D&I in Jio’s DNA – Living the Ten Tenets of Leadership Capitals in D&I and Hiring

In February 2023, Jio was awarded prestigious recognitions for its work in Diversity & Inclusion practices. Jio won the Gold award at the ET Human Capital Awards 2022 for Excellence in 'Diversity & Inclusion Practices'. It had also been awarded the Bronze Award in the 'Most Valuable Employer during COVID-19'.

These recognitions are testament to Jio's commitment to benchmark-setting employer practices and showcase some of the Ten Tenets of Institutional Leadership Capital Building in practice.

Lavanya Menon, Aniket Joshi, and Girijesh Srivastava from the winning team at Jio share the inclusion journey and some of the best practices they have been implementing.

Q. Can you give us specific examples of people practices at Jio for which we have won the ET Human Capital Awards?

Jio D&I Team: While most D&I practices are common across different organizations, what makes Jio's D&I practices stand out and a winning proposition is the connection with business.

• D&I in Jio's DNA: Jio was born with "digital inclusion" as its core business philosophy – Digital Inclusion of all Indians, particularly, the technologically and economically disadvantaged sections of our society, which remained digitally dark even after two decades of telecom revolution in India. This philosophy of D&I is well captured in Jio's multi-coloured brand identity, which represents India's diverse multiculturality.
• 'Sons and Daughters of Soil' Hiring: Jio Points, our last mile customer touchpoints, are spread in every nook and corner India. The Indian milieu comprises socio-cultural, socio-economic, and linguistic diversity of epic proportions. To serve our customers in such a diverse environment, Jio has an enabling policy called – 'Sons and Daughters of Soil' Hiring. This initiative has helped us build workforce heterogeneity by hiring talent from the local communities in which we operate, thereby, taking care of the geographical, demographical, socio-cultural, and socio-economic diversity of our business environment.
• Jio Fiber Shakti: It's a Diversity Hiring and Development programme for Women Home Sales Officers in the JioFiber Business – a first-of-its-kind programme of hiring women in frontline D2C sales role.
• Jio Customer Associate (JCA): The Jio Customer Associate programme is a women-only, gig employment and aspirational programme to connect women from diverse backgrounds, who may be living in any part of the country, to get associated with Jio. The programme provides them an opportunity to work from the comfort of their homes and as per timings convenient to them.
• Enabling technologies: Jio's HOT Platform has a patented skill-based pre-assessment to help overcome hiring bias. To help employees cope up with our digital-native work culture, we offer Jio Buds – a digital assimilation programme for new hires, and a GPS-enabled, automated reimbursement solution for local conveyance.
• Linguistic Diversity: Jio develops and delivers training interventions in 11 different languages to cater to the needs of our linguistically diverse employees who use their mother tongue for day-to-day business operations and customer interactions.
• Customized Holidays: To address India's multicultural diversity and to promote the right to religious freedom, Jio's Holiday Calendar is customized for each State/UT with option of 3-days of Optional Paid Holidays, which employees can avail on any festival of their choice.

Q. Can you share some of the outcomes/impact of the practices? Could you share one key learning from these initiatives?

Jio D&I Team: The impact of the above-mentioned programmes has been great.

1. Jio has around 300 Women Home Sales Officers, who are delivering higher productivity than their male counterparts.
2. More than 40,000 JCAs who are supporting our 400+ million customers in staying connected to the Jio Network, thereby delivering recurring business value.
3. Our Women in Technology programme comprise more than 25% and are doing path-breaking product development in cutting-edge technologies and holding tech patents.
4. 100% of our frontline employees and 55% overall are hired under the Sons and Daughters of Soil programme from local communities, thereby providing employment to socio-economically and geographically disadvantaged sections of society.
5. Over the last two years, participation in D&I awards has earned us the following prestigious national and international awards:
   • ET Human Capital Gold Award for Excellence in D&I Practices - 2023
   • ETHR Future Skills Gold Award for Diversity and Inclusion Learning Initiative - 2022
   • Brandon Hall Gold Award for Best Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategy - 2022
   • LearnX Diamond Award for Best Talent Strategy – Diversity/Inclusion - 2022
   • SHRM HR Excellence Award for Excellence in Diversity & Inclusion - 2021
   • D&I Company of the Year in Telecommunications - 2021

Key Learning: Entrusting diverse groups with critical responsibilities and investing in their training has shown us that they can outperform and contribute to business growth in terms of topline as well as bottom-line.

Q. Which of the 10 Tenets of Institutional Leadership Capital Building are demonstrated in your D&I practices?

Jio D&I Team: Our D&I practices are closely aligned to the following tenets of the 10 Tenets:

• People Capital, Empathy Capital, and Community Engagement Capital – Demonstrated by hiring from local communities, promoting linguistic diversity, celebrating diverse holidays, and strengthening our JCA programme
• Technology & Innovation Capital and Achievement Capital – Bringing digital inclusion to all segments of society, Jio Buds programme to assimilate new hires into a digital-first environment, and Jio Fiber Shakti and JCA programmes to empower our hires with technological capabilities
• Trust Capital – Entrust our hires with critical responsibilities to make them accountable for the organization's top-line and bottom-line growth

Q. How do the D&I practices demonstrate the 10 Tenets in action?

Jio D&I Team: We integrate the following Tenets in our initiatives:

• People Capital: All our D&I initiatives are about people – employees and customer, both. Whether it is about digital inclusion of customers and serving them through their own local people, or about addressing the challenges candidates and employees face in terms of work timings, language barriers, multiculturalism and adopting to a digital native work culture – Jio has always kept people at the centre of its business as well as D&I philosophy.
• Technology & Innovation Capital: Our enabling technologies have not just helped foster the ethos of D&I, but also resulted in creation of patented intellectual properties for the organization.
• Achievement Capital: Being frontline sales roles, our D&I practices such as Son of Soil Hiring, Jio Fiber Shakti and Jio Customer Associate are all driven by high performance work culture and are linked to sales target achievement.
• Trust Capital: As mentioned above, the trust between us and our diversity hires is mutual. We trust them with critical customer facing and revenue generating responsibilities and they repay our trust by delivering business growth in terms of revenue and profits.
• Empathy Capital: We understand that not everyone is same, but everyone likes to be treated fairly and be given an equal opportunity. That's why, we have built D&I enabling technologies, customised holidays, and multilingual learning content. These practices are a testament to Jio being an empathetic organization.
• Community Engagement Capital: In terms of community engagement, we live by the phrase: Give someone a fish, and you feed them for a day. Teach them to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime. Jio's D&I team engages with communities in which they operate by providing dignified employment opportunities to earn their livelihood without having to leave their homes or hometowns.