Engendering a diverse workforce

Policies and initiatives to make our workplace more diverse and inclusive

As an equal opportunities employer, we are committed to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment of any kind. Equal opportunity and fair treatment is part of our Code of Conduct to which all employees subscribe.

To ensure our efforts have a sharp focus, we prioritized three areas for our Diversity and Inclusivity (D&I) efforts – gender, disability and nationality. Tightly integrated with our larger people strategy, our D&I goals for 2020 include:

15% non-Indian nationals in the workforce. In this space we are building collaborative cultures, to start with.
A safe and comfortable workplace for employees with disability (Read more about our D&I efforts for persons with disability here)
25% women in leadership

Fair and square

According to McKinsey, companies across all sectors with the most women on their boards of directors significantly and consistently outperform those with no female representation – by 41% in terms of return on equity and by 56% in terms of operating results.

At Infosys, women comprise 36% of the workforce and on our Board, three out of ten directors are women (all three are independent directors). The Board periodically evaluates the need for change in its composition and size in order to maintain the balance of governance and management.

To ensure that our D&I strategic initiatives balance our drive on this effort, we have adopted a top-down as well as a bottom-up approach. ‘Sit with Me’ is a top-down approach that aims to drive greater participation of women across executive and senior levels. As a bottom-up approach, we are leveraging technology to ensure women do not drop out of the workforce during phases like maternity, but continue to pursue career aspirations.

Sit with Me

Sit with Me is a campaign promoted by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), a non-profit community of more than 600 universities, companies, non-profits, and government organizations nationwide working to increase women’s participation in computing and technology. Infosys partners with NCWIT as part of its efforts to increase diversity in our workforce.

We launched a unique campaign in 2016 to drive awareness about the need for greater participation of women in the leadership and seek commitment across the board on actions to build diverse leadership in the organization. This saw participation from thousands of leaders across the board who voiced their messages, signed up with a personal commitment, and guided the rest of the organization to drive this effort.

Sapphire - using technology to help young mothers stay engaged

Maternity is an important life-stage for women, and organizational support during this period is crucial for women to pursue their professional aspirations. We developed and launched our maternity app, ‘Sapphire’, that helps women in this phase to stay informed, connected and inspired.

Through Sapphire, mothers-to-be and young mothers can stay abreast of organizational news and happenings. It also provides a great interface to our career and learning portals to facilitate competency development. In addition, Sapphire helps women to connect with role models, hear inspiring stories, and get health tips and pointers to strengthen confidence, build perspective, and balance priorities.

In fiscal 2015, about 3,044 women availed themselves of maternity leave and 72% of them came back and continued working one year after going on maternity leave.