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Hi, my name is George Abraham and welcome to this episode of Eyeway Conversations. My guest today is Manushree Singh. She is the Lead-Diversity and Inclusion in India for Capgemini. Delighted Manushree to have you on the show.
Thank you, George. It's a treat to to be here and talking to you. And it's a journey and I'm sure it's going to be a very insightful and enriching one. So look forward.
So let's begin with the question about Capgemini. Tell us a little bit about the company, the products and services that you offer, the geographies in which you operate in India and internationally.
Absolutely. So Capgemini is a global leader in consulting, digital transformation, technology and engineering services. And I must say that innovation is the key and we are at the forefront of innovation to address the entire breadth of clients opportunities and evolving world of cloud, digital and platforms. We come with a strong and a solid 50 plus years of heritage and industry specific expertise. We enable organizations to realize their own business ambitions through services ranging from strategy and design to operations. Capgemini is driven by conviction that the business value of technology comes from and through people. Capgemini's employee targeted initiatives are in tune with our people-first philosophy and we are a multicultural organization with about 270,000 employees in almost 50 countries. India being approximately 125,000 employees and India becomes undoubtedly the single largest talent hub for us. In India, we're spread across multiple locations like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Noida, Gurugram, Gandhinagar, Bhubaneshwar, Trichy, Salem and Coimbatore. So this is Capgemini for you, George.
So Capgemini hires a number of people with disability, what prompted the company to actually start this hiring?
To be very honest with you, George, and you know, stating some fact, more than 1 billion people in the world are living with some form of disability. And that's one in seven of us, right. 80% of these people acquire their disability between the ages of 18 and 64, which is the average working age for most, and sadly, they are 50% more likely to be unemployed. In India alone, there are over two crores 68 lakh persons with disabilities. Many of these people are of employable age, but only 9.8 million are employed. These stats are alarming and why does this happen? There is a need for all of us to think about it. There is lack of accessible infrastructure and awareness, these people find it difficult to earn a decent living to ensure their participation in the economic value creation process. It calls for awareness and competence building in a systematic and systemic way. At Capgemini, we see this as an opportunity and a social responsibility. Whereas we are responsible corporate and we don't want to leave any stone unturned to make this happen. The opportunity is to tap into this unexplored talent pool. And the rationale becomes all the more compelling knowing the business value such talent exhibits. And there are studies that have shown and we all know that most successful organizations thrive on the basis of diversity and inclusion, more innovation, more creativity, better output. In fact, such organizations have highly engaged and motivated workforce if you at it. And on the social responsibility dimension, providing employment to this section of society improves the social fabric that we are a part of. It is as simple as that. Another independent study puts the cost of overall social exclusion of people with disabilities at 3 to 7% of a nation's GDP. And hence, the imperative is real and urgent. And we all need to consciously move forward on this and make conscious efforts.
It is one thing to decide to hire people with disability. But then, you know, on the practical side of things, it's not the easiest thing to do, because, you know, disability does have a lot of challenges in terms of moving around, accessibility and so on. So, how did you as a company prepare for this move that you decided to go on?
Sure. See we are a completely committed organization to equality of opportunity and dignity for all at work, irrespective of you know, their caste, race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, marital status, sexuality, disability, class or age, I mean, any one of this right. And we are an inclusive organization, and we ensure we provide an inclusive environment that makes everyone feel welcomed and valued for their contributions and for who they are. And we have inclusive Leaders Forum, which is headed by senior leaders, and the forum meets on a regular basis to brainstorm and recognize the opportunities to improve the inclusion of persons with disabilities. We all work as one team to drive this right from planning to hiring to inclusion of persons with disabilities, and all other colleagues across all business units. We call our persons with disability inclusion program as embracing abilities and our focus is more on abilities of a person rather than their disability. We run our persons with disability inclusion with four pillars George, first being accessibility, second is focus on their career. Third is engagement. And fourth is evangelism. We started with physical accessibility and ensured all our buildings are equipped with ramps, accessible lifts, disabled friendly washrooms and other infrastructure provisions to enable a barrier free environment for our colleagues and help them deliver their best at the workplace. On the IT and the digital accessibility front, we ensured that all the internal communications and the intranet is updated with the WCAG two point guidelines and we are compliant on that. And all our internal communication SPOCS are also trained on building accessible communication. This sounds small, but it's extremely important and the basic that we need to do. Apart from these, we conduct sessions with our leaders and employees on how to build inclusive workplaces. There are periodic sensitization drives that we conduct with security staff, vendor partners, etc. We spread awareness through observing days of importance, like IDPWD, Autism Awareness Day, The World Thalassemia Day etc. by conducting stage plays, theatres, awareness kiosks, etc. It's so important that you're creative in even sending the message across so that it is received the way you want people to receive it. Right. And we are committed to the PwD inclusion and promoting inclusivity in the society. As a part of this commitment, we've signed up with the Valuable 500. I'm sure you've heard about it. And we actively participate in promote inclusivity in the society through industry and customer connect as well. And one of it is something that we're doing together now. We also participate in various webinars with ASSOCHAM, CII, IBDN, NCPEDP, UNGCI, Sarthak Education Trust, NASSCOM and many more. And we've been awarded the second runners up in the Best Employer for Persons with Disability by ASSOCHAM in 2019 and 2021 as well. And our PwD colleagues are also encouraged to participate in external events, conferences, trainings, sport events, etc, which are sponsored by the organization. So we're all in there standing tall together, evolving and wanting to make this happen, not only for the organization, but the larger society as well.
