One of our flagship initiatives, Power of W, was launched on November 25, 2016. It is a forum of the women, by the women and for the women. This initiative came into being with the core objective of establishing a diverse and inclusive work environment at ReNew. This initiative provides an opportunity to
Engage: Engage with women employees
Enhance: Enhance their skills according to the opportunities
Empower: Empower them to become leaders
Enable: Enable them to lead by examples and inspire others
To make the initiative more effective, a committee has been created that focuses on issues affecting women. This committee strives to ensure a diverse, gender equal workplace where women employees can learn and grow at an equal pace and with equal opportunities as their male counterparts. The Power of W committee ensures this through skill development sessions, career counselling, health and wellness camps and guest lectures from external speakers who are role models.
There are 3 pillars of this initiative – Attract, Retain and Develop.
Recruit HER is a special initiative wherein dedicated efforts are taken towards hiring women especially at middle and senior management levels to create a diverse workforce. Special interventions are taken to eliminate biases at the workplace against hiring women for specific roles.
Our leadership team and the senior management are aligned with the idea of hiring women employees as a priority wherever possible, even the Talent Acquisition team has been given a target to hire women employees as part of their KPIs. In order to attract more female talent, we have created a recruitment policy to incentivize our hiring partners by giving them an additional 2% on each woman hired by the company if sourced through a headhunter.
We have seen great improvement in the number of women at managerial and senior level roles in the last 4 years. Given that we are an infrastructure company, most of our hiring is for engineering roles. This function doesn’t have many senior female professionals. Therefore, we have been focusing on the other functions.
In FY 2016, we did not have any woman employee in the middle and senior management and this number has increased to 21 today. In fact, we have recently on-boarded a senior woman leader in our Board. We have also hired a woman employee at the Vice President level in the HR function, who is also part of the Executive Committee.
ReNew has been associated with Vedica right from its inception. Every year a woman scholar joins us for a 1-month ‘Shadow a Woman Leader’ program wherein they work closely with our Chief Sustainability Officer, Ms. Vaishali Nigam Sinha.
The scholar gets to witness the Life of a Leader – be part of strategic meetings both internal & external, work on projects and participate in their daily schedules. The program provides the scholars an opportunity to broaden their perspective, build social capital, learn to navigate through the organization more strategically, and muster the confidence to lean in and speak up when it matters most. We have also leveraged this opportunity of mentoring cum internship to assess the scholars and subsequently offer a PPO to get the best talent. We also do campus hiring from Vedica and provide a platform to young women looking to make their career in clean energy sector.
ReNew believes in being an organization that promotes diversity and provides an inclusive environment for employees to achieve their highest potential. With this in mind, we had launched an organization-wide Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Policy. The company strives to promote and support a diverse workforce at all levels. The policy highlights the management's commitment to D&I and encourages every employee to be their true self. Every employee at ReNew is entitled to a work environment that promotes dignity and respect for all. We have also set up a D&I Committee responsible for sensitizing employees about biases and integrating D&I strategies in our talent practices like hiring, performance management, leadership development, etc.
At ReNew, we ensure that we do not discriminate against anyone and this practice exists as Equal Opportunity and Anti-Discrimination policy. We are committed to promoting equal opportunities at workplace. Our employment decisions are based on the ability of the individual to perform and deliver the job with no prejudice to personal characteristics that are unrelated to the requirements of the work. It is applicable to all internal employees and external interfaces like job applicants/trainees/contractual employees, etc. A Governance Council comprising of the HR Head, a Management Committee member and the CMD has been created to examine the patterns, requests and implementation of our commitment to equal opportunity.
In 2019, we partnered with Aon, an external HR company, to audit all our compensation practices with respect to women and if there were any systemic biases. It was gratifying that there were no systemic issues. The study, however, gave us insights on areas that we should continually keep an eye on. For example, we were earlier not checking whether appraisal ratings were same for women and men. Such aspects have been now introduced in our reviews.
