Facts box:

Company Name: Godrej Consumers Products Limited
Established: 2001
Total number of employees: 2,505
HQ: Mumbai, Maharashtra

For Godrej, an FMCG company that has steered through two strong economic disruptions in the last two years, their onus and commitment towards their employees' cascades in the company through 3 core principles — tough love, your canvas, and whole self. These entail challenging people and stretching them to grow more, developing competencies, career rotations across other verticals, and enabling employees to bring their whole selves to work. The company encourages its employees to develop interests outside of work and emphasizes on striking a work-life balance for better productivity. Every year, the company hosts an in-house event, LOUD – Live Out Ur Dream, where Godrejites can win a sponsorship of up to INR 1.5 lacs to fulfill their most personal dreams related to their interests outside of work.  

One of the key focuses for Godrej has been finding ways to integrate and engage their widespread team members. This has been realized by transforming digitally, leveraging different platforms and making long-term technology investments in technology platforms.

Today, Godrej manages all its critical people processes on digital platforms like SuccessFactors, Workplace by Facebook and Learning Management Systems that have created seamless, interactive and on-the-go communication for all team members across levels and regions.

The company has also launched ‘Project Ajna’, to inculcate an analytics-based decision-making process in the organization and build cutting-edge analytical capability. Godrej has also crafted a refreshed version of their fundamental principles - The Godrej Way. They have identified 6 core values – Trust, Own it, Be Bold, Show Respect, Be Humble and Create Delight. The company has also hosted several storytelling and brainstorming sessions to inculcate these values in the organization. 

For its diversity cause, the company also recently announced a Care-giver policy that enables women employees to bring a caregiver and a child (or children) up to the age of 1 year for necessary official travel. The policy is targeted towards women professionals in an attempt to ease their transition back into the workforce post a break in their career. To enable more inclusion for LGBT team members, all people policy documents include ‘other’ as an option for transgender employees, all official invites have replaced the word ‘spouse’ with ‘partner’. Godrej’s adoption policy is also designed with a gender-neutral primary caregiver in mind and the company observes a well-defined equal opportunity policy and a gender-neutral anti-harassment policy which protects the rights of all LGBT team members. 

On October 12, 2017, Godrej partnered with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and launched an unprecedented set of global corporate standards to support the business community in tackling discrimination against lesbian, gay, bi, trans and intersex (LGBTI) people. Godrej was one of the companies consulted to research these guidelines in India and had supported the framework since its inception. 

The ‘100 leaders’ program sets a leadership development framework, helps builds leadership and functional capabilities, and develops a pool of engaged leaders with global skills and mindsets, relevant in a business environment with increasing complexity.  As part of the ‘100 leaders’ program, the company also invites idea papers from employees in any area relevant to the organization, business or their function. These papers are presented to the leadership team and basis the merit of the suggestions the ideas are actioned.  Every leader who is part of the program is also assigned an anchor or mentor from the senior leadership team for stronger business guidance.