HCL Celebrates International Women’s Day
HCL thinks about diversity the way we think about product innovation — both are essential to the success of our business. When we relentlessly innovate, our products become more valuable and essential for creating growth and positive business outcomes for our clients. When we focus on diversity and inclusion for our employees, we create more room for innovation and concrete results for our business. We believe that our focus on diversity in the workplace as a core value gives us and our clients the freedom, we need to achieve our goals.
And to be clear, the business case for diversity is well-known — companies with higher diversity in management earned 38% more revenue in the last three years than those with less diversity.
Our commitment to gender equality
For more than 40 years, HCL has been at the forefront of employing and empowering women. We have consistently and consciously furthered this cause through various initiatives, as well as creating a larger social environment that facilitates gender-equal workspaces.
We, along with #IWD2020, believe an equal world is an enabled world. We want to celebrate women’s achievement, shine a light on and combat gender bias wherever we see it, and take meaningful actions to drive gender equality.
HCL has been very active in spotlighting the crucial role that women play in the technology industry through our own Red Ladder Initiative that celebrates, advocates, and fosters women’s leadership. The program identifies and recognizes top-performing and high-potential women leaders and uses them as role models for other aspiring women — and men — in STEM fields. The initiative was a winner of Stevie’s Award for Women in Business 2017, in the category of “Women Helping Women.”
To foster stronger career development, we’ve launched focused programs for our mid-level women managers to quicken their elevation to leadership positions, and delivered programs for senior women managers which focuses on their career progression with key learning elements like one-to-one mentoring by senior leaders, peer coaching for domain and technical skill enhancement, and blended learning with multimedia programs from globally acclaimed learning partners. These programs were recognized by Brandon Hall with the “Best Advance in Women Leadership Development” (Gold Award, 2017) and the “Best Diversity and Inclusion Strategy” (Silver Award, 2018) by Brandon Hall.
Yet, there is still a long way to go to forge a true balance for the better.
Just this past month, our team, the HCL Digital Solutions portfolio, comprised of HCL Domino, Digital Experience, Sametime, Connections and Leap, was very excited to announce the grand opening of our new HCL Lab in Vijayawada, India, hosted by our Chairman, Shiv Nadar, which will be staffed with 70% women engineers.
Not only does this lab help us build a diverse global team, but it will be the genesis of our HCL Domino Applications Modernization team, with the mission to enhance and extend the value of the millions of applications used by our 20k+ clients. This team will also drive overall increased velocity and engineering efficiency for our HCL Digital Experience and Connections products. As with everything we do, this site’s opening represents the investments we are making in our products, but more importantly in delivering on our commitments to you, our clients and partners.
In my career and life I have been fortunate enough to have women in both my professional and personal life that I have learned from. And I am happy to say that I continue to learn from women — every day.
With our relentless goal to provide more value and innovation to our customers — and delivering on our mission of “Relationship Beyond the Contract” — the HCL Digital Solutions portfolio is positioned to deliver enterprise digital transformation to our customers for many years to come. But we can only do this if we consciously hire, promote, and empower women from a diverse spectrum of races, nationalities, sexual orientations, gender identities, ages, and religious beliefs.
Join me in our mission, and challenge yourself to ask, “how will I help forge a gender equal world?”
#IWD2020 #EachforEqual
Richard Jefts
General Manager and Vice President of Development
HCL Digital Solutions