We have a formal Gender Pay Parity Policy. Under this policy, we endeavor to ensure that the pay gap between men and women will be at the minimum and employees doing equal work will be paid equally, irrespective of their gender. This will be monitored by checking the salary of men and women employees on a yearly basis to analyze where gaps exist and seek justification for deviations, if any.
We will also undertake pay reviews or audits for all employees with an independent auditor after every 2 years and use the details to address any instances of disparity in pay.
A Governance Council comprising of the HR Head, a Management Committee member and the Chairman and Managing Director has been created to examine the patterns, requests and implementation of our commitment to gender pay parity. We also have organized ‘Gender Parity Discussions’ at the organizational level to create more awareness and sensitization around it.
We have a well-defined Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) policy at the workplace. This policy covers every employee of ReNew (regular/temporary/ad-hoc/daily wages basis), consultants, interns, volunteers, suppliers, clients, retainers/contractors, and third parties associated with ReNew while working in the office premises/sites or otherwise in work-related activities. We conduct regular policy awareness sessions for all the employees – both men and women across offices and sites. The sessions are conducted by external trainers wherein employees are made aware of the law with the help of case studies, including rights as a working woman and responsibilities as a manager.
As described earlier, Aon had conducted a diversity and pay parity study for ReNew last year. The study analyzed various parameters like demographics, pay, promotions, increments and ratings. The results of the study indicated that there is gender pay parity at most of the levels.
In 2019, increments for female employees were at a higher level than male employees. Further, no gap was observed between female and male employees’ promotion figures in the last 3 years when compared against their experience. However, one of the points that came out was that no one in the women category had got a 5-rating in 2019. This was an aspect for review. It was gratifying that in the April 2020 appraisal cycle, there were a few women employees with a 5-rating.
As we continuously strive to create a more gender equal and balanced workplace, we realize it is important for both men and women to equally shoulder responsibilities at the personal front. Our leave policy is in line with the government guidelines and ensures that both male and female parents get paid time off to bond with their child before returning to work. Our policy is also applicable for parents who adopt a child below the age of 3 months. While the maternity leave is as per statutory norms, i.e., 26 weeks; we have recently revised our paternity leave policy from 5 working days to 15 working days which can be availed within one year of the birth or adoption of child.
Childcare
As an organisation, we strive to provide the best facilities to our employees. We have partnered with KLAY for providing creche facilities for our employees. This is available for both female and male employees.
In our endeavor to foster a culture of learning and development in the organization, we have launched the ReNew Women Mentoring Program. The program helps in the professional development and personal growth of women employees and facilitates in building a sustainable women leadership pipeline in the organization.
The mentoring program aims at providing an opportunity to our women employees to help them in their professional as well as personal development. As part of this program, senior leaders from within the organization are assigned as mentors to these women mentees. To start off, 9 mentors have been paired with 9 women employees for the first batch.
We have also conducted an internal session for our male and female managers on Unconscious Bias. The session was designed to provide supervisors and team leaders with effective tools to build high performing teams and organisation through diversity & inclusion. We covered close to 90 employees through this session.
Since we started working from home, we conduct monthly calls to understand how each woman employee is coping with WFH setup. We discuss the challenges and seek solutions to them. Also, few of our mid-level women employees share insights of their journey so far in ReNew and how they manage/balance work from home along with kids and personal life.
Since diversity is a focus area, the CMD meets with all the women employees twice a year. The feedback is taken from the women employees and problems are discussed. It is very often that some decisions are changed based on the feedback from the women employees. For example, based on the feedback from one of the sessions, we conducted training sessions on ‘Fostering Diversity and Inclusion’ for all managers to highlight unconscious biases.
We encourage our female employees to leave for their homes on time (in a pre-COVID scenario). However, female employees working beyond 8 PM in our offices due to work exigency are provided with official cab facility to drop them to their home. In order to ensure safety of female employee, the cab vendors undergo a stringent evaluation process and while travelling a security guard is deputed who accompanies the employee in the cab.
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