Diversity And Inclusion — How Workplaces In India Embraced Change In 2020

The year 2020 was a game changer in many ways. Everywhere, people were forced to relook how they lived their lives, restock and revisit how they did things. While everyone in the world of work felt the impact of working from home, women felt the brunt even more than men.

This is why it was pertinent for JobsForHer to host a panel discussion on Diversity And Inclusion — How Workplaces In India Embraced Change In 2020, at AccelHERate 2021 —  India’s biggest (virtual) B2B conference for companies — on March 5.

Speakers at the table were:  

• Priti Singh, SVP, Human Resources, Mastercard
• Sayan Chatterjee, HR Director, Beam Suntory
• Anil Santhapuri, Director, Learning and Development, CGI
• Moderated by: Surovi Dey Dhupar, General Manager - Diversity and Inclusion, HGS

Surovi Dey Dhupar kicked off the conversation by making a pertinent point — just when it seemed like we were making progress in the field of gender equality at the workplace, the pandemic toppled the balance. “Women were disproportionately affected by the pandemic; job losses hit women harder than men. The magnitude of this inequality is striking,” she said, before asking the speakers to share one experience that defined the realities of 2020 for them. 

For Priti Singh, the pandemic made it apparent that we live in a deeply interconnected world, where what affects one person, affects everyone. “From an HR perspective, what we learnt was that agility, resilience and the future of work has changed altogether — such as being seated in an office to working virtually, among many other things. That created an opportunity for us to hire more women. Borders were no longer a challenge, because we now have women who are working from their homes, be it in Pune, Vadodara, Mumbai or anywhere else in the country,” she said.

Anil Santhapuri, whose team consists of 60% women, opened up about a personal experience.  “Midway through the pandemic, many women in my team had someone in their family who was affected by Covid. To me, it was a huge psychological shift, because I used to call them up and ask them how they were doing. You are not even sure at that time if this is how you should go about it. It was a brave new world; those couple of weeks were difficult. But then that set off the journey of how we can make the situation better for everyone. Fast forward many weeks, and we launched a survey to understand how the employees were doing. That is an event that really stands out for me in all of 2020,” he said.

When asked about suggestions to start the conversation of diversity and inclusion at an organisation, Sayan Chatterjee noted that the realisation of the importance of D&I may not be to the same extent in all organisations. “That's an important aspect to deal with at the beginning. At Beam Suntory, we have a wide range of consumers, so it becomes important to have a similar representation at the workforce. There is no other way to get relevant ideas to incorporate into your products. We did a programme with senior leaders and we found that many of them were not even aware of the correlation of women to the GDP. So, I think that the first step is to understand why D&I is important. It is not something that is good to have, but a must-have if you are to succeed in your business and be ahead of the curve. And this is something that you have to concentrate on all the time, not just when you have spare resources. It can't be left to the leadership or HR alone; it has to be on everyone's agenda. At Beam Suntory, D&I is every manager's goal,” he said.

Click here to watch the full video of the Panel Discussion on Diversity And Inclusion — How Workplaces In India Embraced Change In 2020, and find out in detail how each of these champions are furthering the cause of diversity corporate India.

Do you want to launch or promote a DivHERsity Program at YOUR workplace? 

Get in touch with us at simran@jobsforher.com.