The Ethicon plant of Johnson & Johnson located in Aurangabad has 815 employees, out of which 699

are males and 115 are females, which is 14% of the total employees.

The management has publicly announced the goal of increasing gender diversity in the plant from
14% to 30% by the year 2025. Keeping this commitment in mind, my project deliverable was to
create a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belongingness Framework and a Yearly Calendar for
Increasing Gender Diversity in Ethicon, Aurangabad.
For this, I referred to multiple sources, including several primary and secondary sources. My primary
sources of information included regular interactions with my field work mentor, Mr. Anurag Kalyani
who acts as the India HR Head for Johnson & Johnson MedTech Supply Chain. I also had one to one
interactions with the Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI) lead Ms. Haripriya Kuntamukkala, which
is an Employee Resource Group for women employees.
The union at the plant had no women representation. The management tried to encourage the union to
give more responsibility to women, but union leaders blatantly refused to do so. Hence, the
management put their foot down and appointment two women coordinators from the shopfloor who
would be solely responsible for bringing up women’s issues to the management. I also conducted
structured interviews with the incumbent shopfloor women coordinators, Mrs. Divya and Ms.
Rajshree. Lastly, I undertook extensive external benchmarking with product competitors and labour
market competitors.
I referred to several secondary sources for this project too. Some of the reports that I referred to were
the Best Places to Work for Women 2023 report by The Economic Times and Femina India, India’s
Best Workplaces in DEIB 2023 report by Great Place to Work, LinkedIn Talent Solutions’ Gender
Insights Report, and the G20 EMPOWER Best Practices Playbook 2023. I also referred to a paper on
called “The Shopfloor is not for Women”, which analyzes the position of women supervisors with
male workmen and male supervisors, and the practices they adopt to exercise authority on the
shopfloor.
I divided the whole framework into three phases, each containing policies aimed to attract, shape and
retain diversity.
ATTRACT
The first step was expanding sources of hiring. The alternative sources of hiring I recommended were
hiring trainees from the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana. Aurangabad has 12 training centres
under this scheme, and one of them, the Priyadarshini Mahila Tantra Shikshan Mandal, was a woman-
only training centre. Furthermore, conducting recruitment drives in ITIs and Polytechnic colleges to
hire women for the shopfloor was also recommended. The management could also use employee
referrals as a way to increase diversity hiring, wherein a higher referral amount would be given in
case of referring a woman candidate for an open position. Lastly, the mission statement of Johnson &
Johnson (called the Credo) talks about its responsibility towards the communities it operates it. Since
the Ethicon plant is located near the Aurangabad Cantonment area, the management can collaborate
with the Aurangabad Kendriya Sainiki Board to identify a pool of candidates who are either war
widows or war veterans and undertake a recruitment drive for them. Johnson & Johnson USA has a
similar program called the Military Veteran Leadership Development Program (MVLDP), and our
initiative can be an Indian subsidiary of the same program.
The second step was strengthening the REIGNITE program in Ethicon Aurangabad, which was J&J’s
Career Relaunch Program for women. In the employee database, I could only find one woman hired
under this program at the plant. Hence, there was a dire need to increase hiring under this program,
especially on the shopfloor. Women especially have a hard time returning to the shopfloor after
maternity due to either outdates skills, lack of confidence or lack of opportunities. Hence, by
benchmarking the career relaunch program of other companies like Reckitt, Unilever, Godrej and
DIAGEO, I narrowed down 4 policies that we can adopt to increase hiring under REIGNITE as well
as helping them reassimilate into the workforce.
REIGNITE hires should have a skill gap assessment conducted during onboarding and then should be
provided trainings, either from seniors or online platforms, for the same. They should be assigned a
live project for the first 4 months to ease assimilation in the workspace without being piled up with
work head on and enabling learning on the job. They should be assigned a mentor-cum-guide for the
live project and to chart a career path for them. We will look into the details of this mentorship
program a little latter. Lastly, during the hiring process, the management should make it a point to
highlight the positives of Aurangabad and make the move easier for women so that they consider
shifting from tier 1 cities to work here.
Thirdly, I benchmarked the newly launched maternity policy of Mahindra & Mahindra, and adopted
some policies that could be actionable and good for the plant too. This includes free transport facility
during pregnancy, health check-ups during pregnancy to be reimbursed, 2-month additional
miscarriage leave, option of hybrid work till the child turns 2, mental health support in the form of
counsellors made available to deal with post-partum depression, introduction of a ‘baby care
allowance’ of Rs. 5000 per month till the child turns 2, and extension of baby creche facilities for
children older than 6 years for women in the second shift (3 pm to 11 pm).
