Not so many women thrive in the start-up business that much in this country. But the one exception is Rehenuma Islam, who with her immense talent and determination became successful in this sector. Her journey to reach the top echelon of this sector is hugely inspiring for the women, who dreams to achieve a lot and thus contribute to the country's development as well as women empowerment.
She started her schooling at Chittagong Cantonment Public School and College but had to move to other cities during my primary education days as her father was a government job holder and after every 2-3 years, they used to move to different cities of Bangladesh with cantonment base.
This journey has given her the opportunity to meet with different people from different corners of this country. Every time a new place and making new friends has given her lots of beautiful memories with challenges to adopting changes though leaving those places and friends were always been a hard thing to do though.
Finally, her father decided to get settled in Dhaka after getting his transfer in Dhaka cantonment. In 2002, she passed her SSC examination in Science and went to Dhaka Commerce College to study Commerce. The decision to change her concentration for further education had played a big role in where she is right now.
She has completed BBA from BRAC University with majoring in Both Marketing and Human Resources. Then she did an internship at Nokia Siemens Bangladesh. That journey and learning scope has played a big role in her career selection as right after her internship she joined a Sales job for few months but that was an eye-opener for her about knowing herself and career objective as she is very people-oriented and she loves the concept of working for developing companies core asset that is Human resources and she believes every single step taken by HR department has an impact on this one of the core resources of the company.
"Sales" word never stopped me, but my position in the table has changed from this side to the other side and my customer's definition has changed but I am still doing sales to attract talents from the market and retain key talents wherever I worked," Rehenuma said.
"In 2010, I again started my career in the HR field in DHL express, Bangladesh and then moved to BRAC EPL Stock Brokerage Ltd. Meanwhile, I completed my MBA in HR from East-West University."
In 2014, she joined Bikroy.com with a challenged to establish HR practices and work on Bikroy's work culture. It has been more than 5 years, she is working here and she thinks this company has a great asset that is the energy of youth.
"Our work culture is very friendly and open-door policy can be seen everywhere. For the last 5 years, we are continuously doing our survey to measure our employees' engagement level and every time the result makes me feel very proud as we are maintaining a good level of engagement which also happened only because "We love Bikroy"," she added.
"We don't spare a special day to celebrate and recognize our employees' effort and achievement, which keeps the motivation up for our employees and work hard as well."
"As a start-up, change management is a part of our everyday work and we are doing great on this because of our employees. We believe that having a great engaged culture will lead us to get the best productivity. This is the reason we have achieved break-even in this start-up nature of business of the Online Marketing Industry in Bangladesh so early. We follow a 70: 20: 10 ratio to train and develop our employees. Employees are given challenges and to work out of their comfort zone in the workplace and also keep a combination of mentoring and different internal and external pieces of training," she continued.
"We have our "Zero tolerance policy for Sexual harassment" and strongly believe in gender equality. One will find a good balance in terms of gender for example in the management team of Bikory, we have a balance of 50:50 ratio. Also, we are committed to the "HeforShe" movement of UNWomen and we are working on our female employees' development for both personal and professional life. We do invite different female role models to share their stories that they faced to reach this successful position and I believe these stories actually gives the confidence to find the balance for work and life and our female employees are now confident enough to take challenges and working in different leadership roles in Bikroy."
She said, "As a start-up, we have a very competitive pay structure with benefits packages that also help our employees to have a balance in their life to manage the need."
"Our guiding principles are embraced by all of us, which helped us to strengthen the Bikroy culture and I and my team are working for this every day."
"In 2015, Bikroy.com signed an agreement of UN Women's campaign 'HeForShe' to increase the number of female employees and to ensure women empowerment. We follow a 70: 20: 10 ratio to train and develop our employees."
"As a part of the 'HeforShe' movement, we have created a forum named 'Moner Janala'. We have been arranging a program named as same in every three months for the last four years, in order to excel in leadership qualities among the young female executives. We invite established female guest speakers to our events who inspire our female employees by sharing their stories".
She left a message to the aspiring women also: "So, my message for all women that you need to have that confidence in you that no matter what comes in between, nothing should ever move your eyes from your goal. Stick by your principles and you can achieve anything in this world".
