Fidelity Investments India as an organisation focuses on ensuring gender, generational, cultural, and cognitive diversity at the workplace, and strives to create a diverse and inclusive environment where everyone is welcomed and celebrate

Fidelity strongly believes that women who return to work post their break represent a motivated and diverse talent pool that can be brought up to speed with training and support thus enabling a high-performance company culture. Fidelity Investments India as an organisation focuses on ensuring gender, generational, cultural, and cognitive diversity at the workplace, and strives to create a diverse and inclusive environment where everyone is welcomed and celebrated. 

The firm fosters a culture of inclusion by removing barriers to inclusion for its employees. Fidelity Investments India also has numerous programs that help drive intentional behavioral changes for every employee—from the senior leadership to new hires—supported by education and training that help foster respect and appreciation for the value of our differences. Lakshmi R. Rajagopal, Head of Diversity & Inclusion, and HR Lead — Fidelity Investments India is here to throw light on their initiative on RESUME program and explain how has it benefitted their organisation.

1. Insights on the program ‘RESUME’ and how uniquely it is placed.

Resume is a six-month internship opportunity for women who are on a career break but looking to re-enter the workforce. The program aims to tap into a diverse talent pool of prospective hires who can bring thought and experience diversity to the organization, thereby enabling a high-performance culture.

The program offers opportunities across business functions including operations, technology, analytics, and across all levels. The participants join the company initially for a period of six months when they are provided mentorship and development opportunities to learn and integrate into project teams. All participants of the program get to contribute to live business projects and undergo functional mentorship. During the program, the interns receive pay and benefits equivalent to that of full-time employees.

2. With what motive in mind, did you come up with this program?

The Resume program was born out of the conviction that organizations need to make it easier for women on break to re-enter the workforce and provide transition assistance to integrate them back into the workforce. The courage and conviction, coupled with senior leadership sponsorship, made us create the Resume program six years ago. What started as a pilot batch has now grown into a full-fledged flagship program for the organization.

Right from the early days, we understood that women returning to the workforce is a fantastic, diverse pipeline to be tapped into for the benefit of the organization. Our positioning of the program was just that – we realized that there is a huge benefit to organizations from hiring a diverse talent pool of prospective hires who could bring thought and experience diversity to the organization. In Resume, we saw an opportunity to connect with a great talent pipeline that can be leveraged and developed. We can confidently say that over the years, the talent pool acquired through Resume has been key to enabling a high-performance culture at Fidelity.

3. In India, marriage and maternity have traditionally been major drivers of attrition. How will your program cater to these needs? Also, what are your thoughts on recruiting women who have been on sabbatical for a long and are looking to join back? How easy or difficult is it for organisations?

From our experience, we have seen a wide variety of reasons that makes employees to take a break from work – the reasons could range from personal reasons like marriage, caregiving responsibilities, parental responsibilities, or to trailing a spouse to another city.

However, we have also seen some completely different reasons, like changing their career, or following their passion and hobby, or even taking time off to upskill, that might have encouraged an employee to take a break.

The duration of the break may vary, the reasons may vary, but what is important is that organizations recognise the needs of every associate returning to work and provide strong ecosystem support so as to ensure associates bring their authentic selves to work.

Some of the support elements that the Resume ecosystem provides to its interns consist of the following:

· Buddy system: Where we have a strong buddy system, where the women professionals returning after a break are paired with buddies who are alumni of the program. This buddy system puts the new entrants at ease and makes the re-integration easier.

· Cohort-based: The program follows a cohort-based structure, where at the beginning of the program, special emphasis is laid on covering key topics that the participants must learn in order to shorten their learning curves and be more productive right from the start.

· Business immersion: During the six -month period, participants are immersed in work where they solve actual business problems and are not treated as participants of training program.

· Best in class benefits: Fidelity empowers employees both at work and at home, with flexible benefits that evolve to meet changing workplace needs throughout the career.

· Mentoring: Mentoring by senior women leaders helps the participants to hone and develop functional expertise.

· Peer learning: Since Resume is a cohort-based program, a lot of peer learning takes place within the cohort. This program provides the participants with an opportunity to build a network that goes beyond the duration of the program so that they can continue to learn from each other and keep growing.

4. Since LinkedIn also has a feature now where you can openly mention your "Break tenre", do you think it will bring about some steady change in the way recruiters look at potential talent with breaks?

It is heartening to see that inclusion is overlaid into the thought process while building systems and processes around us. One can say, this is a result of heightened awareness about the special needs that diverse employees may require in their workspaces. However, for any change to be meaningful, it must transcend beyond process steps to get deeply embedded in the culture of the organization. Leaders should role model inclusive behaviours in everything they do. Employees across levels should "own" D&I and be active allies for the causes they support.

Leadership teams should view Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) as a business imperative and have open and courageous conversations around inclusion. These are critical tenets for organizations to develop a state of deep conscious unbiasing. In addition, leaders and everyone in the organization should see the merit and goodness of diverse talent coming in through these cohorts. This is required for a holistic, meaningful change to happen – towards

building an inclusive culture that transcends beyond events and awareness talks that goes deep into tangible, measurable action, and commitment.

