Attracting, developing, engaging, and retaining high-quality talent
Human
Capital
Intellectual
Capital
Social &
Relationship
Capital
We are committed to building an inspiring place to work, grounded in the Godrej Way. Our culture aims at fostering diversity, agility, and experimentation. Through our people, policies and values, we are empowering our team members, enhancing capabilities in line with business ambitions, and thereby creating more impactful Human Capital and Intellectual Capital.
A lot of our engagement translates through Social and Relationship Capital partnerships and enhanced team member connect, especially in the context of our multi-geography presence.
Culture around the
‘Godrej Way’
The Godrej Way, our purpose and values, is the cultural cornerstone that guides our choices and actions. Over the past year, we have recommitted to fully embrace and live our distinctive purpose and values and are exploring ways to bring this alive and build a more meaningful Godrej for all our stakeholders.
People-first
approach
We believe that our strong value system, rooted in the Godrej Way, is helping us support our people better to emerge stronger from COVID-19. We adopted a people-first approach to support Godrejites working at our various global offices as well as in factories and on ground. Through this, the health and safety of our people has been a top priority, even as we ensured our business priorities remained in focus and we continued to serve our consumers and communities.
Keeping our people safe while
continuing to serve our communities
Our employee
value proposition
We take much pride in fostering an inspiring workplace with an agile and high-performance culture to attract, develop, and retain the best global talent.
Your Canvas
Our exciting and ambitious growth plans allow us to offer unparalleled career opportunities relatively early on.
Tough Love
We expect a lot from our team members, differentiate based on performance and potential through career opportunities and rewards, and lay particular emphasis on developing, mentoring, and training.
Whole Self
We believe that passionate, well-rounded individuals with diverse interests make for better Godrejites. We understand that our team members play multi-faceted roles. Therefore, not only do we encourage them to explore their whole selves but also create an enabling space for them to do so. Our commitment to being an equal opportunities employer and have flexible working policies around part-time work, work from home, flexible working hours, employee self-help resources, and professional counselling are designed to enable better productivity and effectiveness.
Godrej Capability Factors
All our people policies and practices are founded on the leadership capability factors of ‘Leading Self’, ‘Leading Others’, and ‘Leading Business’.
Leading Self
Much of our success depends on whether we can unleash the unique and powerful individual potential of each Godrejite. An in-house programme built around our Godrej Capability Factors called the pillar of Leading Self enables people to introspect and better understand and channelise personal drive.
Leading Others
Leading Others is an important skillset that helps drive both performance and organisational growth. This year, we focused on building people management capabilities through an in-house programme, ‘Leading Others for Impact’.
Leading Business
Strategic orientation and execution are emerging learning needs at middle management levels. We enable this through a blended learning approach with on-the- job implementation.
Ramping up safety measures at
our offices and factories across the world
Safety
We shifted to remote work for all our office- based team members well before it was mandated by governments. This allowed us to prioritise the safety of our team members, while also doing our bit towards controlling the spread of the virus.
To help our people ease into this new working format, we introduced several safety measures across offices and factories, and for those on field.
Health and
medical support
Ensuring the health and well-being of our teams is crucial. Given the categories we operate in, our business was classified an essential service and we were required to keep our manufacturing facilities operational and ensure that our products reached markets on time.
Apart from the existing hospitalisation and medical policies we have for all Godrejites, we introduced additional measures for partners in our extended networks in India. We introduced COVID-19 medical insurance and life
insurance to our extended workforce, including salesmen on distributor rolls, CFAs, and drivers and computer operators. We also covered home quarantine expenses, which are not part of regular hospitalisation policies, for team members in frontline roles in manufacturing, Research & Development, and sales.
We also tied up with Apollo, a healthcare service provider, for tele consultation services in India.
Inner Hour, a mental
health platform that offers
personalised plans with
multiple self-help resources
Mental
wellness
Our Employee Assistance Programme offers a confidential mental wellness platform and services. We have also partnered with Inner Hour, a mental health platform that offers personalised plans with multiple resources like self-help, short daily courses, articles, activities, and access to trained therapists. We have extending the services of Inner Hour to the dependents of Godrejites, including parents, partners, siblings, and children.
We are encouraging open conversations around the importance of mental health by organising webinars with senior therapists and leadership on self-care strategies, strengthening relationships, social media and mental health, among other themes.
Striking a balance while
working from home
We are deeply committed to ensuring that our team members continue to bring their ‘whole selves’ to work, even if it is from home. Enabling and equipping them to navigate the challenges of working from home has been key. We launched a slew of measures to support and truly trust and show respect.
