Shoba Saji, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, DTSS
Shoba Saji, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, DTSS lists examples of internal campaigns that can have a tangible impact on an organisation’s efforts to meet its diversity goals.
Does gender matter?
The selection of employees who are deployed at the customer location is based on the customer’s requirements. For instance, ladies’ washroom areas are managed only by lady janitors. However, when we hire supervisors, we are conscious of ensuring that a good percentage of supervisors are women employees.
Institutional programs
We run a program called ARISE for supervisory training; there is also a program called Udaan where women are handpicked to be groomed as executives. We find that women in supervisory and site executive roles are very diligent and tend to have the least operational issues.
We also have a program called DTSS Shakthi, wherein we have been consciously hiring and promoting women in operational leadership and other mid-senior and leadership roles.
Our communication campaign – known as Respect campaign – sensitises our predominantly male workforce on the value of our women colleagues, and teaches them to respect their contribution and engage in a robust environment of competitiveness and mutual empathy.
Equal attrition
We have not witnessed a trend of higher attrition among women. Our attrition reasons are common for men & women. There have been very few cases of women who leave post maternity leave to take a break for childcare. Such women employees are supported with WFH till the time they require it, until they can be back at the workplace.
Client attitudes
None of our client organisations have shown any apprehensions about having women workers on the ground. As per work scenarios and demands, our client organisations have on certain occasions requested for more female workers as compared to male workers, if in certain office areas, there are more female employees working at the client organisation.
When client organisations have such specific requirements, we confirm the authenticity of such specific requests by doing a site assessment. Based on the findings of our assessment, if the requirement looks genuine, we agree to such requests. Under any circumstances, we ensure the safety and security of our employees, irrespective of gender type.
Push for POSH
Our POSH policy is very stringent, and we have zero tolerance towards any action or behaviour that compromises the dignity or self-esteem of our women employees. This has been clearly spelt out in the policy as well as in the number of awareness sessions that we conduct both for back office and billable employees. Our POSH training is embedded in our onboarding process. Every month, one open house session is conducted for the entire group. With this, we have covered over 31,000 employees in the year 2022.
Currently, we are functioning with 12% of female workforce across various roles in DTSS. We have >12% women in our blue-collar workforce. We plan to increase women representation up to 25% in managerial roles by 2025.