to triple Black and Latinx senior leadership and double our percentage of those populations at all levels. The 10 Actions address development and advancement programs, governance models, community outreach, and philanthropy; look to strengthen our supplier diversity programs; and seek to improve diversity on our board of directors. State Street is committed to effecting real change through the 10 Actions, and a new Inclusion, Diversity & Equity Council, chaired by Ron O’Hanley, oversees progress on these efforts. Since rolling out the 10 Actions, we also launched a variety of in-person forums and expanded the online training courses for our employees around racism and equity.

The discussion was amplified by our leadership team, managers, employee networks, and allies throughout the organization, as they facilitated candid conversations with more than 9,700 employees about the insidious nature of racism. Continuing those conversations, we launched the “Share Her Voice” campaign, a series of video stories articulating Black women’s experiences at State Street.

Investing in Our Communities

In the early days of the pandemic, the health crisis uprooted nonprofit organizations and eroded their traditional funding sources. State Street Foundation, the company’s charitable arm, moved quickly to provide vital grants to organizations addressing the COVID-19 crisis around the world. To help existing grantees continue to function and fulfill their important missions during these difficult times, we accelerated payments and lifted funding restrictions to allow grantees to use the funds for general operating expenses.

Reaffirming our commitment to addressing socioeconomic and racial inequities in education — a long-standing focus of the Foundation — we engaged a third party to assess the efficacy of our grant-making on communities of color and identify organizations that are doing meaningful work to address racial injustice. As we update our grant-making guidelines to explicitly include our racial equity and social justice goals, we will be positioned to build on our record of investing in communities of color.

We also have expanded our global venture philanthropy efforts, with multi-year investments in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Poland, and India, where we recently announced a three-year partnership with The/Nudge Centre for Social Innovation to support nonprofit start-ups with a focus on employability for disadvantaged urban youth.

Although the pandemic hampered our in-person volunteer efforts during the year, State Street employees gave their time in other ways. We brought our Global Volunteer Week online, with 2,600 volunteers taking on projects that included career panels for students, virtual drives for nonprofits, and mentoring students in a remote study environment.

Building on the creativity that nonprofits brought to their virtual projects in 2020, we are reshaping our own volunteer models and programs. We doubled the number of paid volunteer days from two to four, expanding the opportunities for employees to share their time and talent throughout the pandemic and beyond.

To help small and medium-sized firms trying to survive, rebuild, and rebound from the pandemic’s crushing economic blows, we partnered with 18 Boston region businesses and community leaders to launch Small Business Strong.

Providing free resources and advice to women-, minority-, and veteran-owned businesses, this statewide initiative paired business owners with volunteers from State Street and other local companies to help them with issues ranging from obtaining loans and grants to managing operational, legal, and marketing matters.

During the year, the program provided assistance, in eight languages, to more than 1,226 small businesses. State Street also pledged $5 million over five years in seed funding for the New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund (NCF). The NCF is a coalition of Black and brown executives in Massachusetts who are leveraging their individual and collective power to address and eliminate systemic racism and racial inequity across the Commonwealth. The NCF will fund initiatives and nonprofits supporting Black and brown communities in four key areas: policing and criminal justice reform; economic empowerment; health care equity; and youth education, empowerment, and civic engagement.

A More Sustainable Future for All

We realized a host of environmental accomplishments throughout the year. We achieved carbon neutrality in 2020, setting us on a path to realize our objective of net zero emissions by 2050. We raised our clean air commitment, increasing our targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions after exceeding our previously set goals from 2016. Our environmental profile, as well as strong performance in social and governance areas, helped us become one of two U.S. financial firms included in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index.

In addition, State Street Global Advisors was included as one of only 20 global asset managers in the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investing Leaders Group for excellence in climate reporting, and joined Climate Action+, a global investor-led initiative to foster the clean energy transition.

As much progress as State Street made in addressing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues last year, the pandemic reinforced the importance of driving ESG even deeper into our core business strategy.

Our 2020 ESG Report features detailed information on how we are executing against our ESG priorities across our businesses, including our own corporate sustainability goals and our continued engagement with industry and community efforts to drive positive change. The report also includes stand-alone reports for two frameworks: the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures.

Future Focused

Continuing to build a strong corporate culture is central to our goal of becoming an even higher performing organization. We have established a consistent framework of values, culture traits, and behaviors that help guide and support our employees’ personal and professional development, create an inclusive environment, and encourage leadership.

The pandemic accelerated many of the behaviors we have been working to embed across our organization — take initiative to deliver business objectives; collaborate across teams to reach our shared goals; drive better outcomes for clients, employees, and shareholders while managing risk; seek better ways of working and adopt new solutions; and help others succeed. These behaviors exemplify and augment our culture traits, and will help us further propel positive change in our company, our industry, and our communities.

While much work remains, each of us has the opportunity to contribute to a more resilient, sustainable, and inclusive State Street.