Pride Month Celebration- An Essential D&I initiative

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Pride is a celebration of identity, gender, race, and sexuality, and every other minority. It is a fight for equal human rights, tolerance, and acceptance, especially at work. It also refers to the achievements of community members toward equal rights.

Susmita Sarma: Hello, listeners. Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. I'm your host, Susmita. Today's episode is all about fighting inequality and discrimination in the workplace, because it's June and we are discussing Pride Month today. Pride is an opportunity to promote diversity and inclusion alongside employee engagement in the workplace. It is key to an impeccable company culture that attracts diverse talent. Hence, Pride Month celebration is an essential D&I initiative, and to shed light on the topic, we have with us Saswati Sinha, the Head of Human Resources, India, at Evalueserve. Welcome to the show, Saswati.

Saswati Sinha: Thank you very much, Susmita. Thank you for having me.

Susmita Sarma: Thank you so much for being here in this conversation today, Saswati. It's June, and we are celebrating Pride Month this month. Before we start talking about the actual topic today, it would be great if you could brief us about yourself.

Saswati Sinha: Susmita, I head the HR department for India for Evalueserve, which works in research, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. I have more than 24 years of experience now in HR, and I've worked across industries including IT and media. Just before joining Evalueserve, I was heading HR and people functions for a company that is part of the Samsung Group. I've been based here for the last 25 to 26 years.

Susmita Sarma: Great. So talking about Pride Month, the first thing I'd like to know from you is: what is the true meaning of diversity and inclusion for you?

Saswati Sinha: Susmita, whenever we talk about inclusion or removing biases, I always feel, why are we even talking about it? It should have been hygiene by now. We should not have unconscious biases. We should be inclusive of every community. That should already be part of our whole framework, and we shouldn't have to consciously drive it, it should just be basic. In my mind, the ideal situation is one where you don't have to think about this: you're focusing on talent, on creating connections and relationships, without thinking about where the person is coming from. That's the true meaning, building a solution where you don't have to think about it.

Susmita Sarma: Okay. So tell me, Saswati, in your opinion, why are diversity and inclusion initiatives important in the workplace?

Saswati Sinha: Well, in the workplace, diversity and inclusion is one of the most critical aspects, and I'd say we've reached a point where we shouldn't have to consciously drive it, it should be hygiene. It's a given fact that only when different types of individuals, with different ways of thinking and different orientations, come together, can we drive innovation and creativity. Those are the buzzwords, right? The same type of thinking cannot drive innovation and creativity, and it can't help us reach the next level. If you want to go up the value chain, you need diversity in your thinking, and you need to include different types of thought processes to move forward. That's true not just for the workplace, but for society as a whole.

Susmita Sarma: Right, right, right. So do you believe the LGBTQIA+ community is still facing workplace discrimination, even after years of change in workplaces?

Saswati Sinha: Unfortunately, yes. Even today, after so much conscious effort, there is still discrimination, still inequality prevalent in workplaces. And this isn't a conscious inequality, at least I can speak for the organizations I've worked for. It's not a conscious bias; any community bias we carry is actually deep rooted, and that's why change is difficult to come by. It goes back to our whole societal framework, how we grew up, what the cultural scenario was. Even today, forget sexual orientation for a moment, even with gender diversity, we are still working toward it and haven't achieved the milestones we wanted. Simply because, if you go to the interior parts of the country in India today, there are still girls who aren't educated past a certain age. They'll eventually need to be included. Now, people coming out of those communities into the workplace won't suddenly change their mindset. It's a mindset, a whole belief system, and it takes a lot of time to realize that.

Susmita Sarma: It takes time, but I think our responsibility, as organizations and as individuals, is to drive this in every way we can, to create awareness so that more and more people's mindsets shift. And celebrating Pride Month, Saswati, is also deeply correlated with things like employee engagement, recognition, and acceptance. It's become an essential part of our everyday initiatives.

Saswati Sinha: Yes, 100%. Whenever an organization is driving D&I, and I think most evolved organizations are doing this at this point, we consciously say Pride Month is consciously celebrated. At Evalueserve, we've formed community groups for this, and we tell people, please join these groups, talk to each other. We create awareness through panel discussions, our leaders talk about it, we send out mailers. Our focus is more on education, awareness, and removing unconscious bias, because the more we talk about it, the more we realize how much of it is unconscious, things we don't even realize ourselves. That only gets mitigated through education and awareness, and then we consciously drive it across the organization.

