Return on Investment at Tata Power-DDL

How did you help women move into new and more challenging roles?

First, we did an informal diagnostic study and interviewed female staff. We wanted to get to know them better and give them space to speak their mind. We wanted to understand their limiting beliefs; what prevented them from taking leaps forward at the company? We also wanted to hear what they thought we could do to facilitate their forward progress. 

We took their feedback and created a program called The Women in Leadership League, known as WILL. This was a mentoring and leadership program that would help more women move into leadership roles. The top leadership of the company--including the CEO--were assigned four to five female mentees. Their job was to support these women and help open doors for them. Through this program, female employees know that if they are having any difficulty, they can come back to their mentor--a senior leader--for guidance and support. We tell our mentees, “I will guide and support you and help you succeed. If you fail I am behind you and there is no issue; you can try something else.” This type of mentoring and psychological support is critical. 

Tata Power-DDL also established regular, informal opportunities for dialogue between female employees and the CEO. During these dialogues, the CEO shared his vision with female colleagues and encouraged women to take up more challenging roles at the utility. The informal dialogue provides an open forum for the women to express concerns or offer suggestions to improve the workplace. The group discusses each concern or suggestion and determines next steps to resolve the issue. The CEO receives regular updates on these actionable steps to ensure accountability and that women’s voices are heard. 

We also began exposing female staff to other female business leaders-- particularly women leaders who came from basic or challenging backgrounds-- who would inspire them. If you organize a training program for female employees where you have a man stand in front and tell them about their potential, that is just storytelling. But when successful women leaders share their stories, standing in front of them, they relate and feel more inspired. They are able to ask, “How did you do this? What was stopping you, and how did you overcome it?”

We also began providing female staff opportunities to travel around the country and even internationally, attending trainings and conferences, and speaking as panelists. We even created a special program to train female staff in public speaking to build their skills and confidence with public engagements.

Did the creation of a professional development program exclusively for women create any tension with men at the utility? 

Did men feel left out? Initially, yes. There were issues from select segments of employees, and we dealt with those concerns as they came. But when your employees see that the top leadership of the company is investing in women, that the human resources function is supporting and behind these initiatives, that the company as a whole feels these initiatives are necessary, positive, and right, male employees start to buy-in. The programs and sessions we held with leadership on unconscious bias and gender diversity and inclusion were also helpful in mitigating any negative feelings.

What have been the positive impacts of investing in your female employees?

There have been many. Once we had established a supportive culture for women internally, we felt we now had a conducive environment to try more things. We felt that if we were going to truly promote gender diversity and inclusion, we should be putting more women out front. We thought, why not create a customer care center that is exclusively staffed and run by women? We started moving in that direction, staffing all of the positions at one of our customer care centers with women. 

We spoke to the district office team which is responsible for managing the customer care center. We told the district manager, “You are now the primary person responsible for making these women comfortable, for mentoring them, for making sure they are receiving the training they need, and for ensuring that they have the infrastructure they need.” The district manager absorbed all of the responsibility for the performance of the center. We made it very clear: his success would be measured by the success of these women. When you make male managers and leaders responsible in this way, you motivate their participation and investment in their female colleagues. They will ensure their female colleagues succeed when it becomes a reflection on them. We took this responsibility all the way up to our senior leadership. The essence was: if these women fail it is not about them, it is about us. Today the women-run customer service center is Tata Power-DDL’s top performing customer service center. When these women took over the center it was ranked seventh out of 12. 

Today it is ranked first. This increase in performance is a great business success. When the women took over the center, suddenly the number of incoming complaints was reduced. They started resolving cases faster. For me this was not a surprise; this reflects my personal experience working with my female colleagues. They solve problems faster. They are sincere, hardworking, talented, great at multitasking, and have a lot of patience. These attributes are what made the center a great success.

What does the future look like for women at Tata Power? 

After we saw the great success of this customer care center, we opened another. It was also successful. Now our plan is to have all 12 customer service centers run by female employees. In total, that would create around 180 positions for women at the company. The success of these initiatives has only encouraged us to do much more. With support from our Engendering Industries coach, we are ensuring that our female staff have more learning and working opportunities through job rotations, and exposure to new areas. Today we have more women than ever before working in field roles, we have a female employee in the transformer maintenance station, and we plan to hire more women into technical and operations positions.

If you could share one piece of advice with utility leaders from around the world, what would it be? 

It is everyone’s responsibility, and especially men’s responsibility, to facilitate and support equal, fair, and empowering opportunities for women in industry. We should all join hands together to support this effort. When you look at utilities around the world, women are not there. We need to share our gender equality successes to showcase the positive outcomes of increasing gender equality to motivate others. We have demonstrated the business case and tremendous value of promoting women at Tata Power-DDL. Our Engendering Industries coach gives us so much insight simply by asking questions. It is through the questioning and responding that our best ideas are generated. We are really grateful for the many insights that Engendering Industries, Tetra Tech, and USAID have provided during this partnership.