Fourth, I focused on making the hiring process more neutral and impartial. I recommended the
introduction of diversified interview panels, where there would an approximately equal proportion of
men and women with diverse educational backgrounds. These interviewers would then be trained in
body language and facial expressions reading and control, lessons on doing structural interviews and
the basic principles of psychology. There would also be an extensive bias sensitization training
session for all managers. Pamphlets like the one attached below describing different types of bias
would be circulated in the office and framed and put on managers’ desks.
During the interview, managers would be asked to give subjective traits like ‘likeability’ a quantifiable
score and justify it to the fellow interviewers. The interview would be standardized for every
candidate and a customized interview template available on interview.jnj.com will be used for every
interview session. A learning platform by J&J called J&J Learn also provides sessions on ‘Interview
with Purpose’ and ‘Countering Unconscious Bias’ that will be made compulsory for every manager
before he/she sits for an interview. There are also related courses on LinkedIn Learning, of which J&J
employees get free access. Some of these courses are as follows
On the other side of the table, I recommended the introduction of balanced slate hiring, which was
initially implemented by Facebook. This means that the final shortlist for interviews should have an
approximately equal number of men and women, as a diverse set of candidates help mitigate the
similarity bias in interviewers. According to one Harvard Business Review research, if out of a panel
of 4 there is only 1 woman, then the likelihood of that woman being hired is almost 0%. Therefore,
balanced slate hiring becomes important.
Another alternative would be to go for a blind hiring. Here during the CV shortlisting process, the
names, dates, institutions and cities will be removed for a person’s CV. This ensures that there are no
biases when creating the final shortlist.
My last recommendation under this phase involves increasing collaboration with local colleges to
attract young and moldable talent. For this, I recommended the formation of a Talent Community in
two phases. The first phase would focus on local women’s colleges like AEVMP’s Women’s College,
Aurangabad College for Women and Savitri Bai Phule Women’s Engineering College. Once the
implementation of the program is a success in these colleges, it can be extended it other colleges in
and around Aurangabad in Phase 2.
The formation of the Talent Community will be in three phases. Firstly, J&J will recruit Campus
Ambassadors from the aforementioned colleges who will act as messengers for J&J and ensure the
program’s success at their college. Then, we would form a Talent Community by screening interested
candidates on the basis of academic performance and a short interaction round. Once the Talent
Community is formed, the company would plan activities for the students year-round to keep them
interested in the company hiring process and increase its visibility among college students. The Talent
Community would be open to join twice a year. The activities planned would fall under three
categories-
1. On site engagement
This would include field visits to the plan to help the students understand how different
departments function on-site. There can also be a process to select certain candidates to job-
shadow an employee for a day, observe from them and learn their roles and responsibilities.
2. Online engagement
The company could organize regular quizzes and competitions online for students of the Talent
Community to participate in. These students would also get email updates about any job
vacancies in the plant, as well as emails about industry trends in the form of monthly newsletters.
3. Value addition
 Senior leaders from J& can conduct workshops on industry skills like how to ace an interview,
CV building exercises, skill development, etc. There could also be guest lectures and interactive
seminars organized by J&J senior employees in these colleges.
The benefits of such a Talent Community include having access to and indirect training of a potential
talent pool, increase of brand image and visibility in local colleges, and easy advertising of vacancies.
SHAPE
The first line of business was formalization of the Women Mentorship Programme. There are already
such programs in the company, but like all other things, the implementation is defunct. To rejuvenate
the mentorship program, I suggested developing it in three phases. The first stage would include
conducting a Mentorship Circle session regularly. Such an initiative has been started by name of
HOLA Mentorship Circle by a Hispanic ERG in the US. The second phase would be one-on-one
mentoring, where employees could choose to approach seniors and request them to become their
mentors, based on the mentorship circle sessions and their alignment with their career goals. From the
management side, there would be identification of High Potential women, who will be assigned at
least one high visibility (high risk and high potential) project once a year.
Then the third phase of the program will be implemented, which is sponsorship. We will look at
mentorship and sponsorship as a spectrum rather than an either/or role.

A mentoring plan is a document available at the J&J employees portal, which can be used by the
mentor and the mentees to chart their career goals and actionably work towards achieving them. The
management would need to encourage the use of this document in the plant, as it is rarely in use
currently.
