Article: Gender Inclusion - The Infosys Way: Nandita Gurjar

Diversity

Gender Inclusion - The Infosys Way: Nandita Gurjar

Nandita Gurjar, SVP & Global Head of Human Resources, Infosys Technologies shares gender inclusion practices in Infosys

With over 45,000 women in workforce at Infosys we seem to have got our fundamentals right. Thanks to the pioneering work that we started back in 2003 on diversity and inclusion especially gender inclusivity, women form 34 percent of our total workforce today. We may have the distinction of being one of the largest employers of women in the private sector. Work-life policies at Infosys like part time work option, child care sabbatical, satellite office, nursing station, flexible work hours have helped 89 percent of our women join back after maternity leave. Today the challenge at Infosys transcends the purview of attracting and retaining women talent, to planning for programs that assist them in moving to senior management roles.

A series of focused group discussions with women and men followed to ensure we understood what women want to get to leadership positions. This led us to develop an exclusive program designed in partnership with a premier business school in India for women in middle management. The objective is to empower women by helping them identify their leadership style, comprehend behavior criteria critical for leaders, and discover individual strengths and areas of improvement. IWIL (Infosys Women Institute of Leadership) has enabled women to discover latent strengths, re-evaluate their potential and renew their aspirations. The participants are encouraged to not only develop their individual leadership capabilities but also nurture talent in others, a hallmark of true leadership.

Our focus now is to create a talent pipeline at every level to ensure we have a ready pool of talent to take on leadership roles, as and when available. We are using a multi-pronged approach to engage women at different levels through different kinds of programs including mentoring and learning from other women leaders. These efforts will ensure that we have gender balance at every level and make us not only the "Employer of Choice for Women" but also enable us to build tomorrow's enterprise.

Nandita Gurjar is Senior Vice President & Group Head, Human Resources, Infosys
 

Read full story

Topics: Diversity, Strategic HR, C-Suite, #BestPractices, #ExpertViews

Did you find this story helpful?

Author

QUICK POLL

How do you envision AI transforming your work?