Introducing
meeting-free
Thursdays
Some of these were as follows:
Occupational health and safety
At GCPL, we are committed to building an incident-free organisation by creating a strong culture around the safety and health for all our employees and stakeholders.
In order to achieve this, we have adopted a four pillar approach towards safety.
These four pillars include:
1. People and culture
2. Safety infrastructure
3. OHS management system
4. Automation, technology, and AI
Our people are at the forefront of our company and we are very focused on ensuring that they are equipped with necessary safety know-how. We are doing this by organising hands-on trainings, and skits and safety competitions. In fiscal year 2020-21, we focused on improving safety awareness among all our employees as well as our contractual workforce. We arranged over 21,704 safety training programmes across our plants, covering over 83,000 of our team members.
Due to COVID-19, we conducted these programmes online and in small in-person focus groups, following safety protocols.
On-the-job safety trainings
ensuring COVID-19 protocols
As per our commitment to bridge the identified gaps across critical safety areas, we have been investing in improving our safety infrastructure and systems. Some of the key projects in fiscal year 2020-21 were around the installation of fall protection systems, electrical system upgrades, and machine guarding and LOTO provisions.
Fall protection equipment and
infrastructure at various factories
Automation and AI are new ways of working and we believe that they can help us in making our operations safer. This year, we used drones as tools to inspect the health of our boiler stacks, which helped us in reducing risks significantly.
We won eight external recognitions for safety this year, and our safety performance was also recognised by various renowned national agencies such as the National Safety Council and Confederation of Indian Industry.
Leveraging AI-powered
drones to inspect boiler
stack health
| Key priorities | FY 19-20 | FY 20-21 |
|---|---|---|
| Number of people trained on safety (global data for employees and contractors) | 73,039 | 83,395 |
| Injury rate (global data) | 0.35 | 0.51* |
| Disabling incidents (global data) | 0 | 3 |
| Number of fatalities (global data) | 1 | 1** |
| First aid/medical kits (global data) | 434 | 101 |
| Number of LTIs (global data) | 21 | 21 |
| Safe man-hours | 64.99 Million | 50.86 Million*** |
| Increase in near-miss reporting | 18% | 19.1% |
*Injury rate is calculated as per IS 3786: Number of reportable accident*1,000)/average number of employees
Reason for increase in injury rate is as follows:
India and SAARC, and Indonesia and Latin America have shown a reduction of 29% in injury rate, whereas in Africa, we have seen an exponential rise due to an increase in awareness and reporting and our endeavour to build a strong safety culture.
** This year we witnessed one fatal incident at one of our sites in Africa. As a company, we have ensured mental, social, and financial help to the family of the deceased. We have conducted a detailed investigation of the incident and implemented corrective actions across all our manufacturing sites. We are also in the process of completing all preventive actions and have further strengthened our systems and process to prevent such issues in the future.
***Overall man-hours worked in FY 20-21 has reduced due to factories being shut and the shifts being curtailed during the pandemic
Our unique multi-local
operating model
Our international growth has been through acquisitions. Unlike traditional multi- nationals, we have a multi-local operating model centred on value-based partnering and operational autonomy at the local level. This helps sustain the agile, entrepreneurial spirit that made these companies successful while providing the benefits of strong processes and scale that Godrej brings.
Striking a balance between our global identity and the ability to appreciate the local flavour and respond to changing consumer needs is our competitive advantage.
Cluster-function ways
of working
In line with our operating model, we are building strong collaboration across geographical clusters and function teams through shared accountability and clearly defined ways of working.
As a global conglomerate, delighting over a billion consumers, becoming inclusive is not just in our DNA and the right thing to do but it also makes excellent business sense. We take pride in being an equal opportunities employer. We recognise merit and encourage diversity.
Diversity and
inclusion council
We recently launched a Diversity and Inclusion Council at GCPL to anchor and drive conversations around gender and race. It comprises business leaders and senior team members who champion and drive our diversity and inclusion agenda.
We do not tolerate any form of discrimination based on nationality, race, colour, religion, caste, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, age, or marital status and ensure equal opportunities for all our team members.
Diversity champions
in Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa is a key geographic cluster for us. Given the diversity in gender, nationality, race, and educational background, we see tremendous opportunity in leveraging synergies.
We have a representative council that spearheads targeted interactive sessions, online and offline, to build appreciation and awareness around diversity. Based on their recommendations, we have refreshed our people policies and processes.
Employee resource group for
women in sales
We launched ‘Manch’, our first women-only employee resource group in India, built on peer-to-peer networking and senior leadership support. Through this, we aim to build trusted professional and personal relationships to share ideas and learn and co-create tangible solutions to challenges faced by women in sales.
