Diversity Goes Beyond Gender

FROM HIRING DIFFERENTLY-ABLED AND PEOPLE FROM LGBTQ COMMUNITY TO THOSE WITH DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL AND VOCATIONAL BACKGROUNDS AS WELL AS VETERANS FROM ARMED FORCES, INDIA INC. WANTS TO ENSURE ITS WORKFORCE MIRRORS ITS CONSUMERS.

- AJITA SHASHIDHAR

THIRTY-YEAR-OLD Nikhita Bandi is a shopper market manager with FMCG major Marico. She is always on her toes, travelling from one city to another to understand shopping behaviour of consumers at modern retail stores such as Reliance Retail, DMart and Spencer Retail. The 2017 IIM-Bangalore alumnus’ confidence and commitment to her job is remarkable. As she talks passionately about Marico’s digital transformation journey and how she has benefitted from it on a virtual call, there is no way one can know that she functions with just one arm. “I am grateful to Marico for ensuring that my disability doesn’t get the better of me,” she says.

While Bandi is a role model for people with disabilities, for Marico, her passion for work is vindication of its conscious strategy to hire talent from various walks of life and ensure that its workforce is as diverse as possible. “We are a consumer business. To take right calls around innovation, it’s important to have similar social representation in the organisation as we have in society,” says Amit Prakash, CHRO, Marico.

A gender diverse workforce is a given in today’s times. But now, companies, especially the big ones, are pushing the diversity needle further by trying to hire not only women but also people with diverse skill sets and industry experiences, apart from differently-abled and people from LGBTQ communities. “We are launching Kindle and Audible for visually and hearing impaired. How can we do that unless we have visual and hearingimpaired people in our teams who can give us the right inputs?” says Deepti Varma, director, HR, Amazon India.