Leadership has to set an example. EasyJet, which was found to have one of the worst gender gaps in salaries – an average male salary at the budget airline was 52 per cent higher than average female pay – is now rectifying from the top. The salary of the new EasyJet CEO Johan Lundgren, who joined the company in December 2017 will be cut by $48,000 to $994,000 to match the earnings of Carolyn McCall, his female predecessor. But the question is: Rather than men taking a cut, shouldn’t women get a commensurate pay hike? Wouldn’t that send a more empowering message?

Meanwhile, Adobe has announced that it has achieved pay parity in India, closing the wage gap between its male and female employees. Adobe’s second largest employee base is India, the largest being US. In December 2017, Adobe had achieved equal pay in the US. “At Adobe, we believe that employees perform best when put on a level footing and valued equally, and are proud to have achieved our goal of pay parity in India,” said Abdul Jaleel, Vice-President, Employee Experience, Adobe India. Are others listening?

A plea for flexible work hours

Of late, Mumbai has seen some horrific accidents during peak office commuting hours on rail networks. Remember the Elphinstone bridge stampede? To avoid such incidents, why not stagger work hours is the suggestion of the India chapter of the International Advertising Association. It has launched a campaign in Mumbai called WorkToLiveToWork, urging CEOs and HR heads to implement flexible office timings. The suggestion is to let employees choose their opening hours between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. and closing hours between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. Explains Ramesh Narayan, president, IAA, India Chapter: “The IAA initiative towards flexible office timings in Mumbai is a positive, novel and much needed step to immediately tackle the problem of inadequate infrastructure that results in so many deaths every year.”

According to him, corporates seem very receptive to the idea. “Even the State Government is looking into this. We will soon begin making presentations at industry bodies,” he added.

Interestingly, several companies in Gurugram already have this concept to save employees from the pain of commuting during peak traffic times.

Playing up their skills

Indian candidates highlight words such as ‘responsible’ and ‘innovative’ to catch the eyes of recruiters while globally the buzzwords used by candidates are ‘passionate’, ‘motivated’ and ‘creative’, finds LinkedIn. The professional social network released its annual list of buzzwords after analysing over 45 million member profiles in India and found that the three words that topped in the country were ‘experienced’, ‘specialise’ and ‘skills’, which was more or less in line with the top three global buzzwords too – though the order was different. However, in the top ten list of words – ‘excellent’, ‘strategic’ and ‘certified’ – have dropped out of the Indian list compared to last year. Instead words such as ‘oriented’ and ‘innovative’ have made an entry. The question is will these key words make recruiters bite? That might require a different study.

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