Goal

 

HeForShe is a UN campaign which encourages men to be advocates for gender equality. Schneider Electric India committed to some goals towards pushing forward the HeforShe agenda in India. The main goals were to increase the representation of women across all levels of management and ensure that 40% of the new hires were women, increase the overall gender ratio at the workplace, and focus on “bringing about societal changes through education and women employment”.

 

Activities

 

Men were sensitized towards workplace issues and challenges faced by women employees and towards building a gender bias free world. The campaign proved a pivotal point to induce cultural change not only within the internal employees in the organization, but also among the external stakeholders.

 

Internal Campaign

 

All the tools of internal communication channels were utilized to educate employees and garner their support for this, which included weekly communication letters, SMS encouraging employees to participate. Signing up for the cause was also incorporated across Family Day functions which was held in 13 locations, covering a thousand-odd families and each leaders’ personal commitment and pledge towards this movement was displayed across the office to further encourage the employees.

 

External Campaign

 

The initiative has been socialized extensively across all the platforms to generate awareness in the society as well. The posts on social media received over 23 million impressions. 2 rock concerts were organized in Bangalore and in Delhi and 2 marathons in the cities of Chennai & Hyderabad. Schneider also engaged with over 25 educational campuses and HeForShe kiosks were set up in prominent work locations in Bangalore city to garner support from people outside Schneider Electric

 

 

Impact
 

• More than 15K commitments from Schneider Electric India (highest among all other Schneider Electric countries)

• Positive changes in the conversations across the organization, movement from “Why” to “How”

• Covered 45 schools through Jagriti and touched the lives of 4500 children and targeted to educate 9000+ children in 2017

• Enriching experience for men by being a facilitator for “Jagriti” and engaging with children

• Inducted 10 women as “Diyas” across locations

 

 

 

Takeaway

As seen in the above case, this is a brilliant learning for organizations striving to implement and promote GD awareness in their workplaces, either starting from day one or anytime in the future. This novel concept of inspiring the opposite gender to become the advocate, encouraged men to relinquish their traditional viewpoint of women’s success as ‘zero-sum’ gain and on the other hand, women to consider men’s involvement as an act of benevolence.

 

Encouraging men to become change agents to achieve gender diversity not only diminishes the primary walls of prejudice between genders, but also instils an all-embracing culture into the office which in-turn curbs unconscious biases. And all these, at a cost of almost nothing apart from your intellectual capital which you will need to craft simple, impactful ideas to create inspiration. So when you’re kickstarting your campaign with this positive approach, you’re actually making your employees feel valued, inclusive and part of a bigger family rather than mere productive entities of an organization.

 

Furthermore, the apt and timely use of communication channels (both online and offline) proved critical for the success of this campaign. The simplicity and plain sight nature of the campaign paid off, and induced a positive momentum among employees to move from ‘why’ to ‘how’. Develop and use common, simple methods and measure progress to ensure greater involvement of employees, by saving their time, patience instead of making an overwhelming survey or a complicated set of activities. It is advisable to experiment with your existing channels, resources to devise a simple and profound strategy which doesn’t put you in uncharted lands and confuse you to measure the outcomes.