Women
and leadership
We foster a holistic, supportive workplace for women. As a result of these efforts, the percentages of women in GCPL and senior leadership (Vice President and above) have increased to approximately 25 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively, today.
Apart from our maternity benefits and day care facilities, we have a Caregiver Travel Policy, which enables new mothers to bring a caregiver and children up to one year of age, for necessary work-related travel. Through Careers 2.0, our second careers programme, we provide women who have taken a career break a chance to return to the workplace. It offers aspirational and challenging projects across sectors and functions with added flexibility to help women balance their careers and personal needs.
LGBT+ inclusion
Our well-defined Equal Opportunity Policy and a Gender-neutral Anti-harassment Policy protect the rights of our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex team members.
We have extended medical benefits, such as hospitalisation cover, to domestic partners of Godrejites. We offer a choice to any team member to choose a spouse/domestic partner as a dependent. This also covers same-sex dependents, AIDS patients, and fertility treatments. Our Adoption Policy too is designed with a gender-neutral primary caregiver in mind. We have a Gender Affirmation Policy to support team members who wish to undergo gender transition. Godrejites can claim reimbursements towards non-cosmetic surgeries and hormone replacement therapy.
We are reviewing amenities and infrastructure facilities for LGBT+ team members. As a first step, we have set up two gender-neutral washrooms at our headquarters, Godrej One, in Mumbai. The Godrej Group was also one out of two Indian companies to win ‘gold’ in India’s first LGBT+ work quality index by British LGBT+ advocacy group Stonewall, India’s LGBT+ rights Keshav Suri Foundation, and LGBT+ inclusion consultancy Pride Circle.
On December 13, 2018, we launched a ‘Manifesto for Trans Inclusion in the Indian Workplace’. Through this, we aim to highlight the position and circumstances of trans people in the Indian society and steps corporate India can take to improve them.
Project Rainbow is a focused platform to empower people from the LGBT+ community to join Godrej.
Prevention of
sexual harassment
We are committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels respected and included. We ensure that our team members are protected against sexual harassment while prioritising the redressal of all complaints in connected matters.
To build awareness, we organise compulsory prevention of sexual harassment sensitisation sessions at regular intervals and have an e-learning module available for ready reference.
We believe that learning is a continuous process and happens on the job, through a combination of challenging assignments and varying roles. This year, we saw a big shift in our ways of working. The move to completely virtual environments meant that we had to shift our approach towards learning and transform its design and delivery methodologies. We used leading e-learning platforms and designed several in-house training programs around a blended-learning methodology to drive learning.
Online learning
To upskill our team members in functional and behavioural capabilities, we partnered with best-in-class online learning platforms, such as Udemy, Coursera, and EdX, and leveraged our Learning Management System to drive learning. We covered nearly 60 per cent of our people, with a steady increase of 5-10 per cent of learners every quarter.
Udemy
With a vast library of well-structured courses across various domains, Udemy was the most sought-after learning platform. Close to 1,000 unique learners signed up for several courses, around both functional and behavioural areas. In addition, we also utilised courses for our blended learning initiatives.
Coursera and EdX
We leveraged these platforms to improve the capabilities of middle and senior management team members, who actively signed up for courses offered by some of the best institutes globally. High-quality content along with regular assessments ensured that the learning retention was high. As a result, several people could develop critical capabilities in areas such as digital marketing, project management, and strategic orientation.
Harvard Business School Online
We continued our partnership with Harvard Business School Online, which offers access to Harvard’s world class case study content on areas such as strategy, innovation, leadership, negotiation, business analytics, and entrepreneurship. The programmes, designed to bring the Harvard Business School Classroom to participants, follow an interactive and case-based study approach, which keeps participants highly engaged and allows them to think from the lens of a business leader. In total, 100 Godrejites signed up for courses.
My Learning Space
Our in-house learning platform has a library of approximately 500 courses on the Godrej Capability Factors. More than 2,000 courses were completed this year.
We used digital content extensively through focused campaigns. In April 2020, we launched a Lockdown Learning Challenge, which drew participation from over 300 team members. We also organised several group-focused campaigns to promote online courses. After analysing improvement areas emerging from past review data, various courses were recommended to specific groups from different functions.
Our Lockdown Learning Challenge to
promote online learning
Role transition programmes
Our transition programmes followed a blended-learning approach, with learners completing a self-paced course followed by a group-based learning session. We hosted two transition programmes this year.
