Amruda Nair

Founder of Araiya Hotels & Resorts

How does your workplace embrace equality?

At Araiya we are gender agnostic while hiring and promoting our staff. Today, 9% in Palampur are women and the majority in the Araiya Corporate Office are women today. We ensure that we provide a fair and ethical workplace for all employees, actively fostering an environment of fair play. Our structure offers a neutral gender proposition to avoid any bias that may creep in due to the influence of local and/or regional social conditioning and also having checks and balances in place to weed out any discord which may arise due to the inherent biases.

● As a woman, how do you make sure that you embrace equality? When you are the decision maker how do you make sure you are not gender biased?

For me the key has always been to ensure that the recruitment process is gender agnostic, and to exhibit the values of Trust, Equality and Fair practices all across the process chain, from recruitment to on boarding to performance evaluation and rewards. The major shift in most companies now is to structure the interview questionnaire so as to be more respectful of privacy and be more professional and directed at understanding the suitability of the candidate as required by the job scope. The local social norms also affect the suitability of the candidate in certain roles to ensure smooth functioning.

● Do you believe that gender inclusive policies are justified with an increasing number of women in the industry while still not being a 50% strength or close? 

I do believe gender inclusive policies are justified. The Indian hospitality sector is growing towards ensuring a gender agnostic policy and the industry has a number of women entrepreneurs leading hospitality companies and also female general managers, revenue managers, sales heads and even chief engineers operating hotels in India. Gender diversity in the hospitality sector is improving from the entry level upwards. More action is needed to drive change at the leadership level.