In the current mess of global mass hysteria, companies have changed their ways. This pandemic has forced corporations to let employees convert their homes into the workplace and bustling offices are now the things of the past. Work from home is becoming the norm and corporations are all set to accelerate their diversity agenda. It is the myth that works from home hampers productivity, instead, it is a boon for women employees. In the other words, it is the opportunity for the companies to increase the diversity at work as well as women to get back to professional life. The sectors such as hospitality, retails and other industries that hire more women, came to a halt but work from home as given chance to women to return to work and stay in the workforce for a more prolonged period as compared to pre- COVID.
Recently, Deloitte has begun with an initiative to hire former women employees by allowing them to work from home, given them the flexibility to work four hours a day, five days a week. The company got in touch with thousands of former women employees and allowed them to get back to work. Many women who are in corporate roles resign from their jobs due to motherhood and hesitate to get back to work. This will help the women workforce to maintain the balance between their personal and professional life. Moreover, Deloitte is offering programs to re-skill employees returning to work and providing them with mentors and buddies. The current male-female ratio is 78:22, of which 22 percent is women. The objective of Zee Entertainment is to bring this ratio to 50:50 by 2024. This entertainment conglomerate has hired 1000 employees to post COVID-19, out of which 64 percent are women employees. The idea behind the same is hiring disproportionate women every year would solve the problem. Moreover, Zee is putting all the efforts to reduce biases in hiring and wants to be a gender blind organization. According to Animesh Kumar, Chief People Officer at Zee “all interviewers have unconscious biases that women are not suitable for scales roles, so to overcome this we have introduced psychometric and functional testing independent of interview score.” Senior Executive Director of Maruti Suzuki also believes that companies should be gender blind.
Likewise, SAP India Labs is on its way to introduce a shared work concept where the roles can be shared among two people. For the first half of the day, one person will do the work and in the second half, the other one will take over. It provides women with a great chance to show their potential and talent. On the other side, it will be an opportunity for the company to increase its diversity quotient. Also, SAP is not only hiring women from Tier-1 but also from Tier-2 and Tier-3 as small-town India does have a talent mine and will provide benefits of the extended talent pool to the organizations. One can expect women’s participation in the workforce to rise to 50 percent as corporations are taking the diversity agenda seriously.
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