Telenor is planning to increase the number of women employees in the organisation to 16 per cent by the end of the year from 11 per cent now.
“It used to be five per cent a year ago and we began to hire women, particularly in our call centre operations to take the total 170 or about 11 per cent of the firm’s total workforce in the country,” Sharad Mehrotra, Chief Executive Officer of Telenor India, said. “We are encouraging gender diversity and promoting women leaders.”
The telecom services company has doubled its women workforce last year in different areas such as network operations, product development, sales and distribution and social media. The firm claimed that the telecom industry average for women employees is less than 3 per cent.
“Organisations with increased representation of women employees perform better than those without an inclusive strategy,” Quazi Mohammad Shahed, Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO), Telenor India, said in a statement here. Bulk of the women hires happened at its three contact centres established last year at Jamshedpur (Jharkhand), Solan (Himachal Pradesh) and Ethakota (Andhra Pradesh). “Our outbound call centre in Patna too is run by women. This centre supports Project Sampark that targets to reduce gender gap in mobile usage,” he said.