Discover, a transition programme
for new leaders
A blended learning programme for the transition to a General Manager role, this six-month programme focused on building critical capabilities and equipping people with necessary tools to transition into their new roles.
Evolve, a transition programme
for new managers
Designed to manage the transition of people to managerial roles, this programme focuses on building critical capabilities around acting strategically, leading teams, influencing, and emotional and social awareness.
Leading teams for impact
We designed and delivered this customised people management programme virtually, focused on key aspects of effective leadership. The sessions were run in six segments, each focusing on a particular skill, and leveraged a mix of technological platforms and brainstorming tools, interactive tools, and learner engagement platforms. It was hosted for people managers across different levels, covering nearly 100 managers, and customised based on the scope and complexity of each level. It received strong positive feedback with an average Net Promoter Score of 88.
Leadership
development programmes
We are committed to building a strong pipeline of women leaders. We understand that women leaders face a unique set of challenges as they prepare for leadership positions, some of which include unconscious biases, scarcity of role models, and a peer group that continually shrinks the more senior they become. So, we launched ‘Accel’, a comprehensive leadership development programme, and created an intensive immersive learning experience for 20 high-potential women team members across geographies. It focused on building capabilities around strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, influencing, and people management. We also used different psychometric tools, such as OPQ, influencing styles inventory, and FIRO-B, to enable self-awareness and reflection.
Reframed
careers
Our career philosophy draws from the key pillars of our people philosophy and focuses on providing fair growth opportunities. Based on the feedback and concerns shared around career opportunities and guidance through engagement surveys, continuous listening, and leadership connect, we identified the need to reframe careers.
As part of this, we have taken 5 key steps:
The reframed career approach was communicated to all managers through Learning Cafés, sessions led by business and HR heads.
Creative and fun campaigns to
encourage people to sign up for online learning,
Creative and fun campaigns to
encourage people to sign up for online learning,
High-impact courses on digital
marketing recommended for brand managers
Authentic conversations
Our senior leadership team engages through different platforms, including town halls and one-on-one conversations. We are making a shift from static point- in-time conversations and surveys to a culture of continuous listening, aimed at understanding the pulse of our company in real-time for taking immediate action. These conversations have been extremely crucial in the context of navigating the COVID-19 pandemic.
Earlier this year, our Chairperson and Managing Director introduced the Emerge Stronger app as a way to tap into the collective wisdom our people and seek direct feedback, suggestions, and ideas to navigate the pandemic with agility and effectiveness. The app functions as a feedback tool primarily aimed at collecting business ideas and suggestions for improvement and business growth. It allows for specific targeting with customised questions that can be sent at predetermined frequencies. Based on emerging themes, she connects with people in small groups to discuss challenges and solutions.
We continue to leverage Amber, a chat bot, to interact with team members across geographies. Over 1,300 people were engaged as part of the first wave of interactions. Through this, we capture people’s experiences at a defined frequency based on their tenure in the company. The feedback has helped us take both faster individual actions and make organisation-level changes based on emerging themes.
The new
Emerge Stronger
feedback app
Leadership connect
COVID-19 lockdowns encouraged our leadership teams to reimagine new ways to connect. In Latin America, our CEO José Toscano introduced Café Virtual, an online catch-up over coffee session with team members from across the business. Our India and SAARC CEO Sunil Kataria connected with managers each month for the first three months to understand how people were doing.
As lockdowns eased, our leadership teams gradually resumed market visits and spending time with our sales and manufacturing teams. Our on-ground teams, including our suppliers and partners, have been our true heroes through the pandemic, ensuring that we continue to serve our consumers and communities through some of the toughest lockdowns.
Nisaba Godrej, our Chairperson and Managing
Director, visits sales and factory teams in India
Hosting Café Virtual in Latin America
Leveraging technology
to connect
Our business heads regularly engage through town halls at our offices and one- on-one conversations. This year, however, we had to completely relook at how we connect due to the global lockdowns.
We pivoted to virtual town halls to share our business performance on a quarterly basis and hosted online interactive sessions to answer questions and share feedback and ideas.
We also continued to host the Real Deal, our in-house talk show that encourages open conversations on important topics. Some of the topics we covered this year included mental wellness, working from home, and the importance of the Godrej values.
Godrej Indonesia hosts a virtual townhall
Introducing different online
engagement platforms
Innovative approach
to recruitment
Godrej LOUD (Live Out Ur Dream), our radically different approach to business school recruitment, encourages students to live out their unfulfilled personal dreams and offers sponsorship and internships with Godrej. LOUD has been hosted successfully across India, Indonesia, and Africa.
