Building on its efforts towards promoting diversity and inclusion, PepsiCo India today organised an Inclusion Master Class in association with Richard Mckenna, CEO - Inclusive Employers, a leading voice on Inclusion in the UK, who was supported by Anjana Nathwani, CEO- Athena Business Psychologists. The subject of the session “Inclusion for Commercial Success” Master class explored truly inclusive workplaces and ideated for the next steps on the inclusion journey in India.  Speaker Richard Mckenna elaborated on the Inclusive Employer’s Framework of the ‘5Es” - Engage, Equip, Embed, Empower and Evaluate and shared the success stories of some of the most inclusive employers in the UK. The session looked closely at diversity and innovative ways for inclusion and Elaborating on the thought behind the master class Samik Basu, Chief People Officer at PepsiCo India said, “While most global organizations are working on building a diverse workforce, we believe that diversity and inclusion go hand in hand and building a truly inclusive culture is the way forward for the future success of companies. With this thought we collaborated with Richard and Anjana to conduct a master class on Inclusion, which focused on collaborating and harnessing our differences to create a culture and environment that brings out the best in everyone.”

Talking about the importance of Inclusion Richard Mckenna, CEO - Inclusive Employers said, “The world is looking at innovation around inclusion and I feel there is a massive commercial opportunity for India to become a pioneer in this field. This country has the potential to create a culture which is about getting the best out of all staff and to reach communities that are excluded and not engaged yet. PepsiCo India is already working towards this and has been a pioneer in promoting diversity and inclusion at its workplace. I am privileged to have organised this session. Talking about the key takeaways from the master class Anjana Nathwani, CEO- Athena Business Psychologists said, “Moral imperative for inclusion in India goes without saying. It is the commercial imperative where organisations need to focus their conversation. Organisations need to empower employees to communicate, to share, to collaborate and not to shy away to engage in a more positive way so employees feel they are able to contribute and not just be recipients. There is a need to create a culture where there is high value of contribution to impact change, to impact success and to impact innovation.”