COVID-19 impacted women’s careers as several had to take on “work at home” responsibilities. They played multiple roles, and the dual responsibility of work and family affairs had a negative impact on their ability to give their best in both the situations.

In fact, many women have had to step away from the workforce in the wake of burgeoning familial responsibilities.

Whether this break is voluntary or induced, working women often confess to being greeted by strong bias and patchy acceptance and inclusion on the other side of their breaks. It is a substantially prevalent fact in the business landscape that, while many who lost jobs or were impacted were hired for middle and senior roles after the first COVID wave settled down, the same can’t be said about women professionals. This is especially true for those looking to join the workforce after a career break.

Keeping this in mind, Jagran New Media (JNM) created a video series and campaign revolving around women that focused on empowerment. It attempted to normalise the need for flexibility and break biases in the workplace.

For this campaign, JNM and LinkedIn partnered to create a collective narrative about flexibility for women at work. The goal was to stimulate conversation and inspire action around the need for flexible working, especially for women, and position it as the single most effective thing employers can offer to break workplace biases against women.

To give voice to this message, we onboarded four powerful and influential women:

• Vineeta Singh, CEO and founder of Sugar Cosmetics
• Sairee Chahal, founder of Sheroes
• Saria Nazneen, talent partner at Indeed.com
• Jasleen Kaur, marketing head at Benetton Group

Each of these represented a facet of working women. They spoke up on their social media platforms about how flexible working can be a powerful tool for achieving one’s goals and leading a meaningful life.

Campaign messaging

We focused on four elements for this campaign:

• Inequalities women face in the workplace.
• The realities of flexible working.
• The stigma associated with career breaks.
• Changes needed to normalise, humanise, and reset flexible work to make it work for everyone.

This campaign was based on the insight that women are always working under a burden — either the burden of others’ expectations or even a self-inflicted burden. This burden leads to guilt, and this guilt leads to accepting what is not normal.

The catch is that women have accepted non-flexibility and biases at work as the new normal, whereas it should have been the other way around: Flexibility and breaking biases at the workplace need to be normalised. This needs to be addressed with a prioritised and practical approach.

We need to look beyond and bound back because flexibility is the new ability in the workplace.

The campaign inspired women professionals across the nation with the message of fearlessness. No more prejudices, compromises, and complications. No more stopping, and no more taking “no” for an answer. It’s time to give them what’s been long owed: a world that is equal. This is a world where they can be the best versions of themselves, like unstoppable forces of nature.

Campaign impact

The campaign hashtag (#RokeNaRuke) went viral on social media, and women across a variety of industries started sharing their organic stories on LinkedIn. They shared their experiences, fears, and inspiring stories.

We successfully created an impactful cross-platform campaign that included the microsite, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, native articles, and influencers.

We observed that more working professionals on LinkedIn resonated with the idea of providing flexibility for women at work so that platform attracted the best overall engagement rate. However, Facebook and YouTube views and engagement clearly show a wider and broader reach. The article pages received more than 700,000 pageviews on the microsite.

We leveraged the Jagran team to partner with women entrepreneurs. This helped us bring women from different industries onboard to tell compelling and impactful success stories.

Everyone came together for the collective narrative of flexibility at work for women.

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