As a business leader I very often (still) come across questions and doubts on why diversity, equality and inclusion have become important business objectives. Queriesand comments range from: “Why is this important” to “What do we gain from it?” to “Let’s follow the usual initiatives and be done with it!”

On the other hand, there are leaders who genuinely believe in the business objective but are yet to steer their organizations towards the needed transformation.

It is in this context that I considered sharing a few guiding principles that could be useful to practicing HR&Business leaders in addressing these queries and in achieving positive organization transformation.

For the uninitiated, the reason for improving demographic mix (otherwise referred to as Diversity & Inclusion) in your workforce is to effectively cater to the diverse customer base. With a diverse and inclusive workforce, businesses show improvement on various qualitative and quantitative measures including critical ones such as:

1. Access to a larger talent base
2. Access to wider range of skills
3. Broader based innovation and creativity
4. Intuitively a better understanding of customer needs

There are various aspects of an organization’s demographic mix that need attention and improvement but for the purpose of this practical guide, I will focus on how to improve women employees mix in an organization.

Let me pre-empt the unspoken question. Yes, we need to catalyze, and influence conditions and put the extra effort to push this transformation. According to World Bank data, despitethe growth in India’s economy, women accounted for only 19.9% of the total workforce in 2020 (as compared to a population mix of 48.1%) which by the way is a decline from almost 26.7% in 2005. India is one of the few economies witnessing this declining trend. A trend that has further worseneddue to the pandemic!

Notwithstanding the maturity stage of your organization, it might help to examine if you have followed the foremost step in the journey towards achieving a numerical leap in women employees’ mix. The foremost step in this case being a detailed analysis of demographics and people decisions (e.g., promotions, merit increases, awards and so on). In the event that the analysis throws up pleasant revelations, share it with a large cross-section of leaders. It is my first-hand experience that this step creates a high impact on the organization and results in sudden preparedness to work towards change.

You will now have to begin work on two fronts:

1. Talent Acquisition
2. Existing Talent 

After you have thoroughly studied your organization’s talent acquisition analytics, take the first step of assigning ambitious targets on talent slates. The non-negotiable target for every role should ideally be a 50% women candidate talent slate. To achieve this, you could incentivize recruiting partners for every successful women candidate hire and have tie-ups with specialist organizations/portals like Jobsforher, Sheroes, Vividhitta and Avtar, to name a few.

Along with this, you might want to consider how you can reduce biases during assessments. That will mean a lot of initial hard work for the recruiting unit and the larger HR team. Having said that, there is no substitute to doing this. I have found the following ideas helpful while trying to achieve this objective:

1. Review job descriptions to remove biases and ensure gender inclusive language
2. Reduce number of interviews
3. Have panel interviews that include women interviewers
4. Employ pre-decided customizable interview questions
5. Look-out for potential biases and train interviewersto avoid the same

Once you have achieved the targeted talent slate, start taking aggressive women hiring targets. For instance, at our company we kept a goal of 30% women hires in the first year, but decided on a more aggressive figure of 40% and 50% for Years two and three. Having metthese targetshas given us confidence toachieve more.

It is quite possible that you might face challenges and opposition from various corners. You will need to address potential concerns and influence leaders to drive accountability across all relevant stakeholders within the organization.

While we are driving people decisions in our organizations using data and analytics, it is important that each of these reports and dashboards carry gender-wise critical analysis too. Bring forward this data in all your reports and dashboards. Create reviews and discussions around the gender-wise cut with an objective of bringing this to every leader’s attention.

Here are a few questions you might want to ask:

1. Whether they are aware that there is a differentiation and the extent of it? (obviously they won’t if they haven’t seen customized data)
2. Whether there are any conscious or unconscious biases at play?
3. How can we remove said biases?
4. How can the variation be reduced (merit-based)?

Keep showing long term trends of variations in people decisions to leaders and prompt merit-based action. Continuous inconsistencies or variations need to be brought forth and discussed. Keep reiterating to leaders the importance of collective accountability to achieve positive transformation. Find specific reasons for systemic variations and solve problems to remediate.

Here are a few things you might want to bear in mind in the context of People decisions:

1. In your attrition data right after ‘overall attrition’, look at the gender-wise cut before anything else
2. Dive deeper with reference to gender-wise cuts at ‘levels’, ‘tenure’, ‘businesses’, ‘location’, and other important parameters
3. Tenure analysis of your organization can also reveal variations which can help you find systemic problems that can be addressed. At our organization, we discovered that most women leaders were high tenured and adjusted to our different work timings better than new hires. This helped us create an extensive mentoring and development program to build a pipeline of women leaders
4. Gender-wise analysisof performance ratings and actions will show if there are variations, biases, deliberate actions in particular teams 
5. Deeper analysis of promotion cycles might throw up variations in promotion recommendations and reveal underlying reasons preventing increase in composition of women leaders
6. Review merit increase, incentive, and bonus payout decisions for variations. Ask hard questions on whether ‘pay for performance’ and ‘equal pay’ are working in your organization
7. Gender-wise analysis of training and development nominations and participation may help you identify variations affecting opportunities provided to women employees
8. If there is a talent review and identification exercise in your organization, analyze gender-wise variations in ‘leadership potential’ assessment. Highlight variations and discuss possibilities of providing development opportunities to potential women leaders
9. Ensure there is equal representation in ‘committees’ that your organization creates
10. Do a critical analysis of all types of recognition prevalent in your organization. This data demonstrates variations and biases at a grassroot level
11. Check for variations in ‘Leave’ data and ‘overtime, holiday & week-off working’ data. This data may provide you with more opportunities to work at the heart of the matter
12. Do not ignore faintest of variations in engagement scores and feedback. This dipstick will show you cultural elements that warrant change

When you observe that the narrative is changing within your organization and transformation is setting in, ensure that all policies and procedures are reviewed. This will ensure that the organization is not exhibiting any biases or controls that hamper the targeted transformation.

Encourage a flexible, results driven approach to working, where focus is on results rather than work hours, location, and other arrangements. This provides flexibility to both men and women employees and places accountability on their shoulders.

At our organization, for instance, we have found strong evidence that supports forming a women’s affinity group. The affinity group should provide opportunity for women employees and leaders to discuss personal and professional problems. Multiple studies suggest that women employees hesitate in having these discussions and that these discussions have the potential to help countless women employees in their development and continuing employment.

To sum it up, the road to organization transformation in this context is difficult and you will most likely encounter resistance and face challenges. Encourage discussion, lead with data, create champions and influencers, and build consensus to share accountability of the business objective. Steadily you will achieve the goal!