Lastly, J&J has several global level women mentorship programs like ASCEND and RISE, where
mid-level women managers can be nominated. There should be an increase in the nomination of such
women from the Ethicon plant in Aurangabad, with atleast one nomination per year being our target.
The participants of this mentorship program will reap several benefits. The program will determine
and address their developmental needs, increase their understanding of the company culture through
interactions with senior leaders, give them more clarity on their career, their purposes and subsequent
choices, increase their probability of success through substantial career guidance, give them open
access to experience and tacit knowledge from senior leadership, let them learn skills they normally
would not acquire in the early stages of their career, and help them develop new networks. These
benefits needed to be communicated to the women as well to increase the level of participation in
their program. Furthermore, success stories from this program need to be propagated year on year to
enable formation of a woman talent pipeline through mentorship.
The second policy I focused on was internal talent mobility, benchmarked from a similar program run
by Unilever. There are several types of mobility possible in an organization, including but not limited
to promotions, transfers, job rotations, job swaps, mentorship and cross team projects. Nowadays,
scholars recommend looking at succession not as a corporate ladder with a linear path to climb to the
top, but instead as a climbing wall, where employees can carve out their own path while climbing
upwards. The organizations that provide this kind of mobility, especially to its women employees,
guarantee an increase in employee engagement, learning and innovation as employees get to engage
in work that they chose and are passionate about.
To go about this, the first step would be to make mandatory the filling of the Purpose and Career
Planner available at the J&J Employee Portal. This will help employees get a clarity about what they
want their career to look like at different points in their future. Then, the mentors can connect the
employees with opportunities (projects and training plans) that align with their chosen career path.
The next step would be the implementation of a cross-departmental opportunities portal, where
several long-term projects would be announced. People from any department could apply to these
project and would be selected on the basis of their skills by the project-in-charge. This would lead to
the formation of a cross-departmental team, and contributions to the live project would be taken as a
metric for performance appraisals and project raise. This way, inter-departmental mobility would
become easier, as employees would gain the relevant skills and would network with people from the
department they want to shift to before taking the big step.
Third, I created a department-wide diversity dashboard using excel, taking employee data and
gathered insights on gender diversity across various departments in the plant. This served two
purposes-
a) it helped me identify departments with over-representation of women, and give them opportunities
for job rotation through reskilling. Reskilling women in departments where the risk of replacement is
high, like fields where they are engaged in manual labour or unskilled taks, is imperative to maintain
gender diversity in the plant. For the skilled personnel, like women in HR, this can be achieved
through encouraging off-the-job learning using LinkedIn learning and Coursera’s self-paced courses.
Furthermore, the management can also look into tie-ups with local colleges and training institutes for
filling up skill gaps or imparting of technical training.
Some insights I gained from the interview with women coordinators led me to believe that there was
some implicit discrimination in excess of new opportunities on the shopfloor. Women on the
shopfloor would only get permission to change stations if they got the doctor’s approval from it from
the OHC. This stems from the assumption by the supervisors that women only want to change their
stations due to physical discomfort. Monotony and the desire to learn something new is not taken into
consideration. Men, on the other hand, do not require the doctor’s approval to change station. This
needs intervention from the management, because despite bringing this issue to the supervisors, there
has been no resolution till now.
I also recommended the use of a third-party vendor, the LinkedIn Talent Insights, for the upkeep of
the department-wide diversity dashboard. This is because the dashboard made on excel would not
auto-update with every new hire.
b) it also helped me identify departments with under-representation of women, undertaking targeted
hiring for them to ensure gender diversity. The focus department would have increased hiring using
the alternate sources mentioned above.

Women’s Leadership and Inclusion is an Employee Resource Group (ERG) for women under the
Johnson & Johnson family of companies. In the Ethicon, Aurangabad plant too, this ERG is fairly
active. After a conversation with the Plant WLI lead, I came up with some suggestions regarding
activities and events that can be conducted under the aegis of this ERG.
1. Monthly advice newsletters (in the form of either emails or physical pamphlets) from senior
women leaders in J&J
2. Story telling sessions with senior women leadership with the aim of transfer of knowledge
through stories from their years of experience in the industry
 3. Seminars on soft, non-fungible skills like negotiation, networking, conflict management,
adaptability, etc. for women
4. “Men as Allies” session with the focus on creating awareness about microaggressions and
biases against women and how to conduct themselves around women in the workplace
5. Collaboration with local women NGOs to create awareness about issues like domestic abuse,
threats for dowry, child marriage, POSH guidelines, etc.
