Taking gender equality to a higher level, Swedish home furnishing major IKEA India said it had accorded high priority to recruit more women in its workforce to make the work place diverse, inclusive and already 50% of its staff in India is women. This ratio will be maintained in the future when the company expands its base in the country, a top company executive said.
At IKEA India, women are employed in every field, including operating fork lifts at the storage place, to retailing and in the top management.
Speaking at the Bloomberg Equality Summit in Mumbai on Tuesday, Peter Betzel, CEO, IKEA India, who is a foreign national, hoped that his successor could be a woman from India. He was participating in a discussion on how global companies were influencing the drive for equality around the world.
He said diversity had been part of IKEA’s DNA and an integral part of business. Considering that India is the world’s most diverse country with its 1.3 billion people with different culture, religion and political ideology, IKEA, when it started in India six years back, decided to hire 50% of its people as women.
“We thought it is essential that India’s diversity is represented in our workforce. In India we decided consciously to have 50% women in the workforce. Generally, in India, the female workforce is very low. So, that was why we consciously decided to make a difference,” Mr. Betzel said on the sidelines of the summit.
“This is all about equality and gender equality. We decided to have women in in all areas. So we have women operating forklifts, women installing kitchens and half of my management team is women, including four from India. So, we have 50% women at all levels,”he added.
Elaborating on the hiring process since the company started operations from Hyderabad, Mr. Betzel said when they opened the store, they had to hire 800 people. From the beginning it was decided that 400 of them must be women to be working in all areas of the company’s operations. Since there was no market to hire from, the company partnered with an organization in India to train the women including underprivileged women to give then an opportunity.
He said the women had empowered themselves and employment had changed their economic and social life as well as of their families.
The women were trained in language skills, behaviour skills and retail. However, it was challenge to convince their families to allow their daughters or daughters-in-law to join work. “Overcoming that challenges was a fantastic experience,” Mr. Betzel said.
Mr. Betzel said since IKEA is a home furnishing company and it is all about home. “The biggest interest for home comes from women. It is natural that here the women are taking all decisions in the company. If we had men, it would have been only male doing all the discussion and taking the decisions. The experience has been fantastic,” he said.
