'Treat others as they wish to be treated'

Our next guest took a 180 in her career journey. She is a scientist by training and double majored in Molecular and Cell Biology, and Media Studies, at UC Berkeley. She currently runs her own company which envisions a world where people feel safe and empowered to pursue their goals. We welcome Meghana Srinivas, Founder and CEO of TrustIn. 

TrustIn enables a safe workplace with a cutting-edge, contextual solution for seamless POSH implementation.

Meghana thrives to solve complex problems that impact people in a positive manner. She also believes that co-creating a more equitable world is our moral responsibility and not just a worthwhile dream.

She has more than six years of experience in teaching, training, and coaching. Moreover, she has developed and implemented multiple interventions to improve life and learning outcomes. 

Meghana led a program at The CoWrks Foundry, a business accelerator for early-stage tech companies. She also managed multiple programs, projects, and people in the social impact space at major nonprofits including Teach For India.

Episode highlights:

• Advice to employees struggling with self-objectifying issues in the professional space
• How to manage diversity and equality in the workplace?
• Best practices to address workplace discrimination
• How PoSH can help facilitate a safe workplace in the WFH setup

1. How should employees deal with self-objectifying issues in the workspace?

While talking about how they handled work during the pandemic, Meghana clarified that one should be able to draw work and space boundaries to be able to work without stressing out. She emphasized the need to identify differences between asynchronous and synchronous working modes.

2. Managing diversity and equality in the workplace

Meghana thinks that employees must feel safe and included in their workplace. Setting up grievance forums and committees to look at sexual harassment, bullying, and other types of workplace discrimination is a must, according to her. Setting up a strong culture that promotes effective communication is the key to avoiding workplace discrimination.

3. Best practices to address workplace discrimination

For cases of sexual harassment, an internal committee consisting of employees of the organization can be constituted to investigate the matter. However, they should be headed by a person who is well versed in the PoSH (Prevention of Sexual Harassment) laws. Ideally, ⅔ of the members should be women, and the head of the committee should be the senior-most woman of the organization. It is because she will have the social capital to handle such cases. For other cases, ethics or grievance committees can be set up. The investigation, nature of the impact on the victim, documentation, etc., can be carried out in a similar manner.

4. How PoSH can promote safety in the work-from-home setup?

Meghana feels that employees should be provided with multiple modes to report sexual harassment cases even when they are working from their homes.

5. Opportunities for women in top management roles in corporate India

Meghana thinks that diversity starts off very well at the grassroots levels with organizations. However, there is a sharp drop-off at the management levels. Corporates are giving opt-in and opt-out options to their employees in a hybrid working model, but they should also see to it that the employees who are working from home should not feel left out. 

Follow Meghana on LinkedIn

Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast host: Ishika Jani