M&M believes that the workforce and the marketplace will become more diverse due to globalisation of corporations. It follows a multi-pronged approach to diversity. Besides gender, it promotes diversity with regard to the specially abled, race and religion, the socially disadvantaged and LGBT.
According to Mahindra and Mahindra, diversity would weave both business and social concerns and therefore, the need arises to link it closely to strategy and business performance.
The group has a headcount of close to 2,30,000 with women forming 20 per cent of the total workforce.
Mahindra made it mandatory that 50% of the candidates being brought for interview should be women but getting that 50 per cent itself is a difficulty.
M&M adopted new age technologies like artificial intelligence, internet of things, machine learning because these factors are impacting the overall talent landscape significantly.
Moreover, changes in business models and product disruptions are also significantly altering the talent dynamics.
Citing an example, Mahindra and Mahindra assembly lines now have “co-bots” — collaborative robots in a lot many numbers compared to five years ago.
The front end customer service is getting digitised very heavily. To deliver a highly digitised experience to the customer, there is a need to have those kinds of people. Similarly, product disruption like the electric vehicle is in the offing and these kinds of product disruption completely change the way M&M hires, the way they develop and the way they train people.
