Internal diversity and development programme to felicitate women leaders
Noida, India, December 14, 2017: HCL Technologies Ltd, organized the Ascend Women Leadership Summit – an event to celebrate the culmination of ‘ASCEND’- a leadership development program aimed to nurture and guide mid-management women leaders at HCL. As part of the event, women leaders who have successfully completed the program were presented with certificates.
Roshni Nadar Malhotra, Executive Director and CEO, HCL Enterprise also graced the occasion and addressed the forum.
Advaita Kala, Author and Screenwriter, led a key learning session with the participants. She shared her experiences of how her first book, tagged under chick literature genre, was taken by men with surprise. Her journey from being an Hotelier turned Author turned Screenwriter received a huge applause with her frank and engaging discussions. She concluded the session with highlighting the importance of loving and accepting self before anyone else.
Subrat Chakravarty, Head – HR – Business Services, HCL Technologies said, “At HCL, we continue to reinforce our functional commitment to support the journey of everyone through inclusion and diversity and enable each one in their own pursuit. Our Ascend program, in its 5th year, is one of a kind initiatives in the industry committed to nurture women talent and sustained to change the gender ratio significantly. I am glad to see our women leaders trespass all boundaries through Ascend, the self-inflicted glass ceiling, and they have transformed phenomenally.
ASCEND is a Women Leadership Development program which aims to help women leaders prepare for their aspired roles and increase the representation of women in our senior management. ASCEND mandates increases in the representation of women in senior management via multiple ways, including support programs, peer mentoring and coaching at all levels, and providing platforms to enable women leaders to learn and exhibit transformational leadership.
The three key elements of HCL Technologies’ gender diversity strategy involve:
- Leadership commitment and extensive ongoing advocacy to address the unconscious bias in the workplace
- On-boarding multiple stakeholders and driving the agenda based on diversity and inclusion goals of the respective unit, wherein the framework is global but the implementation is global to suit varied business and location needs, and
- Two enabling programs for women leadership development, which are based on formal mentoring.
HCL believes in ensuring respect for each individual and creating a sense of ownership among employees across the globe. The ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ (EFCS) guides all the actions. This philosophy drives HCL towards creating a unique employee organization; creating and sustaining an inverted organizational structure; ensuring trust, transparency and accountability in all that we do; and encouraging a value-driven organization culture.