Improving gender diversity at The Malabar Group

The Retail Industry has been witnessing massive shifts in customer-facing policies and processes. With the phenomenal growth of 15 % every year the competition for enhanced service has only increased. With particular reference to the Gems and Jewellery Industry, all the key players continue to now compete on product, price and service and this has led to a slew of innovations on the service front. Malabar has been witnessing growth both in the domestic and international markets with many new stores opening up and entries into new cities and geographies. Therefore when we looked at our talent repository it dawned on us that our Gender Diversity Ratio was below 10 % and it was imminent that we had to have focus on this aspect given the nature of our customers, their psychographic profiling and ultimately buying decisions.

It was a no brainer that we had to increase our employment of women in our retail stores. Data also provided us with certain yardsticks that women in retail enhanced both customer service, value of purchase and ultimately repeat purchases. The first initiative that we embarked upon was :

• Return to Work Programme for those Woman who want to come back to work. We ran a campaign Pan India requesting those who wanted a career in Retail to come to us and we will enhance your career. This campaign garnered great response and we were able to increase our woman hiring to about 22 %. We also relooked at our hiring practises and made the process simpler for us to attract woman to the Malabar Family. This was a big success in every way.
• Career shift gravitating towards vertical and horizontal integration. We allowed our woman employees to choose careers that they would like to move into within retail and it was no more a one policy driven from the top but more of a collective effort towards meaningful careers through customised training initiatives.
• Since we have expanded our growth towards remote villages as well, we introduced shift system that enabled women to work in a safe surrounding with flexible timings.
• We are into diversified businesses and our Chairman Mr. M. P. Ahammed keeps emphasising on the fact that we need to have more women employed in our company and this has led to one of our packing business unit employing 90% women.