The safety team at Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG) conducted a Women’s Safety Programme at the Tata Motors Training Division in Pune on January 22, 2016. Attended by 105 women employees from 14 Tata companies, the programme was organised with an aim to deploy the best practices followed by TCS for its women employees. As part of the programme, participants were given an integrated view of using common sense, confidence, some basic knowledge of defensive moves and tactics to be safe on the streets. TCS has a Safety First initiative for women employees, which is driven through a 5S Strategy – a simple training session designed to teach women employees steps to undertake for their safety.
This programme was very well-appreciated by the participants, especially given the rise in incidents against women. For women employees, these risks increase manifold in situations wherein they work in night shifts or remote working sites, combined with poor quality of infrastructure and emergency response time. Given the Tata group’s philosophy of enduring care for its employees, the Group Centre kicked off this maiden programme, and has planned a series of awareness and self-defense workshops for women employees across Tata companies, irrespective of age, physical fitness and hierarchy in the organisation.
The trigger for creating a special programme for women’s safety was the Tata Safety Heads Meet, during which Group Chairman Mr. Cyrus Mistry stressed on the need to create safety awareness among women employees across the Tata group. A suggestion was also made to start replicating the learnings from TCS’s best practices on the topic.