Champion of Inclusion 2019 - Working Mother & Avtar Most Inclusive Companies Index (MICI).

Invigorated by the success of their gender diversity intent, companies are opening up their streams of inclusion to welcome all dimensions of diversity - physical capabilities, sexual orientation, cultural background et.al. And against this backdrop, the Working Mother & Avtar Best Companies for Women in India (BCWI) canvas has grown to appreciate this strive for inclusion, through the Most Inclusive Companies Index (MICI). This study, the first of this kind and magnitude in India, is aimed at helping organizations understand gaps in demographic representation and provide a strategic roadmap to drive internal change to find and implement Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) solutions. The key segments that MICI covered are a) Diversity Representation across the key strands of diversity including gender, generation, people with disabilities, LGBTQ b) Practices for fostering diversity and inclusion in recruitment, retention and advancement of people from diverse groups c) Company culture on Inclusion. This study (called the Global Inclusion Index in the US) is in its third edition in 2019 in the United States, under the aegis of Diversity Best Practices (DBP), a division of Working Mother Media.

An index, unlike a list, does not have a set number of organizations to recognize. Instead, threshold percentages are set at which point any participant company with that percentage or better qualifies for the index. Based on the cumulative score (expressed as a percentage) companies got across the three segments the MICI indices were arrived at using two different threshold scores - of 70% and of 50%. Two categories of winning indices for 2019 MICI are:

• Companies with an Inclusion Index score of 70% and above get the coveted CHAMPIONS OF INCLUSION AWARD

• Companies with an Inclusion Index score of 50% and above are recognized with the EXEMPLARS OF INCLUSION AWARD

In this inaugural edition which had 136 companies participating, the diversity focus of companies ranged from gender (95%) to generation (83%) to People with Disabilities (32%) to LGBTQ (30%). 79% of companies had a structured D&I council to drive the D&I agenda that enabled greater traction and focus around D&I and makes the pursuit of inclusion more purposeful. 84% of companies on MICI have conducted implicit bias training in the past, a reaffirmation of conscious efforts to eliminate biases in employees. 92% of companies on MICI have custom built solutions and infrastructure to enable processes such as work from home, remote access and support systems for PwD employees. The best practices in companies on the index transcend across awareness programmes to affinity groups to infrastructural enablement, all driven and championed by the leadership!

The Most Inclusive Companies Index (through the amazing work of these Icons of Inclusion), will widen the expanse of Inclusion and initiate new and necessary conversations around diversity helping businesses rise to the fullest of their potential, in the years to come.

The CHAMPIONS of Inclusion scored above 70% in the Inclusion Index to win the title. MICI Champions listing given in the ALPHABETIC ORDER is as follows:

To view all the companies that made it to the Index, click here: 

• Accenture Solutions Private Ltd.
• ANZ Support Services India Pvt. Ltd.
• Encore Capital Group
• EY
• IBM India Private Limited
• Infosys Limited
• Wipro Limited