Diversity in the Indian workplace
Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) at the workplace is still, unfortunately, largely a western concept. It has not permeated into the Indian ecosystem nor do most people fully understand it.
India is a complex society. Hundreds of years of religion, war, colonialism, casteism, etc that has shaped us, resulting in a largely racist, sexist, casteist, and patriarchal society. These thoughts are heavily ingrained and permeated within families. This meant that our D&I Initiative had to super practical and permeable. If it didn’t address many of our underlying societal issues, it would get nowhere.
We set out with our D&I initiative sometime in 2017.
Objective of our D&I Initiative
is to have people from a mix of different backgrounds, in specific:
- Gender
- Religion or lack thereof
- Age
- Region / State / Language
How have we fared so far?
Initiatives are always an active work in progress. It has been varying degrees of progress in each team and we are proud of what we’ve done in the past 2 years.
Qualifiers:
- Founding team — 2 men, 1 woman
- Development team — each developer is from a different state or country
- Very healthy mix of religions — muslim, christian, hindu, etc
- Core team (involved in strategy) of 13 has 5 atheists. This is abnormal, but maybe it represents the future norm?
- Sales & Support team of 80 is a 50/50 gender split
- Two Managers — 1 man, 1 woman
- Age Range — 22–50
- Vadodara’s medical technicians are all women
How did we do it?
As a company, growth + performance + profitability all need to keep going up. The quality of our people and teams need to get better with each recruit.
The D&I initiative has to work towards that goal, not against it. Otherwise the company wouldn’t exist to support the wonderful team :)
With this in mind we iterated through a lot of issues including why there could be discrimination, where the problem points where, and how do we tackle this from recruiting to lifetime of an employee. The largest teams we hire for is sales, support, and medical technicians. I will only touch upon how we solved recruitment.
Solving Recruitment
It was a swiss army knife approach, but I believe the two things that had highest impact were:
1. Change the “Tell me about yourself” interview question
In India, especially with above mentioned teams, people tend to include everything…and I mean everything. Work, education, grades from 10 yrs ago (!), what their father does, what their mother does, how many siblings they have, which village they’re from, if they’re married, if they’re divorced and what their alimony situation is, and so on.
Whether you ask them or not, they’re going to tell it all in 5 mins.
This, even with the best of intentions, is going to bring up some conditioned biases. More so, if the candidate is a woman/religion1/caste1 and the recruiter is a man/religion2/caste2.
We now lead with “Tell us about your work experience at Company X” or “Tell us why you chose to do mechanical engineering”. This guides them away from their default answer. We also explicitly stop them if they move into personal details.
This solved for the obvious problems of discrimination but we continue having sanity checks on the recruitment to make sure nothing slips. This also solved the quality problem because when biases are removed, you can focus on their work and skills.
2. Remove the bias of “Took a break”
We noticed that a lot of good men and women were “unemployable” in the industry for the simple fact that they took a break. Assuming this was not taken flippantly, most breaks were to take care of a seriously ill parent or have children.
I understand where large companies come from…they want to easily eliminate the ones who take career breaks flippantly and adding a filter works for them. But for us it was a great opportunity. We could pick up the cream of performers if we just ensured that they were hard working people.
In turn, they are extremely grateful since they would probably have been searching for a job for a year or two. They get a higher than industry pay and a great workplace.
This solved for and helped us recruit high quality employees.
Where we need work
We are strong supporters of the LGBTQIA community but have found it hard to include them into our recruiting process. We’re not sure if the process is broken, people are unwilling to apply, or something else that we’re missing. If you have any thoughts or pointers on this — please get in touch!
Where we needed work and succeeded
Women moving up. Our sales team has an equal men-woman middle management. Next post is on that!
