New face of workplace: All-female staff in Mumbai's Kindle office

MUMBAI: At 9am, around 75 young employees walk into an unassuming red-and-white building in a Raigad village to take control of a BPO that powers Kindle by converting physical books into their digital versions.


In Nagpur’s Nimji, approximately 90 staffers sort, pack and dispatch a variety of consumer goods in a mammoth 80,000-square-foot distribution centre.

The one big similarlity between these diverse units is that both are helmed and run entirely by

women

.

While

India Inc

has been hiring more women across functions and businesses, companies have begun to increasingly hand over the reins of entire units to female staffers.

Kirloskar Brothers’ pump manufacturing factory in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, is operated by 204 women. Rama Kirloskar, executive director, says, “Women as a group tend to be more focused on assembly line functions, which translates into higher efficiency rates.” The facility rolls out 75,000 pumps a month.

PV Sheshadri, CEO, Future Supply Chain Solutions, which owns the women-only Nimji distribution centre, says women tend to be more punctual, more likely to stick to a job and more disciplined than men.

“Men tend to be aggressive and at times are difficult to manage. Also, men have hygiene issues like they chew paan or betel leaves and spit. Women staff have a positive impact on productivity, especially in male-dominated sectors such as logistics,” he says.

In non-metro areas, women-only workplaces are a big pull in attracting talent, besides serving as a comforting factor to families.

Chemistry graduate Priyanka Patil, who works at the e-book BPO operated by JSW, says, “My parents refused to send me to Raigad or Mumbai for a job. Also, my mother suffered an accident and has been bedridden since. Working far from home was out of the question. Last year, when JSW offered us jobs, it came as a blessing,” she says.

A year ago, when JSW approached the local gram panchayat to train and hire women for its BPO, the response was unprecedented, says Shraddha Patil, coordinator at the centre.

“The women are well-educated but did not have employment opportunities nearby and their families did not want to send them too far for security reasons. A women-only workspace came a big relief for them as well as their families. When they joined here, their parents and other family members visited the centre to ensure their wards were in a safe and secure environment,” she says.

Apart from this outfit in Raigad’s Dolvi village, women run the show at JSW’s four other BPOs in the country too. Biswadeep Gupta, head of JSW Foundation, says the plan is to double the number of women workforce in the BPOs from 700 at present by the end of this decade.

At Tata Power’s customer relations centre in Mumbai, too, the entire gamut of services is handled by women.

Not just factories and BPOs, an all-women crew man some railway stations such as Matunga in Mumbai and Gandhi Nagar in Jaipur.


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