Over the past five years, a growing number of women have started occupying senior leadership positions globally. It is even more heartening to see women professionals opt for key roles in the hospitality sector.
This emergent inclination can be traced to improved working conditions in the industry as well as growing opportunities for their skills. Women make better candidates for several customerfacing positions in the hospitality industry – they are good listeners with strong interpersonal skills.
Keen to leverage this soft power, hotel brands are going all out to ensure the safety, comfort and convenience of their women staffers. A case in point is Ginger Hotels, which is aiming to increase the percentage of women in senior leadership positions for healthier gender diversity across all levels.
Ajit Dias, Head of Human Resources at Ginger Hotels
However, Ajit Dias, Head of Human Resources at Ginger Hotels tells Vinita Bhatia that in today’s competitive times, every hiring decision is taken on the basis of an individual’s skill set, not their gender.
This is best illustrated in the career trajectory of Deepika Rao, MD and CEO of Ginger Hotels. Tata Motors hired her through a campus recruitment drive and she subsequently joined Tata Administrative Services. During both these selection processes, she did not experience any gender bias. Instead, she maintained that the entire process focussed on evaluating potential and right organisational fit, agnostic of gender.
Though more women are entering the workforce, are they underrepresented as they rise up the corporate ladder?
While the presence of women in senior leadership roles is low, this situation has been improving. It will keep rising as support systems at home and workplaces get better. In organisations, this could be in the form of identifying potential women leaders and supporting them with a mentor to chart their journey from middle to senior management.
Can gender inclusivity influence overall employee satisfaction and retention?
Various studies have shown that embracing diverse and inclusive values lead to better employee satisfaction. This results in higher levels of productivity and profitability. Inclusive environments allow individuals to bring their true selves to work. Employees who feel empowered in their job are likelier to feel happy in the workplace. This promotes employee confidence, which in turn, leads to innovative ideas. Of course, all this positivity influences staff retention.
How can employers ensure that their companies do not have either a glass ceiling or a broken rung?
Employers need to evaluate their work culture, while taking a closer look at their existing values, successes and failures. Two key influencers in this appraisal process are communication and context.
Leaders need to listen to their employees’ feelings, concerns, and ideas. Asking team members for their views helps in discovering important facts about the company and getting real-time suggestions for improvement, in addition to encouraging the organisation in recognising and challenging bias.
This also gives impetus for the ‘why’ behind decisions made about diversity. It can mean having some difficult conversations, and requires honest introspection from senior leaders across the board. Practicing equal opportunity for any role, irrespective of gender or any other factor, helps to break the proverbial glass ceiling.
How has Ginger Hotels implemented this?
We have promoted women-specific leadership programmes to develop and groom female leaders in the organisation who are at the cusp of early senior management roles. This equips them with tools to take purposeful choices and enhances their individual impact within the company and beyond.
In line with our group philosophy, we have been practising all aspects of being an equal opportunity employer. This includes ensuring a healthy diversity mix in the organisation as well as within teams, since it brings diverse views to the table.
We have set diversity targets for our teams, communicating about these constantly by announcing achievements and sharing success stories about women. We create diverse teams in the strategic
decision-making process and make certain that their suggestions are well noted.
How did you go about setting gender representation goals and outlining targets for the inclusion and advancement of women into senior-level management?
What we have done is look at the various opportunities internally. We then encourage our HR teams to set internal targets or KRAs for the HR function as well as the organisation to meet our gender representation goals. This has also influenced our recruitment strategy and efforts for the advancement of women into first level management.
We have been providing and maintaining equality of opportunity for self-development and advancement to all qualified employees. Our career development programmes as well as our campus recruitment drives include conscious inclusion of 50% female associates. During a recent young talent recruitment programme, we discovered that the selection naturally gravitated towards more women graduates who became part of this initiative.
Similarly, organisations keen to better their diversity ratios can emphasise that everyone in the work environment must be treated with dignity and respect. Non-tolerance and sensitivity training about preventing any form of harassment – whether sexual, physical, verbal or psychological – is also key to the diversity agenda. The HR team, along with the senior management, should mentor and train managers across the company on handling unconscious bias and leading diverse teams.
How can companies rejig their HR process to be more diversity oriented during hiring and promotions?
Companies could incentivise diverse hiring. They could also offer a higher incentive for candidates who are selected based on the identified diversity criteria.
We have a talent management council with strong women representation, which periodically reviews all key hotel positions. They also look at potential assessments to determine the best fit for these roles. All
potential candidates are explored so that we do not miss out on any potential women candidate.
How can these processes be evaluated critically to ensure fairness, while getting the desired results?
Women tend to take on a new role only when they feel they are 100% ready for it. Hence, the onus is on leaders to instill the confidence that they can take on new challenges and that the organisation will support them with all required resources.
Line managers making hiring decisions should be encouraged to assess talent purely based on qualification, experience, skill set, potential and merit. This is possible by having a diverse interview panel and training interviewers on the kind of questions that can, or cannot be, asked to female candidates.
A few other initiatives that companies can take up include maintaining transparency in communicating the growth path and key deliverables to get there. They should also ensure equal pay opportunities for females. Women should be treated as equals in all aspects rather than giving them any special benefits.Â