Susmita Sarma: As you've mentioned what you're doing at Evalueserve, would you like to highlight a few other ways workplaces can celebrate this month and show support for the LGBTQ+ community and employees? We see many organizations taking part in diversity training or Pride events. What else would you suggest to the listeners, managers, and HR professionals listening today?

Saswati Sinha: Yes. The initiatives most organizations have found effective, first, as I said, is awareness and education, through external panel discussions, bringing in external speakers to talk about it, and explaining what's in it for the organization as a whole to ensure the community feels included. That's the first aspect. Second, what we're also doing, and what organizations have found very effective, is hearing people's stories. We encourage people to talk about themselves, what they've gone through, and what they'd want from the rest of the organization so they can grow. It creates empathy and builds more connection between the majority group inside the organization and people outside it. Third is engagement activities, activities that include this community, where we work together on certain projects, small gains and initiatives. I think these are some of the things organizations have found effective in creating inclusiveness for this community.

Susmita Sarma: Brilliant. I also believe there's more to it than just the visible gestures.

Saswati Sinha: Just changing the logo or adding the rainbow, these are all good, and I think we've been doing that year after year. But now, I think it's required that our whole fabric isn't just about the month of June. We should weave inclusion into our whole fabric. Let me give an example: in our hiring process, over a period of time, we've said that a certain percentage of hires should be women. We should apply the same thinking here. We should say that, wherever people are able to disclose their orientation, we ensure that percentage is brought into the mainstream. So slowly, it stops being just about inclusion for its own sake, it becomes about talent and skills. Nobody should care what orientation, background, race, caste, or gender you're from, it's all about talent and skills. But initially, we have to drive it, the organizational framework has to drive it. Just talking about it for a month, or really just a couple of days, isn't enough. All our effort should go toward making the process of accepting the community a lot more organic, not just something that creates a buzz once in a while and then fades. It's a mindset change, and it has to happen consistently over time.

Susmita Sarma: Very true, very true. So, in the end, how would you like to summarize your thoughts on Pride Month celebration being an important D&I initiative at work? Your end note for the show.

Saswati Sinha: I'm really passionate about this subject, I could go on and on. But to summarize, I believe organizations driving these initiatives and this inclusivity for the community shouldn't look at it as just a short-term D&I initiative. Whenever we're devising any policy, process, or program within the organization, we should keep in mind that this is a minority that can bring a lot of advantages to the organization, and we should keep involving them at every step of what we do. It shouldn't be a plug-in, plug-out approach. It should be consistent, working toward changing mindsets, which might take years, but if we don't start now, it's never going to happen. So let's start with consistent approaches rather than just a month of celebration. That's my humble request.

Susmita Sarma: Amazing. Thank you for those words, Saswati. Is there a book, podcast, or movie you'd want to suggest to our listeners, something you enjoyed watching or listening to?

Saswati Sinha: There are lots and lots of them, but I don't have one favorite. What I'd request our listeners to do, from a very practical standpoint, is to read or look up case studies where including this community has resulted in ROI, return on investment, where organizations have seen the benefits themselves. There are a lot of case studies available online. So I'd ask each of you, whatever resources you have, to go ahead, search, and look at case studies where there's a return on investment. It's not just about being a good human being, it's also about the benefits it brings to the table, if you look at it from the lens of an organization.

Susmita Sarma: Thank you, Saswati. After this podcast, our listeners might want to connect with you for a more detailed conversation, maybe even another podcast. How can a listener reach out to you?

Saswati Sinha: I'm very active on LinkedIn, so the best and fastest way to reach me is through LinkedIn.

Susmita Sarma: Yes, I'll share your LinkedIn link in the show notes, Saswati. Thank you so much for this conversation today. Thank you for taking the time and for beautifully answering all my questions. I really appreciate that we discussed such a sensitive issue today, and I'm sure our listeners will love this episode. So thanks again, and I hope to hear from you again soon.

Saswati Sinha: Thank you for having me on the show. And to all the listeners out there, even a small step of yours toward inclusivity will help us move ahead, as human beings and as organizations.

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