Big Basket CEO says company’s resilience helped rebound after losing 80% workforce during lockdown

‘Big Basket’ lost 80 per cent of its workforce within two days of the nationwide lockdown in March, but bounced back with “sheer resilience” of its team and hired more than 12,000 people in 16 days to turn around the fortunes of the company, its CEO Hari Menon said on Saturday.

“After losing 80 per cent of the workforce for two days, we were really dumbstruck as orders poured in...we hired 12,300 people in 16 days- through this we demonstrated the power of resilience, he said.

Menon was speaking at an online session of “Isha Insight: The DNA of Success”, a three-day leadership intensive programme that explores what it takes to lead through uncertainty, which got underway here today.

“An organisation needs to be a learning organization and the first thing we did at Big Basket was set up an excellent training and innovation function.

Learning elements of culture and managing people is more critical than being a technocrat and understanding technology, since that can be outsourced as long as you know where your organisation is headed,” Menon said.

Isha Foundation founder Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev addressed the participants from the Isha Institute of Inner Sciences in Tennessee, saying: “Human beings have to realise that only with conscious and responsible action can we rise through this pandemic,” an Isha release quoted him as having said.

The program brought together over 300 business leaders and top CEOs from nearly 30 different industries, it said.