Tag: talented

Mumbai: Urban Company has been on a mission to bridge the respect gap between India’s white and blue-collar workers over the past year. After Chhota Kaam, and Chhoti Soch, their third film in the series speaks  about this subtle yet insidious prejudice, brought to life in conversation between a father and daughter.  

Around this time each year, LinkedIn is flooded with chatter about leadership in workplaces- good managers, bad managers, toxic managers, handing out peanuts in the name of increment managers. However, the very same employees who engage in discourse around leadership styles, work-life  balance and mental health, often don’t make the best employers, at home.

Urban Company senior brand manager Kartik Ahuja said, “Over the last 10 years, Urban  Company has been instrumental in reshaping India’s access to blue-collared services. We have two  constituents, our customers and our partners, and in order to create a mutually beneficial platform, a conversation around the dignity of labour isn’t just a communication platform, but a business  necessity that ensures consistent year-on-year earnings growth for our partners, safety nets in the  form of insurance and medical cover, Over 57,000 Urban Company professionals have benefitted  from skill training programs and accreditations, climbing the ladder to upward social mobility. With  this work, our intent is to nudge society to see our partners the way we see them – as professionals.”

Through hours of interviewing UC professionals, the creative team at Talented derived insights about the various ways in which the respect gap between blue and white-collar workers has widened. This bank of biases highlighted that the limited glass-cabin’ view of workplaces excludes the very  environment that millions of UC professionals work in every day – our homes. Thus the mutual respect, irrespective of the stature or nature of work, that forms the bedrock of dignity, doesn’t permeate these glass borders.

Talented’s Aakash Desai added, “We all wax eloquent about mental health at the  workplace and what we expect from our managers within the contours of Corporate India. We have an  expansive vocabulary to talk about what makes a “toxic” workplace; and yet we often forget that our  homes are the workplaces for UC Professionals and other support staff -that we are their managers. How do our actions at home weigh against our ideas of creating a conducive environment for  someone to do their life’s best work? In our third film in the series, we attempt to bridge the respect  gap between white and blue-collar workers, to reflect UC customers being allies to UC Pros.”

Superfly founder and director Kopal Naithani said, “The film is a slice-of-life, everyday  conversation between a father and a daughter  a casual chat that takes an unexpected turn and  pushes the father to counter an unspoken prejudice. Our biases against blue-collar workers are  seldom verbalised it is complex, rooted in class-based ‘othering’ and passed down generations. Therefore the only way to break these intergenerational cycles of bias, is to pause, recognise and question them.”