This year, Everise celebrates International Women’s Day by choosing to challenge traditional work paradigms that hinder not only women in the workplace, but all marginalised communities.
We sat down with our Chief People Officer, Sheena Ponnappan, to ask her how this year’s International Women's Day theme applied to Everise and why it is so important.
Q: The theme of International Women’s Day is “choose to challenge" - How does that apply to Everise?
A: When it came to traditional workplaces, our mindset from the beginning was to challenge everything that was harmful and discriminatory. We have always encouraged remote working, we’ve challenged gender discrimination, we’ve challenged gender pay inequality, and we’ve achieved most of these goals. We stand with women everywhere to challenge inequality in workplaces across the world.
Q: What are some of the critical ways we keep gender equality in mind when it comes to hiring and promotions?
A: Having more women in leadership is essential because it ensures that there are more women in power who have the authority to decide and negotiate on issues that affect women. At no point should women entering the workforce feel they’re less worthy of it because of the gender discrimination that they see in organizations.
Q: Why is diversity important to our success?
A: Everise has always celebrated diversity and inclusion, but a shift to a more flexible and dispersed work culture has removed many barriers and enabled us to increase our inclusion targets across the board. Everise successfully transformed our hiring strategy to overachieve on our diversity targets over the past year.
Q: Why is Everise a great place for women to work?
A: With 45% women in Senior Management, Everise is proud to be among the top echelon of companies, according to Diversity Inc. We have eliminated the gender pay gap and we take a strong stance against harassment.
When we have more women on top, young women who are entering the workforce and joining Everise can see more female leaders and get inspired to be like them – to want to be in that position someday.
Q: What can other companies learn from Everise?
A: We as an organization needed to first understand that gender diversity was a priority before we established our goals. All of our male leaders value the opinions and perspectives of every female employee and they all promote gender diversity. As a result, we’ve been successful at creating a fair, safe environment for women, which brings me hope that there’s more progress being made elsewhere.
Digital transformation, culture and flexibility are things many businesses seem to talk about but relatively few have the ability to take action on. In 2021 it's time that companies #ChoosetoChallenge traditional workplace practices and build a more diverse, dispersed and inclusive culture.
Related Insights:
