Tata Technologies working on gender-neutral leave policy, expected in a few months

Tata Technologies, an engineering services company offering product development and digital solutions to vehicle equipment manufacturers, has said that a gender-neutral leave policy is in the works and will be out in the next three months.

“We are working on policies which will help women who have some constraints and those policies are in the works. Some are going to be released in the next three months,” said Pawan Bhageria, President- Global HR, IT Administration, and Education, Tata Technologies. 

The company is undertaking a host of measures for employees, among which this is one. 

“We are coming up with a special leave policy, and we will make it gender neutral, so if there is a need in the house, they (employees) can take additional leave to take care of the home, whether it is constraints in the health issues, or parents or someone, so we are looking at that piece. We have the draft but we are reviewing it right now.” 

Further details on leave policy are under review. 

Increase in women workforce participation by 60%

He also mentioned that the company aims to have a 25% women workforce in three years. As of Q4 FY23, women comprised 14% of the workforce at Tata Technologies. “Last year Q4 end our target of hiring female employees was 14%. So, then we set a target for ourselves to move to 18% by mid of next year and then we kind of move to 20% then 23% and finally, we wanted to at least reach 25% in the next three years," reiterated Bhageria. 

At an entry level too, the company is looking to improve the women's employment ratio. "We hire graduate engineers, 1000 engineers a year. We are trying to significantly improve the ratio, and want to go to 40-45% graduates that we hire by this year,” Bhageria added.

Coming to the issue of training and reskilling for women and the workforce in general, he said that equal weightage was being given to technical and soft skill training. 

“We are giving equal weightage to technical training and soft skill training. Recently we launched a programme on EV, which is EV vision, and that is available to all the 12,500 people in the company. We have got a significant number of programmes in embedded, SDVs, ADAS, infotainment, all these areas. So there is a huge amount of focus and we are finding a huge amount of interest (in these programmes)", he stated.