‘Inclusion and diversity are critical’
Ong mu Gombu is executive vice president-HR, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare. Gombu brings with her 21 years of rich and diverse experience in HR in organizations across manufacturing and commercial operations. A result oriented professional, she is an alumnus of Lady Shri Ram College and has an MBA in HR from XLRI, Jamshedpur, India. At GSK, Gombu’s focus is on creating an environment inclusive for all its employees. Edited excerpts:
What is GSK doing to empower its women workforce? Are there any special initiatives and policies in this direction?
At GSK, our endeavour is to have policies that reciprocate the changing needs of our employees. Our aim is to cater to all the life stages for both men and women to enable an inclusive and diverse culture.
As a modern employer, we keep evaluating policies, both existing and new, from time to time. One such policy that we amended in April 2016 was the leave policy. Across industries, GSK was the first to offer maternity leave for 180 days for both biological and adopted children. Our paternity leave is for 14 days. For single parents, the policies are in line with regular maternity and adoption leave. Single male employees, in case of adoption of a child of age 6 months or less, can avail up to 6 months of fully paid leave, and in case of adoption of a child more than 6 months of age, can be availed up to 3 months of fully paid leave. This is in recognition of the fact that the world around us is changing and we need to be conscious of always including diverse situations and perspectives.
In 2017, we launched training programs for employees on Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) with an aim to create awareness on issues of safe environment for all our employees including women. In less than a year 98% of our employees are POSH certified.
Policies apart, we also have a very strong mentoring programme at GSK. We have mentors assigned to our emerging talent both men and women and all our initiatives are aligned ensuring we provide equal opportunities to everyone and therefore give them a great career at GSK.
As an organisation, we make that extra effort in driving more women participation. Research shows that successful organisations should have a minimum 50% women participation in everything they do. We at GSK, therefore, partner with search firms and ensure returning mothers are provided flexibility and constantly have conversations around better women representation in the workforce.
How do you promote a culture of inclusion and drive the diversity agenda?
Inclusion and Diversity is a critical component of embedding our innovation, performance and trust culture in the organization. Over the last few years, we have made strong strides in gender diversity, wherein we increased the proportion of women in our leadership team to 30%, early talent intake to 50%, increased number of women in Sales as well as our Manufacturing Sites. All this has been possible with focused efforts and commitment from our business leaders.
Our Inclusion & Diversity council is also led by our Regional Supply Chain Head & includes members of various functions.
To further drive home this commitment, we instituted a practice to celebrate Inclusion & Diversity Week annually coinciding with International Women’s Day.
This year, our intent has been to broaden the conversation and emphasize our commitment to build an inclusive culture that values diversity not just in gender but in many other areas. We conducted a holistic set of events across locations under the umbrella of “#Bethevoice” encouraging our employees to raise voice against any conscious or unconscious biases. Such events lead to increased awareness of the diversity agenda, translating into many specific efforts in various parts of the organization.