What Companies Can Do To Attract And Retain Female Talent

Neha Bagaria - Founder & CEO, JobsForHer
in
Back to Work, Founder's Blog
|
15 Nov 2017

The business case for diversity within companies has been around for a while. In India, many companies have woken up to the realisation that improving their diversity quotients means better business all around. They’re designing returnee programmes tailored to women restarting their careers, and changing HR policies to accommodate this growing talent pool.

There are several things that companies can do, in the long and short term, to attract and retain female talent. Currently the conversation in India is focussed on attracting the talent, to fix the “leaky pipeline” in the workforce and get more women back to work. Companies are going the extra mile to understand this talent pool of women returnees, and are opening their doors.

However, retaining women returnees in the long term is more challenging. While fixing the hiring gap is no doubt, very important, we also need to start thinking of how to keep this talent pool engaged, challenged and satisfied.

Which is why your company needs to be at AccelHERate - India's biggest conference for companies committed to increasing female participation in the Indian workforce.

In Mumbai on 21st March 2018, this is the place where corporate India will come together to bring more women back to work, and more importantly work to keep them there.

Here are some ways in which diversity forward companies are working to recruit, retain and promote women in their work places.

Flexibility

Flexi-time is the single most enabling factor for women employees, particularly young mothers, to keep working. In India, childcare can be expensive and difficult to sustain, and mothers still shoulder the majority of the caregiving responsibilities. Companies need to understand this, and design flexi-time and work-from-home policies in such a way that as long as the employee is performing and meeting targets and deadlines, it doesn’t matter WHEN they work. This empowers women returnees to work on their own terms, and manage their personal lives too.

In order to truly achieve this, work needs to be templatised as much as possible. This ensures that employees don’t need to work 9 to 5, or 10 to 6, 5 days a week. Converting time-based work to output-based work is much more valuable, both to the company and the employee. It should not be about how many hours an employee works - rather, it should be about the work that she delivers.

Unilever North America, for instance also provides women returnees with the option of cutting back or increasing the amount of time they can work, at their own discretion. This is particularly useful for young mothers, for whom unforeseen circumstances (like children falling sick) are almost a daily occurrence.

Family-friendly policies

Companies that offer extended or an equal amount of paternity leave, are paving the way in the long run for equal opportunity and the end of gender bias towards women. There is an urgent need in India to go beyond maternity leave, and bring fathers into the fold too. This is where corporate India can play a big role in changing the status quo.

When fathers start to pitch in more with the family, and companies recognise that they need to be given time off to do so without prejudice or judgement, only then will women stop being the target of unconscious biases and benevolent sexism at work.

So rather than focussing on offering women extended maternity leave, companies need to seriously consider offering longer periods of paternity leave, to really get to the root of the problem. We’ve written before about how Scandinavian countries lead the way in providing equal opportunity to both men and women, which shows in their gender balance at the work place.

Equal Opportunity and Equal Pay

Just because women have taken a break from work does not mean that they have gone back to square one. Taking care of the house or raising children is no less challenging than working, and companies need to appreciate this. Women returnees should not be penalised for their break, particularly when it comes to pay.

Companies that are opening their doors to women by designing returnee programmes, must also put salary brackets in place that are applicable to both male and female employees. Even in [seemingly] progressive countries like the U.S., women “still earn 82 percent of what men typically earn, childless or not”, according to Sarah Buhr of TechCrunch. This is another gap that needs to be bridged.

Transparent Performance Review Systems

It is important to set expectations for different roles before people are hired. This allows for evaluation of the employee’s performance against the roles and responsibilities laid out at the time of hiring.

Performance for male and female employees needs to be treated the same - “it is commonly seen that most organisations promote men on potential and women only on measurable and proven performance. Check your talent management systems and do away with such biases”.

This may also require some amount of sensitisation for frontline managers and HR executives at your company.

All of these measures will go a long way in retaining female talent across the board.

At JobsForher, we’re working hard with companies across India to open their doors to women returnees. Are you ready to join the movement? Then AccelHERate is where your company needs to be, this March in Mumbai. We're hosting India's biggest conference for companies committed to increasing female participation in the Indian workplace.

Write to simran@jobsforher.com to learn how your company can be a part of it.

References: