81: Conversations with DEI leaders: Richa Singh (she/her) VP HR - D&I and CSR at Max Life Insurance

The Elephant in the Room

Shownotes:

We all know that countries and cultures are not monolithic and homogeneous. That when we speak about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), we are at different points in our journey; sensitivity and awareness levels may wildly differ from country to country within a region or a continent. So, the drivers for DEI will differ from one geography to another. For practitioners to not force fit HQ policies in local markets, a level of cultural intelligence is critical to understanding this.

Over the coming weeks I will share insights from my conversations with DEI leaders and C-Suite from the Indian subcontinent in an attempt to better understand the priorities, socio-cultural barriers, legislation, and best practice.

My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast, this week, is Richa Singh (she/her) VP HR - D&I and CSR at Max Life Insurance. In 2020 Richa was featured in the Top 50 Global Ally Executives Outstanding list by Yahoo Finance. In this episode I spoke with Richa about her DEI journey, acknowledging her privilege and becoming an advocate and ally.

We also spoke about how organisations could leverage the current buzz around all issues of inclusion and diversity

👉🏾 The biggest challenges to building an inclusive business

👉🏾 The relevance/importance of ERGs to building an inclusive organisation

👉🏾 DEI talk vs action. The slow pace of change and movement on pay, representation and culture

👉🏾 What she finds rewarding and frustrating in her line of work

👉🏾 Her advise to those starting on the journey

👉🏾 Businesses with great stories to tell

And what inspires her and keep her motivated.

Memorable passages from the podcast:

👉🏾Thank you for having me Sudha, it's a pleasure.

👉🏾 I'm you know, usually not very good at doing this, talking about oneself, but as a means of introduction I'm Richa, I'm based out of Delhi, India.

👉🏾 I'm a cisgender woman, my pronouns are she and her. I'm also a single mother who is a mother to a teenage son. And in work front I lead DEI and CSR at Max life insurance. I'm also a certified coach and a mentor to young women. I've had almost 20 years of experience in the hospitality industry.

Richa: I used to head learning and development and diversity and inclusion, for a group of five-star hotels. And I also helped set up the Keshav Suri Foundation, which is a not-for-profit organisation, working for the inclusion of the LGBTQ youth in India.

👉🏾 Actually, I love telling that story Sudha I completely acknowledge my privilege. Raised in the capital city of India, I had the best of education, I had very supportive parents. Not once I think growing up, did I ever feel that there was any difference between the way me or my brother were treated, which is actually the case in many Indian families. So that difference was never apparent to me.

👉🏾 I went to a co-ed school and boys and girls were treated as equals and healthy competition. So I think this was a blind spot and I kind of grew up with the understanding that I was a very inclusive person.

👉🏾 And when I started in my previous organisation, this talk about diversity and equity and inclusion was a very fresh topic in India. Somewhere in the year, 2017, end 18, that was also the time when section 377 got scraped. So almost every organisation, I like to say came out of their own closets. and we're talking about DEI, Indian and multinational companies. I was fortunate enough to be working in a company that took this agenda very, very seriously.

👉🏾 And we were more concerned, I would say, and more focused towards the LGBTQ inclusion front. And I would often ask myself this question that, why do we need to speak about this at all? I mean, people are people and everybody is only being assessed on their merit and what they bring to the table and if that is what we are focusing on then how does it matter what their gender is? What their sexuality is? What their ability or disability is? What their age is? And so many different kinds of diversity that we all bring when we come to work.

👉🏾 So when I started working and interacting more with communities, with organisations, NGOs, and CEOs, working with acid attack survivors, working with people who had a visual disability or speech and hearing disability, is when I realised that there is so much disparity and inequality and inequity in our modern world.

👉🏾 We still have many cobwebs to clear in our heads, and we might come from this place of, you know, merit is king or queen for that matter and we are absolutely impartial and there is fairness and justice. But we don't realise that the skills are actually not tilted in the favour of the marginalised communities, of the minority community, everybody does not have the same starting line.

👉🏾And that's when I understood that there is so much work, absolutely, that needs to be done. And I honestly believe that companies and organisations have this responsibility to the society. We are not just enterprises designed to make profit, we are also enterprises that touch many, many lives. All of our people who come to work also go back home, and if we can influence these people and make a little dent in their very conditioned thought process, and then they go back and talk to their families and their friends and their own little communities that they're part of, I think that's how you really create a ripple effect.

👉🏾 So that's how I got involved and, being a woke person is what I thought I was, I realised that, oh my God, there's so much that needs to be done. And hence, I like to talk about it because we actually have so much work to do.

👉🏾 That's a great question Sudha. So I always say that DEI has a business case, it has a talent case and it has a culture case. So whichever way you look at it, it makes absolute sense and I honestly wonder as to why we had not begun conversation about this earlier.

👉🏾 We are talking about it more and more in the year 2020, especially because we were suffering from the pandemic. One of the things that we've all understood, especially after the pandemic is that nobody can move forward by leaving anyone behind, we have to take everybody along with us.

👉🏾 So when developed countries were not able to share vaccines for examples for developing countries, we know that the virus was mutating itself, was making itself even stronger and hence the second wave and the third wave and the fourth wave, which is now again happening around the world. So it is only when the entire world would get vaccinated, would we actually be able to get rid of coronavirus from our lives.

👉🏾 Why are companies talking about it? Is it fashionable to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion? I would say some of them, yes. And that's the nature of organisations, you know. organisations are competitive in nature and when people are talking about the latest buzzword, I'd say whatever gets people on board.

👉🏾 Initially yes, people will be curious, organisations would be curious to understand what is DEI? Why is everybody talking about? And I would say that's a little part of your battle already won, because when you have people's attention, when you have got their curiosity piqued is when you can actually get their mind share. You can actually get their attention in the boardroom and talk about this.

👉🏾 Any change for it to be effective has to flow from top down. So I think it's very important that right from the CEO, the CXOs and the leadership of the organisation are absolutely convinced of the DEI imperative. It is not something that can be postponed any further, it is not something that you can do at leisure. It is not something that you can say, oh yeah, let's do this another year or let's do it next year. I think it's urgent and it's important because we've all seen trends like the great resignation.

👉🏾 People understood, especially after the pandemic, that what is most important to them is their health and wellbeing. To summarise it I would say that this is something that cannot be postponed any further because it affects you as a company, it affects you as a brand, it affects your mere relevance and existence. And if you were to continue being a great organisation or even continue to exist and be relevant to your customers, you have to understand that this is what is required and needed today, and it cannot be postponed any further.

👉🏾 So that I would say, it's like I said, companies are very competitive in nature, right? So one thing that gets the attention of the CEO and the CXO is how is it that the other company or the competition in your environment is doing better, and one of the reasons why they're doing better is because of their focus in diversity, equity and inclusion. Now, if you were to elaborate the business case of diversity, I would say that I think the most important thing, and that's why most companies go wrong, is because they think diversity is getting more women into the workforce.

👉🏾 Well, that's not it. Diversity is diversity of thought. Because when you have different minds, different experiences, different people coming under one roof and solving a common problem, you will have better solutions. There will be creativity and innovation will be something that will happen very naturally because we all see the world through our own lens. I see the world as a woman, and even within the women folk, there is so much diversity.

👉🏾 Similarly, a person who let's say has a disability, would think completely different from you and me who are able-bodied, Because their life experiences are so different. So something which is completely a blind spot to us and something that we haven't experienced firsthand, we cannot think about that problem. And hence, we cannot think about the solution because for us, the problem doesn't exist.

👉🏾 So I often take this example of the speech to text or, you know voice to text. It was actually developed for people with disability, it was developed for people who could not see and they could just simply speak into their device and it would get typed out and that message would go to the person. But today you know, when I interact with my son, he just doesn't type. He goes onto Google and there's a mic button and he says what he wants to search. So it's benefiting not only people with disability but people at large.

👉🏾 Similarly ramps, for example, we think that ramps are only meant for people who use a wheelchair. All of us, at some point in our life experience some form of disability. Let's say you have a knee issue, and you have arthritis and you cannot climb steps, that's when you understand the importance of a ramp, or let's say you pregnant and you understand the importance of a ramp or a lift or an accessible place. So all of these are structural barriers and hence I think innovation is something that keeps a company going, that makes a company ready for the future.

👉🏾 Let's talk about communication, you and I are sitting in different countries and talking in real-time, and where we can look at each other and hear each other absolutely without any lag. This is innovation, what if nobody had thought of it and people were just content on their phones where somebody had to kind of place a call and some operator would connect you and you know, you remember those times.

👉🏾 And we've seen communication advancement and innovation go about leaps and bounds and everybody benefits. So we all benefit when we innovate, and innovation only happens when we have different thoughts and different people working for a problem or discovering a problem that many of us don't see. So diversity of thought is really the business case of DEI in an organisation. It keeps you relevant, it keeps you current, it drives innovation and makes you a future-ready organisation.

