Women in Future of Work: Evidence from the Indian IT Industry

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a great ‘reset’ and has challenged many assumptions about work and life in general. Several virtual management practices emerged during the Covid period to solve problems of organisation building and to address concerns about connecting with the people of the organisation and maintaining the culture. Since women are at the forefront of everything today, it is important to focus on the future of global work from a woman’s perspective in the context of multinational enterprises (MNEs). We take a phenomenon-based approach to describe the important trends and challenges affecting the where, who, how and why of global work from a woman’s perspective. This study aims to understand the relevance of these learnings in the current scenario and in the future by compiling best practices that IT organisations in India used to build ‘Social Capital and Organization Culture’ and define the future of work in the process. For this purpose, we collaborated with NASSCOM and studied nine participating organisations as separate cases. We interviewed HR and business leaders to compile best practices that might define the future of work by answering three broad questions—how to build and maintain networks and relationships, how to build and maintain culture and engagement and, finally, how to integrate new joiners. As we highlight implications for organisations and individuals, we offer a set of four findings to guide future research and inform IHRM practitioners, especially women. This article interconnectedly talks about women at work.