“We Organised 'Know Your Bias' Workshops"
From encouraging women to take up leadership and male-dominated roles to addressing biases through workshops and clearly-defined policies, Faurecia India Private Limited has initiated several inclusive measures. Manish Patil, who is the company’s D&I champion for India, describes these initiatives. Excerpts:
Can you describe some landmark initiatives that your organisation has embarked upon to ensure diversity and inclusion?
Women’s forum: The idea was to have a platform where women can share their requirements to improve facilities at work. It resulted positively, and we addressed major needs, like organising a shuttle to drop-off late working female employees, initiating a creche facility survey and now working on the execution.
Periodical connects are organised to address key priorities and garner suggestions with the support of site management.
Female mentorship: The idea is to develop the leadership and soft skills of female employees and to promote them to global platforms. It will add value to our business as we are creating next generation leaders here. We are trying this model for the first time and we are expecting good results out of it.
D&I welcome calls: We welcome newly-recruited gender-diverse talent and make an effort to understand how they are settling in Faurecia. We understand our good practices and improvement areas from them. It has resulted in us being able to review our joining/settling process from new joiners’ perspective and we have started working on improvement area.
These calls have given our new female talent a platform to connect to and be heard by the India leadership team. We have also nominated D&I champions at each site to connect with new female talent.
Her way: The purpose of ‘her way’ sessions is to invite Faurecia women leaders to one platform where they can share their experiences, talk about their career journeys, and connect with other Faurecians, especially female young talent. These sessions have helped motivate and inspire Faurecia women to seize every opportunity and take the leap in their careers.
Break the bias : It was a theme of International Women’s Day 2022. Faurecia launched the #BreakTheBias campaign on LinkedIn. The India leadership team and all Faurecians shared their own commitment to the cause.
What specific problem areas and challenges did you identify, that needed to be addressed?
FORVIA Group understands the importance of D&I and is putting special focus on this topic. Our group has nominated D&I champions for each country globally to address and implement the Group’s D&I strategy. I, being a D&I champion for India, have identified the following areas where I need to put more focus.
- Resistance towards accepting a female colleague in a masculine industry like manufacturing engineering. We immediately started to organise ‘know your bias’ workshops.
- We found that challenging work is not offered to female colleagues. For this, we started organising one-on-one with female colleagues to understand their requirement and assigned one global-level mentor to mentor them to handle any challenging tasks. We also promoted women to techno-commercial roles at our manufacturing plants.
- We found that we need to increase the number of gender diverse population to bring new and different perspectives at work. The group decided to recruit 37 per cent gender diverse population; currently we are at 38 per cent in the hiring.
-We found that woman can address their requirement and topics in the women’s forum, so we formed one, and have already started working on several projects, like: pool cab for women working late; creche facility for working moms; technical training; assigning mentor for development; change in building infrastructure to make it more comfortable for gender-diverse population
What kind of support did you get across the board? Also, did you meet resistance at any level?
FORVIA believes in peer-to-peer connect and our board is very supportive. I joined as a lead engineer and had a female manager, and she shaped me to leadership role. So, I believe, you need to have acceptance of diverse working global environment, and you should be open to learn and accept challenges.
What has been the impact of the initiative/s taken? Has the organisation conducted a survey to assess the impact?
Our organisation conducted an engagement survey and impact was huge. I would say that in my team the impact of know your bias workshop is huge. People started addressing their bias, became more aware of challenges of gender diverse population and started offering help. We have promoted female leadership to techno-commercial roles in manufacturing plant and in engineering centers.
We have seen that people want to have female colleagues in their team and are helping them to get challenging work. We believe that our mentorship programme would develop future female leaders. We are planning to promote our India gender diverse talent to global level.
What is the way forward for more diverse and inclusive workplaces?
I personally believe that this is just a start and we need to identify more areas where we can make a difference. We need to continue the spirit of D&I.
(The article appeared in the august issue of BW People publication)