This year, we adopted an all-digital format for LOUD, leveraging technology to forge deep connections with business school students. We garnered greater reach than before, engaging with 5,500 students from 17 business schools over 40 days. Given our multi-pronged platform approach, the accessibility of the conversations went much beyond participating business schools, drawing in a large, relevant audience.
Connecting with
our global teams
Workplace by Facebook is our in-house social media and engagement platform used to stay connected with our teams globally. This year, we saw 11 per cent increase in new users on the platform and 10 per cent increase in engagement rates.
Recognising and
celebrating high performance
The Godrej Awards
Our annual Godrej Awards ceremony, organised across the Godrej Group, is dedicated to recognising outstanding performers. We shifted to a completely virtual format, recorded from our team members’ homes across the globe on mobile devices.
The Godrej Way Awards
Organised every quarter, the Godrej Way Awards are where we recognise people for behaviours in line with our values — trust, be bold, show respect, own it, be humble, and create delight.
Challenger Club Spot Recognition
To motivate our team members in India amidst a highly challenging environment, we selected the theme ‘unleash the challenger’ and defined five challenger behaviours, including: (1) overcoming fear, (2) possibility thinking, (3) hyper agile execution, (4) leading from the front, and (5) thriving in beautiful constraints.
This helped us set the tone for the year and ensure a clear sense of direction within teams. As part of this, we also launched the Challenger Club Spot Recognition to recognise employees displaying these challenger behaviours.
Superstar Awards
One of the most prestigious awards within GCPL, the Superstar Awards recognise the excellence of our team members across all our business functions.
Godrej
Leadership Forum
At our annual Godrej Leadership Forum, leaders from across Godrej businesses come together to share perspectives and interact with global change makers across. We reimagined the standard 2-day conclave format, went all-digital, and hosted online sessions with some incredible leaders on how to build resilience and emerge stronger. Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder and Chairman of Infosys, highlighted the importance of a compelling, energising vision for the future.
Author and professor, Chinmay Tumbe, reminded us that we first made soap in the year of the Spanish flu pandemic and asked what our contribution in the year of COVID-19 would be. Sanjiv Bajaj, Chairman and Managing Director of Bajaj Finserv, discussed how crises could change the way we look at productivity and efficiency going ahead. Historian and professor, Nancy Koehn, pointed out why crises are amazing crucibles or greenhouses for leadership growth.
Volunteering,
the socially distanced way
This year, we moved our annual Godrej Global Volunteering Day online. Not only did we go completely digital but we also made it a week-long activity that could be completed at home and while socially distancing too. Our theme was centred around sustainable living, through which we encouraged our team members across the globe to make tiny lifestyle changes that could be done from anywhere and at any time.
We offered 56 volunteering tasks and hosted them on the Aimeo App. Over 1,320 Godrejites volunteered and posted their updates on the app. On an average, our volunteers completed 28 tasks and contributed 2,400 hours to volunteering in just one week!
We have been consistently recognised among the best companies to work for. We were recognised on Great Place to Work® Institute’s (India) Best Workplaces in Manufacturing (2021) for creating a high-trust, high-performance culture, and we were also part of Great Place to Work® Institute’s (India) top-ranked FMCG companies for building a purposeful and agile workplace for our people. Our Godrej Indonesia business was awarded the 2021 Indonesian Best Employer Brand Award by the Employer Branding Institute, World HRD Congress for the second consecutive year.
In addition, we were also awarded the ‘Business World Pure: Purpose + Resilience Company Award 2020, for bringing alive our purpose and showing resilience in a challenging year.
Godrej Indonesia is awarded the 2021
Indonesian Best Employer Brand Award
Godrej InTune, our engagement survey, hosted in partnership with Willis Towers Watson, measures engagement levels and seeks feedback from across teams and geographies against identified parameters. We use the insights generated to co-create targeted interventions with specific teams.
GCPL is committed to uplifting human rights as part of our vision to help build a more equitable, inclusive and greener world. Our respect for and commitment to human rights is central to our values. We believe our main human rights responsibilities are to our employees, the communities where we operate, suppliers and business partners, and customers and consumers. Our commitment to human rights is reflected in our Human Rights Policy, Sustainable Procurement Policy, Policy on Prevention of Sexual Harassment at the Workplace, and Code of Conduct for Employees, Senior Management, and Directors.
The Human Rights Policy was adopted in 2017 and since then we have focused on the following aspects:
Going forward, we aim to work on some of our salient human rights with the support of our stakeholders. In 2021, we are committed to:
Visit our website
to view our Codes
and Policies
