Mr. Bhatia, VP Human Resources, PepsiCo India shares with Winning Edge, PepsiCo's commitment to build a diverse workforce and create 'inclusive' culture within the company as the company launches a 'diversity and inclusion' initiative in partnership with JobStreet, in a bid to reach out to diverse set of potential employees.

Mr. Bhatia: Yes. It is a competitive advantage. Actually it's a 'given' in today's situation. It's a competitive advantage because  if you represent your consumer within the organization you will develop better products, better services. Wherever you recruit from, that pool is going to be diversified.  It's not only gender diversity, you  can look at diversity from age, religion or ethnicity perspective. So there are different dimensions of diversity and therefore what is more important for organizations is to build inclusive culture.

Mr. Bhatia: No, we don't make any reservations for gender, age, religion, ethnicity etc. The policy is related to getting the best fit individual. We ensure that  in our hiring process, there is no bias related to any kind of diversity. However, we do keep targets. There would be a target framed to increase women representation in the organization from 15% to 20 %. But those targets are an indication of how we are doing or building a diversified workforce. That does not necessarily mean that there is a quota or reservation.

Mr. Bhatia: Our target is to reach 20%. But in my mind even 20% is under indexed because if you look at population demographics there is no reason why you shouldn't have 40% or 45% women.

Mr. Bhatia: It started with fixing targets. And very soon we realised that it's not about fixing targets but making sure that you are facilitating on a larger scale identification, development and hiring of women. That's how we got on to this initiative with JobStreet. What is it that we can do as a corporation that will impact beyond just the numbers increasing from 15 % to 20 %? How can we get the intellectual capital back? There are enough statistics that show that from graduation and post graduation to after five years, there is 50% drop in the number of women who are working. That's why we wanted to go beyond just the targets and numbers and get the intellectual capital back to the workforce.

Mr. Bhatia: It really depends on the role. Of course a shop floor job can not be done out of home. But in sales offices or corporate offices of manufacturing companies you can easily do it. And we have implemented some of these policies.

Mr. Bhatia: Absolutely! Most of the manufacturing companies are now re-looking at their policies to see how best they can provide these facilities in order to retain the best talent.

Mr. Bhatia: When we were brainstorming as a team and looking at how do we make a bigger impact that's when we came up with the idea that let’s tap the female employees who dropped out of the talent pool for family/personal reasons Once we had the idea, we realised that what we need is a strong partner who can advertise these jobs. Because we needed a bridge..if we have roles like that how do we communicate to women who are not in the workforce. And that's how we identified JobStreet. They have the means of communicating with the larger population and we have the means of giving those roles by partnering with other organizations.

Mr. Bhatia: This is a standalone campaign. However besides this campaign for the internal population, based on the feedback from different sets of individuals in the company, we have looked at modifying our policies. The whole 'inclusion and diversity' drive is based on two or three aspects. One is making sure that you have an inclusive culture and we have been doing a lot of work in creating that inclusive culture through training initiatives.

Mr. Bhatia: What we have done is we have developed four modules on diverse and inclusive culture. We have finished training of all our forty senior managers. Now what we are doing is we are taking this to the organization so that it creates the first platform of building inclusive culture. There is no point in getting diversity to the organization if you don't have the culture that cherishes this diversity. Having done that our second platform is to see how to increase the numbers, and what are the different programs that we can run to achieve this. Out of that, the first program is this tie up with JobStreet. The third platform is making sure that we have the policies that are flexible, which take care of employees who have different and diverse needs. These are the three pillars.

Mr. Bhatia: I would hope so. We need to make the company more employee friendly and hopefully we will be seen as a very strong employer by all categories of employees especially women.

Mr. Bhatia: We have a sabbatical policy whereby women or even male employees can take a leave up to one year, in case they feel the need to balance work and life. We also have policies on spouse working. In case you're getting transferred, we look at hiring your spouse in the new location or if your spouse is looking for a job we are open to hiring your spouse as long as it is not a boss subordinate relationship. We have policies relating to flexible maternity leave policies and if you are still feeding the baby then you can do half day work or work from home. We have policy of telecommuting e.g. I'm based in Delhi but one of my team members is actually based out of Mumbai. That's because her husband transferred to Mumbai. So we have different kinds of policies for different employee needs, at different stages of their lives.

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