Sounds very impressive Manushree, and you spoke one of my favorite lines focusing on the ability rather than the disability. I think that's the way to go. So what are the categories of disability that you actually focus on when you hire? And do you actually hire blind and visually impaired people? And if so, what are the kinds of assignments you give them?
Sure. See, as an equal opportunity employer, we follow a merit based and a fair recruitment process, George, where we ensure if any person with disability is being interviewed, they are given the required reasonable accommodation, right. We had, we have people from almost 20 of 21 disabilities. This includes people with full vision impairment and low vision impairment as well. They are present across grades in the organization and some of them are also leading critical project teams and handling pan of more than 100 people. So as an IT consulting firm, most of our roles are technical in nature. And we haven't earmarked any role in particular for, you know, people with certain disabilities that as it leads to an unconscious bias and discrimination and we are very, very conscious about it. And we ensure that we have a bias free environment for all our colleagues. We recruit people based on their available skill set and ensure them to choose which ever role would suit them the most. We believe in our people first philosophy like I told earlier as well and as an organization, we are willing to extend our support to any extent, to ensure that our colleagues lead a life of dignity in a barrier free workspace.
So what are the strategies you as a company kind of have adopted to ensure that the integration and the inclusion actually happens?
Sure. So some of it I talked about earlier as well, which talks about the hiring and the career and evangelism and the other pieces. We're working on a train, hire and deploy model, where we have tied up with the civil society partners to source and train people with disabilities who have completed their graduation in technical domains and upskill them and accordingly hire them based on their assessments. We're also working on campus hiring initiative to attract persons with the disability talents from colleges and like I mentioned I did talk about the overall inclusion effort within the organization previously.
It's one thing to hire, and number of companies actually do hire and many of the people with disability in many of the companies are normally at the starting point and growth within the company is a challenge. What are the prospects of people with disability you hire to move up in the company? What are the plans you have for them?
See we are a fair and transparent organization that hires and promotes people on their merit. And specifically when it comes to persons with disability, from the career development aspect, we have redefined the learning and development policy to support every individual to grow and flourish in the organization. Learning must not stop. What is important is that your learning content and the ways of delivering training is accessible. Our inclusive classroom sessions ensure that the PwD colleagues do not miss out on any learning opportunity that are being conducted in the regular classroom sessions. The other very important point is mentorship across grades for all colleagues, and it should not stop for persons with disabilities as well. We have a mentorship network for our PwD employees, where mentors are allocated from the ranks of Directors, Senior Directors, basically leadership level who guide them on career planning and provide them the much required visibility. And as a team, we also ensure that there are regular campaigns we do with the people managers of persons with disability to ensure that there is seamless career progression and if there is any requirement of training or upskilling then we ensure that it is done in the right time.
Now you have been working with people with disability in the company for a while, you have the experience. So when you look at the time that you've had over the years, what are some of the challenges? And what are the learnings that you have acquired and this obviously would help you as you move forward?
Absolutely. We feel honestly just not the organization, but by and large, the key challenge is lack of awareness, and the myths associated with employing people with disabilities. There's a general lack of awareness in the society which is hardwired into our brain and in some way, it also comes out at workplace and to mitigate that, I spoke about how conscious we are in making the efforts on inclusion. We ensure that our people managers go through the culture brain and bias sessions, where we address this, the stigma and the unconscious bias deeply rooted in our mindset. There are unconscious bias trainings that every panelist who interviews and the recruitment team also go through. Because it's so important for us to be aware of our biases. And then when we you know, execute our effort of hiring people, we know that we are, you know, bias free there. We additionally, we also ensure that the team members are also sensitized, on you know, the challenges that the PwD colleagues face, you know, in their career journey. Then another challenge we often come across is the availability of the talent pool. And that's where we feel the educational institutions and the civil society and the administration has to come together and work in tandem to build a better environment for persons with visual impairment or any disability for that matter. Right. And we've had, you know, as an organization, great experience in working with persons with disability in our teams. Most of the time, they have exceeded our expectations and have been growing steadily over years. To further boost the morale, we in fact, celebrate our people, celebrate their stories, motivate them, promote them, you know, in terms of their talent, their interest, and also in the careers. You know this brings forward the stories of our PwD employees and how they have succeeded in their corporate career. This is inspirational, just not for persons with disabilities, but everybody in the organization. And let me tell you that with a little bit of guidance and confidence shown on them, you know, it can just work miracles and this is why we continue with our focus and commitment for the PwD inclusion and actually just celebrate it throughout the journey.
One can see that you are extremely passionate about what you do and what the company does. Wonderful talking to you. And thank you very much for giving us the time.
Thank you indeed George. You know, as I mentioned, there is nothing that we want to not do to ensure that we as an organization and as a country, progress forward and move ahead on inclusion of persons with disabilities. Thank you for having me over.
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