Last week was amazing for us - in the process of bringing examples of women to you who had achieved success in their returnship journeys, we got inspired ourselves.

The idea we started with was to showcase the successful journeys of these women, but also to highlight the different paths they took across diverse functions and skill-sets to reach that destination. And that is the whole point of flexibility in work - it allows women from all walks of life to shine. You could be a work-from-home mom doing full-time work like Shipra Sonthalia or a 2-day-in-a-week office going mom working part-time like Franky Aggarwal, you can be either or more, and be successful and productive.

We at FlexiBees are proud of all of the women we showcased last week. To start with Mohua Das, as our blurb said, she is the James Bond of Business Development. She goes about her work with the same intelligence, passion, hard work and killer instinct, resulting in hundreds of leads conversions and a happy client. She works from home and with complete flexibility in her hours - being able to dial them up or down depending on how the business environment is or how easy or difficult it is that month to convert leads. It helps that she has the time in her life to increase the number of hours if the situation demands, but the variable pay she earns for the effort makes it worthwhile.

 

Similar is the case with Bansi Mehta, another sales professional we wrote about and her case while being slightly different in the details from Mohua, is the same in essence. Bansi is a mature, hard working person, who is doing well at a B2B sales role while working part-time. B2B sales as many may know has challenges of its own - businesses many times prefer being sold to in-person, given their products and functionality are a bit complex. The sales cycle is also often longer, considering more people in the organisation have to sign-off on it and the service expectation also higher. While today technology has enabled this process to be carried out on phone, and even mindsets of businesses are changing to see this as a viable way of selling and being sold to, it takes a special person to do justice to this role and shine in it. Bansi has done that very well, and all while working part-time - so she not only delivers on expectations to the client she works for, but also carries out the responsibilities she has towards her family well.

 

It is unthinkable to us that professionals as talented as Mohua and Bansi should not have the opportunity to make use of their skills because they cannot go to an office to work or cannot work full-time. The world today has opened up sales roles which are best done on phone and remotely - after all, when you have potential clients/partners in every nook and corner of the country or the world, it does not make sense for a business to deploy an expensive on-ground force. More and more businesses are getting aware of this, and of the talent that women like Mohua and Bansi possess, resulting in a win-win all the way.

While sales can be done on phone today, what does a scientist do without her lab coat? Plenty, as our profile on Dr Shruti Sharma brought to light. Women in science have already had to travel a tough path to reach where they are; bachelors, masters, PhD - these degrees often hide the societal battles that women have had to win in order to obtain them, in addition to years of gruelling work. These are also fields where intellectual stimulation is paramount, and for such women to shut off that part of their brain or their lives, is excruciating. And that is why it is so heartening to see that today options are opening up that allow women such as these experience this stimulation while managing their kids from home. The client in case of Dr Shruti was one such, committed to creating fun materials and teaching systems for children to get them invested and interested in science from an early age. It’s a revolution in itself, to want to change the education system in India. The fact that we could join hands with them to add our own revolution to it, speaks volumes about the kind of good that businesses intend to bring about today. We hope this assignment sets off Dr Shruti on the path to exploring a new facet of her talent if she so chooses - in the education space - which will help not just her but an entire generation of students who will learn at her hands.

And that brings us to our next flexibility warrior - Shipra Sonthalia. Shipra is special to us, because she is one of FlexiBees’ own, and also because the kind of flexibility she champions is rare. Shipra works from home as a full-time employee. Full-time and work-from-home don’t always appear in sentences together unless it is to explain how it is not possible to do both together. With Shipra, this myth has been thoroughly proved wrong, enabling not only a talented woman to have a career, but also a business such as ours to get really good talent without the overhead costs and management bandwidth of running an office space. Working from home while being a full-time employee comes with its own challenges of being able to create your own space and time to dedicate to each of your responsibilities and Shipra rises to it with aplomb. She brings the discipline, planning and communication it needs, ensuring all stakeholders are left feeling satisfied. If you are such a person who has the hours to work full-time but thought that was out of reach because you cannot work outside of your home, take some hope from this example. Things are slowly but surely changing for the better.

And a testament to that change is Franky Aggarwal, who with her talent and drive, was able to create a space for flexible work within a multinational corporation. Large enterprises are notoriously inflexible, with a high expectation of the number of work hours that need to be put in, or very little tolerance for working from home and such. In this particular case, they were resourceful enough to come to us in the first place, to hire an experienced marketing professional who could help them with a short duration assignment, but upon working with Franky for those three months, were smart and progressive enough to make the engagement a more permanent one. Her role is now much more strategic and elevated, needing complex discussions, brainstorming and coordination with team members. For the organisation to be looking at a flexible model for such a role, wherein Franky works slightly shorter hours than full-time and from-home around 3 days every week, is proof of the benefits this model brings to businesses as well as of Franky’s undeniable talent. We wish to create such opportunities for many more Frankys in the time to come, and are sure organisations shall gradually change course to meet us half-way.

So this was our week. At the end of it, we were ourselves inspired, to do more, challenge more, and to most of all, celebrate more, the wonderful women who have pioneered this journey and are paving the way for many others to follow in their steps. This women’s day, here’s to a more equal world, where every woman will have meaningful and relevant work, and where we will eventually come to not need this special day at all!