Imagine that the next remote employee you hire is an Indian woman between the ages of 25 to 35 years.
She is trained and certified as a remote worker, speaks fluent English, Hindi, plus a vernacular language, has the work experience you require, and has worked in a corporate environment for over three years.
She also has the empathy to handle sensitive client situations, a high sense of ownership for her work, and feels empowered and grateful for the opportunity you’re offering to achieve financial independence from the safety of her home.
In other words, she’s the perfect remote employee for your organisation and you don’t even have to train or manage her yourself.
Managing A Remote Team Isn’t Easy
As this article by Mark Murphy attests, managing the productivity and mental health of remote employees is not easy. Studies have shown that if remote work isn’t handled correctly, people can become less productive and feel shunned and left out.
It takes a unique set of skills to ensure that your remote processes are run efficiently and that your remote employees feel supported and well-cared for. Most organisations have neither the bandwidth nor the know-how to manage remote teams efficiently.
The coronavirus pandemic has forced many corporate organisations to look for solutions to manage their workforce remotely. It has also provided them with the unique opportunity to achieve gender parity while doing so.
Why Hire Indian Women For Remote Work?
According to the first Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) report, the trend of women withdrawing themselves from the workforce in India has intensified with women’s labour force participation rate falling from 35.1% in 1990 to 27.2% in 2017.
India is one of the nations having the fastest growing number of career women in the world but ranks a dismal 130 out of 189 countries in the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP’s) Gender Inequality Index 2018.
The fact that working women in India are leaving the workforce is hurting the Indian economy and making it less competitive than China.
A report by the McKinsey Global Institute states that India has one of the largest opportunities in the world to boost GDP by advancing women’s equality — $770 billion of added GDP by 2025.
According to The Economist, were India to rebalance its workforce, the world’s biggest democracy would be 27% richer.
“The days of seeing women as homemakers have gone; we have to see women as nation builders,” states Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. However, it’s not just the Indian government that needs to demonstrate a commitment to improving the participation of women in the workforce.
In 2019, Ravi Shankar Prasad, minister for electronics and IT, offered monetary incentives to companies that create large-scale employment for skilled workers excluded from the formal workforce, including women or those based outside the country’s metropolitan areas.
In hindsight, the coronavirus pandemic has made that policy seem almost prescient. With the lockdowns forcing more women in India to consider taking up remote work, Indian companies now have the opportunity to rebalance their workforce by employing more women to work remotely.
Remote Work Is Here To Stay
Experts believe that, even with a vaccine, there’s a good chance that the COVID-19 pandemic will last a lot longer than one might think.
According to the Wall Street Journal, many remote workers are expected to choose to continue working from home even after the pandemic is over,
A recent Gallup study revealed that only a quarter of remote employees are emotionally ready to return to the workplace, while fears of contracting COVID-19 may keep an equal number away, and half have a personal preference for working remotely.
The pace of adoption of work from home policies has accelerated with tech companies like Twitter and Facebook leading the work from home revolution by deciding to continue allowing their employees to work from home indefinitely.
According to Forbes, this global shift to remote working will not merely be an experiment — but, rather, a historical moment with long-lasting ramifications.
Remote work is here to stay and as this article in The Guardian notes, the lessons learned from lockdown could spark a more rapid and widespread “virtualisation” of business practices.
Enabling Work From Home For Women In India
For many working women in India, the thought of risking their family’s health and well-being by going back to the office in such a scenario is unthinkable.
Organisations like SHEROES are enabling the remote work revolution in India by offering online work from home jobs for women in India through the MARS by SHEROES program.
MARS (Managed Remote Solutions) by SHEROES is a women-run organisation that helps clients achieve an improved diversity ratio with access to their remote workforce of trained and skilled women.
MARS can also mitigate the cost implications of hiring the wrong team with a zero resource termination cost. They also ensure a seamless process to handle attrition, eliminating its negative impact on team momentum.
MARS helps organisations achieve upto 30% savings in overhead and tax benefits, and benefit from zero employee startup or onboarding costs, and zero seat running or maintainence costs.
It also helps manage P&L impact during scaling up and offers the economic benefits of flexi-staff with an on-demand workforce during seasonal cycles. This makes it an end-to-end process outsourcing company where companies can see a significant value in terms of quality and savings.
Every MARS remote worker is certified as a MARS Certified Remote Professional (MCRP), ensuring only the best talent is selected from the pool.
Enabling remote work for women is an opportunity for Indian organisations to make a difference in the lives of thousands of highly-qualified Indian women who are unable to work outside the home.
If India treated her women better and Indian women were a bigger part of its workforce, the world’s biggest democracy would be 27% richer. SHEROES is creating the opportunity to make that happen.