6. Sessions of financial literacy and wealth creation and investments (especially for women on
the shopfloor)
RETAIN
Here, I first focused on revamping the grievance redressal mechanism of the plant, which as expected,
existed but was defunct. Under the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947-
1. every industrial establishment employing 20 or more workers shall have a Grievance
Redressal Committee and shall consist of equal number of members from the workmen and
the employer.
2. every employer should form a Works Committee if they have more than 100 employees in
the organization with equal number of workmen and employers and aims to reduce the
material differences between both parties.
An important insight from the women coordinators interview that I got was that grievances take a lot
of time to be addressed in the plant. Furthermore, supervisors and the management is not proactive in
resolving issues and do not notice things on their own that need to be changed. Even very obvious
demands like repairing of mirrors in the changing room, inclusion of another bus so that women of the
2nd shift reach home on time, etc. need to be brought up again and again, and still have not been
resolved.
Therefore, the two committees need to be rejuvenated. I proposed the inclusion of the two shopfloor
coordinators in one committee each. There would also be representation from most departments, and
compulsory representation from the HR department. Meetings would be held once a month for the
works committee and once every quarter for the grievance redressal committee. With every issue and
grievance that is brought up, the members of the committee need to set a time frame within which the
solution will be given. Not sticking to the time frame should be a rare occurrence, and the committee
would then demand explanation from the person responsible. In short, the committees need to become
more visible, representative and powerful to have a real impact on the functioning of the factory.
The members of the committee will also be trained in the process of grievance redressal, which
usually involves the following steps-
1. Documentation
2. Problem Identification
3. Collecting the information
4. Analysis
5. Decision making
6. Implementation
7. Taking action and feedback
Secondly, to retain women it is important to keep them on track of their career goals. This is done
through regular feedback sessions organized with both the managers and the mentors. This is
especially important because according to an INSEAD Research, feedback is unnecessarily
sugarcoated based on an employee’s gender. If greater kindness towards women shrouds the candor of
the feedback, it may inhibit women’s ability to learn and predict their future outcomes. Women were
also less likely to receive specific, actionable feedback tied to business goals and outcomes. Managers
can be educated about the SBI Feedback Model, which looks something like this -

Managers should be provided by feedback prompts to give a direction to these feedback meetings.
Some of the positive feedback prompts are as follows
Positive feedback prompts
1. Here are the three things that worked when you said/did (behaviour) in the meeting (set
context). What was going through your mind when you did them?
2. Here’s where you really excelled…
3. What do you need from me to help build off your success?
Negative feedback prompts
1. When you didn’t meet the deadline (expected behaviour), it affected the team by
(consequence)…
2. My observation was that you weren’t as clear in your explanation with…
3. One change that could make you more effective in your role is…
4. Here’s exactly where you started to lose me…
5. You can improve this skill by doing more of… and less of…
Some more tips for feedback sessions would be establishing measurable and specific criteria for
performance appraisals, making the feedback actionable and quantifiable for the employees,
reinforcing positive behaviour through praise and acknowledgement, and lastly using gender-neutral
words that have the same connotations for both genders, or setting the connotation themselves. For
example, too ambitious or too outspoken are seen as negative traits for women but positive for men.
I identified the following KPIs for the implementation and monitoring of this framework
The HR would be responsible for holding the department heads accountable about the diversity goals
of the plant by
- Calling out executives if they aren’t meeting diversity goals, skipping meetings or are absent
from DEI events
- Ensuring an adequate budget for DEI programs to be allocated department-wise
- Including the aforementioned KPIs in the executives’ yearly performance appraisal
Lastly, for any framework to be successful, there needs to open channels of communication about
what is working and what is not. Ensuring a feedback loop for new policies will help management
understand what policies employees are engaging with, and if they are not, taking steps to modify it or
just scrap it. This can be done by conducting yearly Employee feedback surveys about DEI Programs.
Here, employees’ suggestions will also be taken into consideration and fit into the existing DEI
strategy. There will be a dedicated email box for DEI related questions and suggestions open year-
round too. For the survey, the management can use the Gartner Inclusion Index, which measures 7
core concepts that best represent elements of inclusion, mentioned below
1. Fair treatment
2. Integrating differences
3. Decision making
4. Psychological safety
5. Trust
6. Belongingness
7. Diversity
To implement these policies, I made a DEIB Calendar for Ethicon, where every month of 2024, a new
policy from the framework would be launched and taken up by the HR.
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