Shadow board is a Leadership development journey program offered to promising young talent to facilitate accelerated development, develop future leaders and integrate their viewpoint in the strategic planning process. With this view, Shadow Board was created having representation of managers from diverse functions and geographies. Shadow board helps spark new ideas, prompt new ways of working and help assimilate thoughts and ideas. The Shadow Board helps to integrate the diverse perspectives of young professionals in the critical decision making process, offer engagement opportunities with business leadership, attend Executive Council Meetings to gain perspective around how a Board Operates.

The Shadow Board members have also been working on a CEO sponsored business critical project around designing a long term strategy to drive business growth which also helps in developing business critical competencies of a successful leader – Business Acumen, Strategic thinking, and Decision-making capability and gain required exposure / experience to take up significantly challenging roles in the future.

One of the key pillars of our DE&I strategy is to focus on Capability development of emerging women leaders and help them to take on leadership roles in the future. Considering this, ‘WINspiration’, a mentoring program is specifically designed for emerging women professionals where they get mentored by senior women leaders in the business to support their development and growth.

Objectives of WINspiration

 Supporting emerging women leaders to be mentored by senior women leaders and guiding them to shape their career paths.

• Facilitating them to get cross function and cross geographical perspectives
• Engaging and retaining then by focusing on their capability building and supporting career growth.

The first ERG BCProD was launched in January of 2021 at the Marietta Office with the goal of fostering professional development, career growth, and networking at the site. BCProD was the first ERG to launch across the organization and was born from an idea on fostering diversity and inclusion. The BCProD ERG emerged during the Covid pandemic as a way for employees to remain connected in a hybrid working environment and to enable employees to practice and develop professional skills. The ERG leadership team spotlighted the career journeys of several employees including Ann Schoeb, Chief R&D Officer, hosted speed networking sessions, engaged with external speakers, and conducted offsite happy hours. The ERG currently hosts an internal book club focused on relevant topics such as innovation, organizational change, etc.

WISE is a global ERG (Employee Resource Group), which connects all the women employees who work within HS&E Departments globally and those who have a strong interest in the HS&E mission, goals and objectives within Birla Carbon. The objective of the ERG is to empower women in the HSE space to foster an inclusive community for professional growth, brings awareness to current challenges, and position women as future leaders of the organization.

It is a great networking opportunity altogether and benefits women from different cultural backgrounds and diverse professional experiences.

The inaugural meeting of the ERG got hosted at the Global HSE conference in Spain. The women participants from the global HSE and related fields joined in the initial meeting to discuss the purpose and importance of the group and the challenges women face in their daily work lives. The WISE ERG members meets regularly and the discussions revolve around topics like Book clubs/article review, panel discussion on professional development topics, happy hour networking event (virtual). In the future sessions by professional speakers on various topics are also planned.

Every year on 8^th March, we celebrate International Women’s Day wherein our Leadership reinforces our focus on DEI and how woman employees make a difference to the business. In addition, we organize a host of activities/events and some of the notable ones are – inviting stories from our women employees across geographies, inviting guest speakers to talk on key themes, arranging fireside chat with our senior leaders, building awareness through trivia & quiz and celebrating success.

Some of the objectives that we meet through International Women’s Day Celebrations are as follows:

• Lay out the importance of DE&I in our vision and purpose.
• Highlight significant achievements and career stories of women colleagues.
• Enrich workplace inclusion through various activities and events