Overcoming the Changing Face of India's Workforce
Anjulie Kalsia
Associate Consultant,
Aon Hewitt
There is no doubt that the world around us is changing at an exponential rate, in no small part because of the influence that technology has on so many aspects of our lives. As our environments become more flexible, organizations cannot remain stagnant and have to follow suit, becoming more flexible and efficient themselves. In parallel with these changes and perhaps the driving factor behind some of these changes, are the fundamental shifts occurring to the demographics of the employee pool.
As the current workforce ages and older employees retire, the percentage of Baby Boomers and members of Generation X will reduce, and Generation Y and Z will contribute to a majority of the workforce. Simultaneously, more women are entering the workforce, and companies recognize the advantages of having a more gender-equal employee pool.
With these demographic changes, the expectations and demands that are placed on employers are also changing, and companies need to take this into account to ensure that their employees remain engaged at work. While many companies around the world might be experiencing similar changes in their employee population, these changes are particularly important in the Indian context. As the Indian urban population continues to grow rapidly, domestic companies expand and international companies enter the Indian workspace, growth is firmly on the agenda here, making it even more important for organizations to ensure that their employees are engaged.
Faced with inevitable shifts in the demographic structure of the workforce, as well as the knowledge that employee engagement is a crucial factor within organizations, we are looking at what it takes for this increasingly diverse workforce to be engaged at work and how their expectations differ from older, more male-dominated employee populations.
We have drawn out the gender and generation-wise cuts from three recent studies to get a more complete view of diversity in the workplace, tying the results together to tell a more complete story. The data used here comes from the Top
Companies for Leaders 2011 study, the Best Employer's 2013 study and the Employee Preferences Survey 2013, each of which examines the Indian workplace from different angles.The data gathered suggests that while expectations across genders and generations overlap to varying degrees, there are also key differences, highlighting the need for organizations to take these perspectives into account to ensure the engagement and satisfaction of their employees.
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