Anju Awal quit her full-time job in 2006. Her husband, Raman, who works at an IT company, was on an indefinite period foreign project and it made no sense for her to stay away from him. So she decided to accompany him, along with their daughter Nikhita.
“For a woman, it is always an internal struggle about striking a balance between her responsibilities at home and as a professional,” Awal said. “When Nikhita was small, even though I had my parents to take care of her, there was this guilt of not being there to see her grow. And above that was the fact that my ageing parents were made to run behind a toddler, even though they thoroughly enjoyed it and never complained.”
Awal is just one of many Indian women who struggle everyday to balance work and home after marriage or childbirth. After an eight-year career break, when Awal found her children (she had a son later) branching off and she had time for herself, she decided to return to work. With an MBA in marketing, she took up a few assignments before hitting the jackpot with Flexi Careers (FC), about which she read in a newspaper.
“Flexi Careers is a social enterprise which focuses largely on second careers for women, providing jobs to women who take a break after marriage, childbirth or relocation,” said Saundarya Rajesh, the president of the company.
Back in the 1990s, Chennai-based Rajesh worked with Citibank National Association, when she decided to take a career break after the birth of her child. Later, when she wanted to get back to work, she found that her career was not sustainable in the absence of proper day-care facilities. Rajesh took up various part-time jobs including working as a lecturer and as a compere and producer for All India Radio and Doordarshan, the government-run TV channel.
“In all my assignments, I sought and insisted on flexible working hours, often compromising on pay in the quest for control over my time,” said Rajesh. This led her to research and come to the conclusion that Indian women required career enablers to sustain themselves at workplace. And she not only found a way out for herself, she helped more than 3,500 women in India by helping them get flexible jobs.
In 2000, she set up Avtar Career Creators, a talent strategy-consulting firm, “in response to my own thirst for entrepreneurship”, and a decade later, Flexi Careers, to help other women work on their ambitions again.
Through FC, Awal found work as a marketing consultant with Sundaram Business Services. “My life is slotted and sorted. I work part-time in the forenoon, when the children are in school, and I’m home when they get back. This enables me to take them for their respective extracurricular activities. Fortunately, the projects I have are long term and though there are certain days when I carry work home, I do not put in late hours in office.”
However, Rajesh said it’s not easy to find placements as good as Awal’s for many women. This, she felt, is due to the apprehension companies have towards flexible working hours.
“Organisations are very heavily entrenched in the habit of a person being ‘present’ at his/her seat at all time,” she explained. “[No doubt] their concern is quite real as there are no formats or templates available for managing a flexible work force [in India]. Most companies are wary because they feel it will set a bad precedent of showing that less can be done and gotten away with. This is actually a fallacy. The truth is that a flexible-time worker accomplishes much more in the prescribed working hours than a full-time worker.”
What’s tough is to get the management to understand that “work” is not a place, but a set of activities to be carried out. Rajesh now approaches them with what she calls “flexicurity”, meaning, career security for the individual and performance security for the organisation.
To create this awareness among both, FC holds workshops and training programmes to prepare them for the new challenge.
“There is a big question of trust,” said Rajesh. “To work flexibly and effectively, an individual has to be extremely disciplined when it comes to time management. That is why I emphasise on training — capability training for the flexi-working professionals and sensitivity training for managers to understand the talent pool better, and it is at such forums that jobs work out.”
If despite this an organisation still requires convincing, Rajesh believes it is still living in the olden times.
“It is similar to people rebelling against computers and claiming that these would take away jobs. But nothing of the sort happened. In fact, thousands found placement. Similarly, flexible working is a method of support whose relevance will be enhanced as days go by. The concept of crafting separate career tracks for women opting for a second career is still in the nascent stage [in India]. And to get organisations to understand the need to have better gender balance at workplace, plus to ensure that women’s careers are sustainable, is a tough call,” said Rajesh.
Since gender barriers begin operating right from childbirth, the prevailing societal perceptions are often the biggest hurdle. Most women admit accepting perceptions of themselves and family’s expectations. Only in some cases, men participate equally in running the home and managing the kids.
Megha BK’s is one example.
Megha quit her job in 2010 due to pregnancy and the extensive travelling that her work required. Also, her husband Kiran Voleti, who works in sales, was transferred from Chennai to Mumbai.
“I decided to get back to work as our daughter Stuti was also about a year old by then,” said Megha. “Kiran and Saundarya are alumni from the same B-School and she is quite active and popular on the social media. Kiran suggested I speak to her too.”
Incidentally, the first profile FC referred her to suited Megha and in 2012 she began working as area sales manager with 3M India’s Critical and Chronic Care Solutions Division.
“I had always wanted to work after marriage, so am happy. I have strong family support, with my grandmother, mother and mother-in-law coming over to take care of our child. My husband is also extremely supportive and understanding. We adjust our timings and one of us always returns home early when the other has work in office,” she said.
“There is a sizable number of women qualified for top jobs in the industry, but unlike organisations, they too need to change their mindset to progress and take up flexi careers suiting them. A self-defeating belief will not work,” Rajesh said.
However, Rajesh says she is hopeful because some companies, especially IT, are attempting to provide flexible timings for women.
“The most purposeful moment of my day is when a woman connects with me to say that she has had a second lease of life by landing herself a flexible career option. That is when investing my time in this space gives me immense pleasure.”
“I feel there is a huge potential that big companies do not explore because they have created their own limitations regarding the number of hours a full-time employee needs to put in,” Awal said. “They should come forward and provide opportunities so that degrees of numerous women do not gather dust at home. Women, used to multitasking, will this way not become redundant.”
As for herself, Rajesh says there’s no watching the clock.
“If you want to advocate flexible working hours, you cannot be a clock-watcher,” she said.
— Nilima Pathak is a New Delhi-based writer
