Women must be actively nurtured within your organization, writes Neha Bhatt, Country HRBP – India, AVEVA
It is not getting talented women through the door that’s the challenge. It’s retaining them.
A recent study by the Genpact Centre for Women’s Leadership revealed half of working women in India leave their jobs to take care of their children by the age of 30, and, of these mothers, just 27 percent return to the workplace.
In part, these statistics are rooted in the fact that the burden of child and elderly care tends to fall disproportionately on women. However, corporate India isn’t exactly helping – particularly when it comes to career progression. In the IT sector, which leads the country in female workforce participation rates, only 8% of leadership positions are held by women.
At AVEVA, we’re tackling this problem both through our corporate strategy and programmes and through cultural change. This dual approach is, to our minds, the only one that can work. If you limit yourself to top-down edicts and quotas, you won’t see the important cultural change required to make workplaces genuinely attractive to women. If you stick to a bottom-up focus on culture, change will come too slowly or not at all.
The trick is to make sure corporate and cultural initiatives are complementary.
For instance, we at AVEVA India are particularly proud of EmpowHer, our programme for getting women who’ve taken career breaks back into the workplace – but that programme only works because our culture is friendly and collaborative, and because we have ready-made networks of professional women.
Women@AVEVA is one such network. Run entirely by employees on a voluntary basis, it’s focused on establishing a supportive environment for women and fostering professional growth by providing development, mentorship and outreach. Women@AVEVA recently launched ‘Master Mind Groups’, judgement-free discussion spaces for colleagues who have common learning and development objectives.
Country HRBP
India, AVEVA
We apply the same combined cultural-corporate approach to our partnerships with external organisations. Our corporate affiliations with bodies like HYSEA, NASSCOM and SWE send a powerful message of commitment to current and prospective women employees. The true benefits of those associations, however, come when our employees use external partners to advance their development, grow their leadership skills and expand their personal networks.
It’s understandable that the conversation around gender diversity often defaults to discussion of hiring practices. Recruitment is a discrete, linear process; it’s relatively easy to identify improvements and measure outcomes. Retention, on the other hand, is a more difficult topic that covers pay, culture and everything in between.
But focusing on hiring practices at the expense of retention is like pumping air into a punctured tyre. People passing you on the other side of the road might think you’re doing the right thing but, in reality, you are ignoring the underlying problem.
A final statistic emphasises the importance of retention: here in India, only one in eight employees across the economy are women. Female professionals are a scarce and precious resource. If you want your company to have a gender diverse workforce (which, if you want to beat your competition, you should), you need to work hard to hold on to the women you already have.
And once you have a work environment that appeals to women, you might find your hiring strategy writes itself.
