How an Indian company increased awareness on Gender Diversity through sensitization sessions
Background: An Indian engineering company with plant locations across the country approached Re-Link to design and deliver a program for all its employees on inclusivity and biases in everyday life.
The Challenge: The key challenge was to obtain a buy-in from employees, especially at the plant locations on the need to improve gender diversity. While the leaders appreciated the business case for DEI interventions, they faced practical challenges in bringing it to life in their immediate work environment.
Our Solution: We designed a workshop titled ‘Inclusion 101,’ aimed at presenting a strong business case for gender diversity and educating participants on the key concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In order to get the buy-in, this program used an immersive approach, utilizing facilitative processes such as World Café and Hello Game to introduce participants to the notions of diversity, its benefits, and ways to leverage the current diversity within the team.
Experiential games were used to establish the concepts of Power, Privilege and Unconscious Biases. We also highlighted the differences between Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging through case studies and practical examples, relevant to the industry.
Outcomes:
- 80% coverage of employees across all the plant locations in India.
- 4.7 / 5 average feedback rating.
- The impact of the first two sessions created a snowball effect, with employees in other locations expressing interest in participating.
- Leaders came up with a list of practical solutions to improve gender diversity.
- Kickstarted the conversation of identifying roles for women.