Abstract:

This paper explores the diversity and inclusion (D&I) changes for women, undertaken by a giant pharmaceutical firm to become a truly global organization. With D&I becoming one of the central parameters in evaluating an organization’s openness to global changing trends and reflecting one of the most paramount HRM issues, these changes are often seen as just a ‘good to do thing’. In contrast, we explored an organization that adopted an organizational development (OD) approach by introducing a systematic change management process, to bring about a deep-seated change towards the inclusion of women. The paper attempts to shed light upon the various elements required to achieve sustainable inclusive changes, by discussing the ways of achieving leadership buy in for D&I initiatives, dealing with the challenges associated with introducing D&I changes, embedding D&I in each of the organisation's functions, measuring inclusion and introducing a change management process. So far, we have analyzed the ways to achieve leadership buy-in, ways to deal with the challenges of implementation, ways to instil ownership among all employees (rather than perceiving it as merely an HR function), and ways to measure inclusion. We investigated the same through various means, including taking 15 in-depth semi-structured interviews of employees who were directly associated with embedding D&I in the organization, as well as extensively going through various company documents. Next, we aim to assess the change management steps that the organization took to inculcate D&I through the theoretical lens of Kotter’s eight-step model. Although this paper is based on gender diversity and inclusion, it gives a realistic picture of the kind of hindrances that organizations or consultants working for organizations can expect when they try to bring in any kind of sustainable change in an organization, and what could be the possible measures to deal with them. Importantly, through the example of the case in point, we provide a holistic picture of the processes involved in inculcating any kind of sustainable organizational change, in any domain.

Please choose your submission type: Developmental Paper

Primary Track: Practice Theory

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Prof Neharika Vohra