Urban Company to have 30% women in leadership, senior roles by 2025

In 2022, the company invested Rs 72 crore in training and upskilling its partners

Online home services platform Urban Company is aiming to take the number of women in leadership and senior roles to 30 per cent in the next two years, Bhavya Sharma, director of ESG and Communications at the company, told Business Standard's Raghav Aggarwal in an interaction over e-mail.

Edited excerpts from the interaction here:

Has the demand for services on your platform fully recovered to the pre-pandemic levels?

The negative impact of Covid-19 on our operations was short-lived and was only due to central and statewide lockdowns. We have bounced back strongly since then, witnessing growth in demand across services as both existing and new customers availed of our safe and hygienic services. Further, we expanded our geographic presence from about 20 cities in India to over 55 currently over the last three years.

 

How is Urban Company ensuring that the rights of its partners are protected?

We are constantly working towards developing modes of upward social mobility for our service partners and ensuring they continue to benefit from our partner enablement initiatives. These are centred around four key pillars, increased earnings, security & well-being benefits, training & upskilling, and wealth creation.

In 2022 alone, we invested Rs 72 crore in training and upskilling partners.

To enable wealth creation for our partners, we also announced the Partner Stock Ownership Program (PSOP), under which we have so far granted stocks worth more than Rs 5.2 crore to about 500 partners.

Has your PSOP program helped the company in retaining its partners?

The program is at a nascent stage, and we have yet to see its impact on retention. However, we believe that over the long run, this program will be key in partners' wealth creation journey and will, therefore, become a core benefit of associating with the Urban Company platform.

Your latest ESG report shows that the female participation in your total workforce is 32 per cent. Are you taking any steps to take this percentage higher?

Out of 1,100+ employees at Urban Company, 32 per cent are women. By 2025, we are committed to increasing women's representation in leadership and senior management roles to 30 per cent.

What is UC doing to upskill its partners?

Urban Company has a unique training system where we focus on every candidate's areas of development, and the costs for training are entirely borne by us. The first training session happens at the time of onboarding, ranging from 3 days to 45 days, depending on the partner's skill level and category. We train service professionals on both technical and soft skills through our physical and digital training infrastructure, especially our Urban Company partner app.

Also, our service partners are Skill India-certified and members of the Skill India portal under our MoU with the National Skill Development Council.