Commercial Real Estate (CRE), though a highly regarded industry, has historically been male dominated. In more recent times, women have begun to enter the industry, but they fall short in numbers, especially in leadership roles. These could be attributed to reasons of a non-inclusive board room, jobs demanding high levels of personal commitments, challenges in re-entry to the workforce after a period of leave, etc. Women may enter the workforce with the intent to move up the ranks and develop their skills, but culturally, the struggle to overcome traditional mindsets about the distribution of work between genders and the lack of a support system could also be contributing to this trend.  Thankfully, over the past decade, a lot has changed for the better – women are beginning to scale new heights, changing not only their own standing but the terrain of the field itself. Today, women are excelling in all sectors and real estate is no different.

Fostering the ‘Berkadia Way’ Culture

I believe that an organization’s culture serves as the bedrock on which it stands. Berkadia India is an organization that stands for its values and creates an atmosphere of lateral thinking.  The ‘Berkadia Way’ encourages us to hone an outward mindset with an ability to appreciate differences and see people as people with unique needs, challenges, and objectives. Diversity Equity Inclusion Belonging (DIEB) is at the core of this mindset. As a result, we look inside Berkadia to identify demographics to support us in setting appropriate goals that reflected efficient representation.

For a long time, I was the only woman in the Berkadia India’s management committee. 

Acknowledging diversity in management is the key to growth in today's fiercely competitive global marketplace. Over the last couple of years, when business opportunities arose for heads of newly created functions, we made a conscious effort to review a diverse set of candidates. Through this process, we hired women who are passionate, qualified, and competent.

What does this mean for Berkadia?

Berkadia has followed this ethos to the core. Gradually this resulted in change in mindset, behaviours and finally action. Some of the representative actions are:

• Enabling a Returning Mothers program – an initiative to welcome young mothers who may want to get back to the industry after a maternity break.
• Developing objective, merit-based assessments to eliminate behavioral biases.
• Developing training programs to address the needs and challenges of diverse employees – gender, age groups, ethnicities, special needs, etc.
• Learning best practices from peer companies and embracing them.
• Partnering with reputed universities and B-schools to connect with female students to educate them about the myriad of opportunities in CRE.
• Assessing and bolstering our readiness to welcome individuals with special abilities.
• Creating platforms for women in leadership roles to offer guidance to younger women in junior roles.

Despite the current challenging times, we continued to stay focused on nurturing SPECTRUM – and the results have been very encouraging:

• The Returning Mother’s program ensured a return to work of all 22 employees who went on maternity leave during 2020 and 2021.
• In the last five years, Berkadia has attracted 600 students and hired 150 individuals, out of which 84 were women.
• Revamped our New Leader Orientation Program with modules on dynamics related to diversity, encouraging empathy, and recognizing that people, irrespective of differences, have important insights to offer.
• As the work-life lines have blurred, we have trained and guided our hiring managers on the virtual interview process and to be empathetic.
• Improvised SPARK (Supervisor's Predict Act Retain Kit) - An early warning application, to understand trends of attrition and take timely action.
• Created customized training programs for skill enhancement which encouraged women to progress in their career – out of 115 individuals who were promoted in 2021, 40% were women.
• Bridge to Berkadia – our alumni program that cherry-picks former colleagues to bring them back to Berkadia. Last year, 29% of the returning employees were former women employees.

The 4D Leadership Program and SH(IN)E ON

Customized programs such as 4D and SH(IN)E ON give wings to gender diversity at Berkadia.

The outcomes from these programs during the last one year have been encouraging, some of them being:

The other specially customized program at Berkadia is called SH(IN)E ON.

This is exclusively for the women leaders in Berkadia India. The goal of the program is for these women leaders to develop skills identified through focus groups and surveys. It was observed that most women leaders were reluctant to come forward and push the boundaries of their leadership personas. The  program intended to stretch their abilities and refine key leadership skills to bolster them with a leg-up in the business arena.

The Learnings

Over the period of time, I have learned that inclusivity, as everything else in life, can be taught, but has to become intrinsic to oneself. A few simple but powerful lessons that have helped me overcome self-created limitations and inhibitions are:

• Ultimately we are responsible for our own growth. It is important to take control of our own learning and development.
• Good mechanisms to help cope with work-life balance and equilibrium in life are delegating and prioritizing of tasks. At times we may have to prioritize professional commitments over personal and vice versa.
• Guilt is a game-killer. When in guilt zone, one should pause and check the mindset, introspect, understand the needs, objectives, challenges, of oneself and those of others.
• Translate self-doubt into a strength with self-efficacy, or our confidence in our ability to set ourselves up for success.
• Being our own person and not letting stereotyping bother us.
• When cornered or disappointed about something, we should speak up.  The Berkadia Way culture plays a significant role in acquiring this skill.
• Leverage the benefits of networking. We need to be visible, express views, and lead company initiatives.
• Harness the intrinsic feminine skills of multitasking, planning, organizing, intuition, and applying EQ that comes naturally to all women.

The Journey Continues....

Today, besides paving the way for women leaders in a traditionally male-dominated sector, Berkadia consciously drives a forward-looking culture and continues to consistently work on various initiatives that advocate people power and gender equity in corporate leadership.

While we, as an organization, compare well on the DEIB scale, we still have many grounds to cover. However, I believe we are changing for the better. The reality is, embracing a diverse workforce at Berkadia has become the hallmark of our organization and in time it will be so for the rest of the CRE industry too.