5. Can you share a few anecdotes of the success stories of those women who have participated in RESUME and where they are in their respective journeys?

We have several success stories of participants who have joined through the Resume program and are now thriving within the organization. We have instances of participants going through holistic growth and development from a career standpoint. They have enhanced their experience and expertise by effectively leveraging the resources available to them.

Here are a few success stories that highlight varied perspectives:

· A participant joined us through the resume program as a Lead Software Engineer. Within 6 months of joining, she applied for a patent program and was awarded too. She secured another patent later and currently holds two patents against her name.

· A participant who joined the India Operations team through Resume identified some critical process efficiencies and corrected them. A blend of process knowledge and operational discipline acquired during the program helped her contribute towards improved team performance.

· Within a year of joining through the Resume program, several women professionals went on to present papers in prestigious external forums.

6. Apart from the RESUME program, what other leading D&I initiatives are in process at Fidelity Investments India?

At Fidelity, Diversity & Inclusion (D & I) is embedded into everything we do; it is layered within the various processes. Conversations around inclusion are embedded into business and talent strategy and transcends beyond a programmatic approach. We also believe that creating atomic habits around inclusion has become a part of our culture over time. At Fidelity, we are focused on multiple dimensions of diversity (not just gender or generation alone). We place a lot of focus on invisible dimensions like cognitive diversity in terms of thinking, learning, personality styles, tenure, and experience, along with other well-known dimensions. We strongly believe that D & I is no longer unidimensional; it requires a multi-pronged approach.

Some of the high-level initiatives that we have are as follows:

Improving diversity:

· Focus on a diverse talent pool: We have a sharp focus on tapping into a diverse talent pool of prospective hires who can bring thought and experience diversity to the organisation, thereby enabling a high-performance culture.

· Healthy build/ buy approach: To promote diversity we have undertaken a healthy build/buy approach. We deploy a balanced 70:20:10 approach in developing diverse talent, i.e. 70% on the job learning, 20% peer learning, and 10% classroom learning.

· Career vitality: We offer an intentional, power-packed development plan for diverse talent to prepare them for higher roles.

Enhancing inclusion:

· We conduct several training programs on debiasing, nudging, and allyship sessions to educate managers. We also conduct inclusive leader training for all hiring managers to debias them.

· We focus on creating cognitive awareness through a series of strengths-based leadership sessions for all leaders. These sessions help leaders understand and appreciate their unique nature and work with others who have complementary styles.

· We encourage leaders to role model inclusive behavior and talk about their inclusion pledge.

· We have several Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that have matured beyond imparting education and creating awareness.

· We focus on creating allies across the organization that cut across levels and groups.

7. How has the process affected the budding employees in resuming selection under this program and selection criteria post-mentorship and training programs?

The Resume program has been running successfully for the past six years. We have assimilated enormous learning from our past programs and have continuously evolved the program to make it better for the participating cohorts and the organization. The program has several salient features that help participants to settle down with ease.

Some of them are as below:

· Leadership commitment: We understand that leadership support is critical to the success of any program and Resume is no different. We have total buy in from all senior leaders in the organization and there are continuous connects set up by the leaders to reinforce the importance of the program to the employees.

· Role of buddy/mentors: Each Resume participant is paired with a mentor and a buddy to ensure they settle down well. Most of the buddies are Resume alumni, which makes it easier for the new entrants to relate to and get their doubts clarified. The system also provides a psychologically safe environment.

· Role of managers: Managers play a pivotal role in the success of any program and this is true of Resume program as well. The managers and Resume participants meet on a weekly basis for structured connects. Similarly, there is a formalized goal-setting process and regular monthly performance check-ins to ensure clarity.

· Access to learning resources: Resume associates have access to a plethora of resources to enhance their professional development, leadership skills, technology, and domain expertise.

Though we leave no stone unturned to create a supportive environment, we have seen the greatest success when Resume participants lean into the ecosystem and make optimum use of the resources that are provided. We have seen a high degree of success in terms of conversion in situations where participants take such initiatives.

The true testament to the success of the program lies in the retention rate of past Resume participants, which is fairly high.

8. How are you planning on recruiting women on the leadership level where one needs to prove their talent and acumen at each step?

Fidelity as an organization believes in hiring for potential and hiring for Resume is no different. We look for potential, passion, and learnability in the candidates who apply so that we can develop them to achieve new heights. We continuously orient and educate all recruiters and hiring managers to be sensitive during hiring for the Resume program. Unlike traditional hiring, we encourage them to look for potential and not an immediate fit. Any gap that needs to be bridged in knowledge gets taken care of during the 6 months of the program and beyond.

Having said this, we believe as an organization that not just leaders at senior levels but talent across all levels should have opportunities to bring their authentic selves to work and have ample opportunities to prove their talent and acumen continuously