The long road to a safe workplace

MJ Akbar’s decision to quit the government will go down as a major victory for the #metoo movement in India. Yet sounding the victory bugle may be terribly premature. There are thousands of women who are still afraid to come forward and report cases of sexual harassment at the workplace. The fact is that India Inc is still far away from building a safe and gender-balanced workplace that provides a sense of security for people to willingly come forward and report incidents and also believe that there will be a fair and thorough hearing of their complaints.

Last week, Moneycontrol made one of its reporters trawl through the annual reports of the Nifty 50 companies for the financial year 2018 to identify the number of sexual harassment complaints that had been recorded. Despite the fact that it was for just one year and somewhat unidimensional, the findings from the data were quite revealing.

Here’s what they found:

Wipro, ICICI Bank, Infosys,

TCS, and Axis Bank top the charts with 101, 99, 77, 62 and 47 complaints, respectively.

There are just 12 companies in the Nifty50, including the top 5 listed above, which have recorded complaints in double digits. These 12 companies together account for about 87 per cent of the total 588 complaints recorded by the Nifty50 companies. The skew is quite revealing.

There are 14 companies that don’t have a single complaint to show for. These include Grasim, Reliance Industries, Tech Mahindra, Adani Ports, and the like (notwithstanding differences in the nature of business and level of gender diversity within, experts say that about 100+ complaints in a year for every 100,000 employees is a good thumb rule to follow).

Among the rest, most of the 74 companies have recorded sexual harassment complaints in low single digits, often as low as one or two for the whole year.

So what does this tell us?

There’s a reason why Wipro, ICICI Bank, Infosys and TCS are ahead of the pack. Their global operations forced them to put in place systems much before it became mandatory in India. ICICI Bank started its journey with prevention of sexual harassment in 2003 around the time it was expanding overseas. And it was felt that the Indian operations also ought to have the same system in place. The tech companies on the Nifty50, with the exception of HCL and Tech Mahindra, have had to deal with multiples cases over the years — and have a far more sophisticated approach than the rest of the industry.

The level of complaints is an important indicator to gauge whether people trust the system to deliver. And whether the system of natural justice will be brought to bear. If women aren’t willing to step up and complain, it signals that most people don’t have confidence that they will find justice — or at least be given a fair hearing.

The key issue is that it isn’t about tokenism. Setting up an internal complaints committee, as mandated by law, is one thing. Some firms simply publicise the fact. But do very little beyond that or look to create a strong workplace culture. And then there are firms that do not even tell employees about its existence — as many Indian firms have chosen to do — something that is totally unacceptable.

The latest round of revelations around #metoo have galvanised some firms, including some in the media industry, to promptly write to employees urging them to come forward and register complaints. It is entirely reactive — and a belated attempt to appear even-handed.

And sadly, nothing much will come off it, even though a few heads may roll. The challenge is to make the transition from a compliance-based approach to a new workplace culture that supports safe and gender-neutral behaviour.

Cultures don’t get formed overnight. And it requires open, facilitated conversations led by leaders, as opposed to check-box kind of training programmes that our HR folks simply love organising, forcing employees to attend, kicking and screaming.

Issues of consent, for instance, are deeply cultural and based on past conditioning. And it requires free and open conversations to evolve a minimum set of rules that everyone understands and is willing to adhere to. Storytelling in town halls is a great way to mobilise culture building.

Video-based case studies can offer simple dos and don’ts to deal with potentially tricky situations. Like not setting up meetings in a hotel room, but in a coffee shop. Or at an office party, staying away from the dance floor, if you’ve had a few rounds of drinks.

In the end, this kind of culture change, more often than not, depends on the intent of the senior leadership team at the helm. If the top four or five leaders in the firm are strongly committed, half the battle is won. There is enough help at hand to get the rest of the procedural aspects — be it a well-functioning enquiry committee or a calibrated matrix of punishments to deal with different kinds of offences — in place.