On her own terms

 

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to do this.”

 

This sentence and sentiment is something that we encounter on most days. We all know that keeping your team engaged and motivated is the key to achieving results. And when your team is working alongside you, it’s easier for you to keep a pulse check. However, when your team consists of 750 women who are working from home, the challenge to keep them engaged and motivated amplifies.

 

We launched the Holiday Experts (HE) programme in 2011. Holiday Expert is a channel where we give flexibility to the women who want to work from home. We believed that these women could leverage their relationship-building skills, extensive networks and multitasking abilities to sell holiday packages. Our first batch had 35 women. And soon we had an army of women of all ages, from 23 to 65. Today, we have a team of 12 in-house managers who guide these 750 women across 40+ cities in India.

 

Trust is a key aspect of any employee-employer relationship, and this is so much truer for a Holiday Expert, as the HEs work remotely. Apart from communication around products and training, we are constantly communicating with the team and sometimes even with their families, to reiterate to them that we are all in this together. This line of communication is needed to keep them going, help them prioritize tasks in their professional and personal lives and incentivize them to stay on track. This is a unique model that solves three problems—we are able to bring women back into the workforce on their terms, its remote nature limits the logistical costs, and we’re positively impacting the bottom line too.

 

The biggest reward, however, is seeing the impact on the lives of the Holiday Experts themselves—through careful hand-holding and training not just around sales products but encouraging and motivating them to aim higher and believe in themselves. By doing this, we are bringing them a step closer to realizing their potential. The true reward is talking to a Holiday Expert who didn’t believe that she could do the ‘real work’ by just sitting at home, doing something tangible and rocking it. It warms the heart when another 45-year-old HE, tells me that she has bought a new car from the commission she earned or when they share their experience of believing in themselves once again, due to the success and recognition they achieved at work. This zeal and motivation is an inspiration for all of us.

 

The success of this programme is largely credited to the huge amount of value that these women add to our business. But to us, the true success of this programme is in the will and determination of these remarkable women, who make a comeback and fight even harder, every time they think they can’t. It is the stories of these women who want to have it all and of an organization who believed that they could. And together, they did it.