BW Businessworld in association with Ask Insights, a consulting organisation, organised a workshop on 'Diversity to Inclusion 2017 and beyond!' at Indian Habitat Centre. The session was moderated by Dr Niru Kumar, Founder Director, Ask Insights.
It is often said that India is way behind when it comes to gender diversity and sensitivity at workplaces, as the population have been wired like that since childhood. Talking about the discerning diversity in the Indian context, we need to keep up with the trends. The millennial today is bringing in a totally different thought process where discerning is required when it comes to designing the strategies, especially at the workplace. So what is it that the organisations are facing and working towards, to bring about a change, not only in the thought process but also strategies?
"As a leader, it was a stark moment when I was hired as the only women member in the leadership position at Vodafone. There is a whole lot of change today and the timings are excellent with diversity being a senior level agenda. We have targets and metrics put in place where we have touched 30 per cent level at Vodafone with respect to gender diversity", says Varsha Singh, Senior VP, Head of Vodafone Shared Services India. Varsha says finding an evangelist is very important, to begin with, for on ground action to take place, "Sometimes the senior leader face the problem of discriminating mindsets and limiting beliefs", adds Varsha.
At PepsiCo, another company which has to build on a high tone of diversity, Pavitra Singh, AD, Talent Acquisition and Campus Engagement, PepsiCo, India, says there is an utmost need of role models, not just in India but worldwide. "Initially we conducted a lot of workshops on Diversity and Inclusion but the penny dropped when the numbers were not changing, despite our efforts. We realised that we did not involve the 90% of the male workforce into this whole journey of D&I to make one sensitive to the other. We started our journey again".
Pavitra says that they over indexed on inclusion as the diversity alone is not enough. It became a leaky bucket as people left. The company conducted Gender Intelligence workshops all across the centres from sales to the manufacturing plants. "The first is the utmost important thing is to bring the realisation that there is a need for diversity in the workplace. All the 50 leaders were brought in the room and the burning platform was shown to them. Once that is done, we built on the infrastructure and safety. Half of our workforce operates in sales and manufacturing and these places did not have washrooms. These were the basic things we grappled on".
Paitra also touched upon the balanced screening process that she undertook. "If I am giving out 2 resumes of men, then there are other 2 resumes of women that I make sure goes up for screening, not compromising on the merit".
Abhishek Budhiraja, Associate Director, Snapdeal who hailed from a 125-year-old company to a start-up, says being a 5-year-old company they did 2 things right, "Talking about an evangelist, we had a leader who owned the whole agenda to bringing diversity and inclusion at the workplace. For the last 2 years we have been baselining from maternity policies to hygiene and the next 2-3 years we will see getting into the more nuanced side of it. Also, D&I is not just gender, but also bring in LBGT, differently-abled as well".
D&I is an issue which is very easy to drop out today. Therefore, it needs to become a part of the everyday conversation and is critical to making this a part of our system consciously.
(BW Businessworld in association with Ask Insights, a consulting organisation, organised a workshop with Dr Alan Ritcher 'Diversity to Inclusion 2017 and beyond!')
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Naina Sood is a Economics graduate and has done her post graduation in International economics and Trade. She has deep interests in Indian economy and reforms