👉🏾 The other thing that I talk about, the great resignation. Many people are leaving, and people usually leave, and I say this often that people don't leave organisations, but people leave people. So no longer can people, managers and supervisors think that it is not their responsibility to engage with their team. It is everybody's responsibility, and one of the key things that happens during engagement and driving that feeling of belonging is to make those human connections.

👉🏾 If I feel valued and heard and respected, I will feel engaged, I will have a longer stint in the organisation and when I will come to work, I will bring my authentic self to work. I will bring my hundred percent to work, which means that no time would be wasted in covering a part of my personality, which I hide because I don't think that I will be accepted at my workplace if I bring my whole self to work. Oftentimes people don't understand what does it mean, you know, bringing your authentic self to work. So I'm kind of taking the liberty to explain that.

👉🏾 What it really means is when I am accepted for who I am and I don't have to hide a certain part of my personality or my life or my status or my orientation. And I just be without worrying who's thinking what about me. Then imagine that kind of freedom and that kind of mental load taken away from that person. Then that person is there on the job, doing their work completely a hundred percent productive and they feel engaged and they feel this is an organisation that cares for me, that values me. They know me as a person and not just as a resource. So, making that human connection is very, very important. And that is what will help us organisations retain people.

👉🏾 So that is really one part of the talent case, I think the other part in which I have seen firsthand Sudha, is that there is great talent in the market, and that kind of talent every organisation wants that they should come and work with you. How will you attract talent, and I go out and do campus interviews and I speak to the youth, the youth is bubbling with energy optimism and they're full of bright ideas and ideas for the future. How do you attract the youth, how do you attract great talent into the organisation, what are the things that talent is asking you, right at the time of interview, is that what is your company doing for diversity and inclusion.

👉🏾 So one of the very often repeated questions when I ask is, do you have any questions for us? That's a very common question. What is it that your company's doing for diversity, equity and inclusion? So I think it's no longer just an internal exercise organisations have to take a stand and act in the public sphere, I think that's very important.

👉🏾 Also, I think lastly, when we are talking about the business, the brand, you will see many organisations and brands, actually, their marketing is focused in such a manner that they are redefining what a family looks like. You're reimagining what a family looks like. It need not be a heterosexual couple, it can be a same sex couple. Who are you projecting as the breadwinner of the family? It need not always be the man. It can be a woman. Who are you projecting as showing the primary caregiver in the family or the person who is taking care of all the domestic chores?

👉🏾 So we are seeing that shift in the way brands are positioning themselves and telling their stories. And the reason they're doing that is because the customers expect it, they demand it, they're looking for it because when you do that, you become an attractive brand. That is a brand I wanna be associated with.

👉🏾 Because you are forward looking, you're progressive, you're talking about something that's sustainable and that's a brand that I, as a customer wanna be associated with. So I think that's really the brand story and I think that's the business case.

👉🏾 I think Sudha, once you have the C-suite on your side and convinced that it is really an imperative and something that we have to do. Oftentimes that's the layer where it rests, but really the job of a DEI practitioner or anybody who's kind of shouldering that responsibility in an organisation is to reach the employee till the last mile, which means that each and every person in the organisation should have a basic understanding of what diversity, equity, inclusion is. And understand the importance of it and how it affects our work and who we are as people. So where we kind of struggle is really the middle management, I would say, that's one. And second barrier is really that section of people who are called the hiring managers.

👉🏾 So one is talking about the environment within the organisation, and one is really guarding the gates of the organisation. Who do you let in? Let me talk about the culture of the organisation and who are these keepers of culture. In an organisation, because what we are really saying is DEI is about changing mindset, it is not a project, it is not a one-time activity. You are changing mindsets of people. For example, the two of us I'm sure is a product of years of conditioning and it's the way we've been brought up. It is shaped when we go to school, when we interact with our friends, where we live, our parents, our culture, our religion, what kind of books we read, who do we mingle with.

👉🏾 That's really something that shapes our opinion and our thought process. So whatever ideas we have about the world at large is pretty much fixed by the time you are in your late thirties, early forties. and you know, of course growing up it's pretty much fixed. Are we talking about changing those mindsets? It's obviously not as simple as it sounds. Like I said, once you have the C-suite on your side of the table, I think few things that are low-hanging fruits are changes you can do in terms of policies and in terms of facilities. So practices and policies is something that can get driven from there. And facilities is also something that you need to build in order to include more and more people. Now, the toughest bit, like I said, is about the mindsets and mindsets can only change with lots and lots of conversation. And I'm so happy to see this topic of diversity and inclusion is actually quite popular, even when it comes to media.