How Eswaran Brothers Tea Is Advancing Responsible Business Through the Mother and Child-Friendly Seal Initiative

“It has been a helpful and eye-opening process. We are a company with a long history that values doing right by our people and the communities around us. As an older company, we sometimes need to refresh the way we look at our impact. The SEAL process helped us see a new perspective on how we can serve the cause of women’s development and support for families. It has also helped to deepen our understanding of our employees and strengthen our relationship with them.”

“We have taken many actions within women’s development, but a key action that I want to highlight is reviewing the maternity and paternity policies and how we welcome women back onto our workforce at the end of their maternity leave. We want to create an enabling environment for women who rejoin the workforce after maternity leave.” Migros

“As part of the Seal Cycle, we prioritised a number of actions that strengthen support for parents, children and women across our workforce. We introduced new parental benefits — including paternity leave, reintegration support for mothers returning from maternity leave and coaching for line managers — to ensure that parenthood, especially motherhood, is no longer a barrier to career progression.

We also expanded our support for employees’ children. Those preparing for O/L, A/L and university entrance examinations now receive monthly scholarships to ease financial pressure and allow them to focus on their studies. With the support of the Lions Club Pamanuwila, we also organised an eye camp for employees’ children.

Another key area was strengthening our internal policies. We updated our harassment and discrimination prevention policy, grievance-handling procedures and supplier code of conduct. In line with this, we established an anti-sexual harassment committee and have begun rolling out awareness sessions for employees. On 4 March, we also organised a ‘Speak Up’ session with an external expert to encourage women to speak out against harassment or discrimination.

Supporting women’s career development has been equally important. We introduced a formal performance management policy and evaluated employees at all levels. As a result, 12 women helpers were promoted to machine operators, three female machine operators advanced to senior operator roles and eight high-potential female staff members were identified for our ‘She Transforms’ leadership programme, where they receive personalised coaching.

Finally, we focused on local economic empowerment by running job fairs in Nuwara Eliya and Hatton, key tea-producing regions. From these, we onboarded 50 new machine operators to our factory. Together, these actions reflect our commitment to creating a supportive, equitable and family-friendly workplace.”

“We consider ourselves a company that looks after the community around us. So this is not something new but already part of our DNA. Access to international certifications and working with people who have experience in international standards and processes helps us align more with the global standards. It helps us communicate our vision and actions with our buyers with third-party verification.  We make it a point to share about our journey with the Seal Initiative in our discussions with buyers.”

“As Sri Lankan tea companies, it is inherently very important that we contribute to the community. Many of our companies already do great things for their workers and communities as CSR but doing it in a measurable and structured way while communicating our actions to buyers and our employees is important. This is what being part of the Seal Initiative means. Programmes like this will definitely help Sri Lankan tea companies stand out in a crowded global marketplace while helping us work even better with our communities.”