Women's Day Special Feature: Peyu Gupta, Head – Business HR & ISAMEA(India, South Asia, Middle East & Africa) Strategy Group, Panasonic India Pvt Ltd

Peyu Gupta

Head – Business HR & ISAMEA(India, South Asia, Middle East & Africa) Strategy Group, 

Panasonic India Pvt Ltd

Tell us about one of your superwoman moments:

Last year business wasn’t going as per expectations and naturally to cut loses I was asked to optimize manpower which meant firing of few employees was on the cards. After much deliberation and brainstorming, I was able to convince the top management to restructure the entire sales force which created a new business vertical and ended up saving all the jobs on the line. I was able to absorb the excess manpower in the new structure in such a way that no employee lost their job. This particular incident gives me a lot of satisfaction and happiness because when you terminate the services of an employee, your decision is not only affecting the employee but the entire family of the employee.

You ensure work-life balance by:

Not taking my office to home and vice-versa i.e. I compartmentalize things happening in the office and at home. When I am in office I focus on things at hand there and try to give 100% focused efforts and when I am at home, no matter what has happened/ is happening in office its effects are not carried to home with me.

You spend your weekends doing:

Weekends are spent with the family. Sometimes it's family outings and sometimes its alone time with my 7 years old daughter who is the centre of my existence. Also, I have made it a habit to reflect back on the week went by and try to think of the things I could have executed in a better manner both at the office and at home.

A piece of advice to increase women empowerment in the workplace:

I always advise companies to have women-friendly workplace policies because working women have to juggle between their office and home. Unlike men, the entire household depends on them, there are expectations from the extended family as well and working women have to handle similar responsibilities at their workplace as well. Flexi working hours, work from home, child care facilities at work are few things which can really help women find their feet in the workplace. Also, the gender ratio has to increase at the workplace because as of now India accounts for one of the lowest male-female ratios at the workplace. More the females in the workplace better will be the cause of women empowerment taken up.

Few words of wisdom for the women reading this:

Being a woman is one of the biggest blessings of God for us and for sure being a woman is not an easy task. Always be your own flag bearer and recognize the power within you. I would like to share a story to illustrate my point. Once, there was a warm egg in the nest of an eagle which was about to hatch, and then a farmer who lived nearby took out the egg and kept it with his hen’s eggs which were also about to hatch. After quite some time the eggs hatched and they started following their mother and tried as much as to be the way their mother was. The point here to note is that that the baby eagle never knew that she was from eagle family. Though her mother had realised the eagle’s different behaviour but she never acknowledged it. One day the baby eagle saw an eagle flying powerfully high into the sky and it was amazed at the strength she was possessing and wished to be an eagle in the next birth so as to have such unwavering strength. The baby eagle never realised its strength for it always believed that it belonged to the hen’s family. The gist of the story is that we women are the baby eagles born to an eagle’s family but not knowing that we possess the same strength as that of an eagle. So stop believing what the society says, challenge the status quo. Start living; Living your life on your terms, it’s high time!