From warehouses to white-collars: How bigbasket is building talent at scale

bigbasket, says, “We are a very operational heavy organisation and we have a diverse talent. If you see at one end of the spectrum, we have engineering folks (who are into people, data scientists and product people) and on the other end of the spectrum, we have our associates working in warehouses and stores, and a gig workforce in the delivery fleet. And the talent strategy is very different for the various segments.”

“When I joined way back in 2015, we were just 2,000 plus workforce, and as we speak, we are almost 58,000 today. It’s been a big leap. Now, we are doing quick commerce. We are into the subscription business and have expanded the business to tier-2, tier-3, and tier-4 cities,” Tewari adds.

Back then the delivery people used to be on-roles as bigbasket had van deliveries. Now, they are into gigs. The individual can choose to have a gig with the firm for the hours of their choice.

bigbasket’s white-collar managerial workforce has a strength of more than 10,000 employees. Among these, about 1300 people work in the corporate office in Bengaluru.

“A few years back, hiring associate workforce was a big struggle for bigbasket because there wasn’t enough supply with a lot of other competitors. Our warehouses were remotely located in some parts of the cities. Hiring people in such remote locations used to be a big struggle. Since we got into quick commerce, we now have stores in the heart of the cities in very posh places with high population density. So now, finding this workforce has become relatively easier,” Tewari shares.

bigbasket’s corporate hiring has multiple talent sourcing channels like partners, job platforms, etc. The firm also has people within the organisation and the recruitment team on the ground. They work with village panchayats sometimes to hire gig workers in those locations.

According to Tewari, the hiring strategy, in the case of frontline workers, is built on attrition projection in the firm. “On the ground, we’ll end up hiring more associates and deliveries directly proportional to the business growth. We see an 80 to 100 per cent churn rate every year–that’s the industry average–in the case of associates, which we fill in through our partners,” she says.

In Tewari’s point of view, the gig workforce has very well evolved in tier-1 cities and is evolving in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. “Unless there are specific seasons, like if there is a harvest season or if there is an exam season or extreme summers/winters where you will see a dip as people go back to their native places, or decide not to work for a few days, the work engagement is almost stabilised,” Tewari says.

“In the case of a corporate office, it’s a very manageable single digit churn percentage. We continue to have similar hiring numbers in the corporate workforce because we would have hired relevant talent that can take care of our future needs for at least a year or plus. Whenever there is a position open at any level, we first see whether we have people within the organisation who can take up the role. If the role doesn’t get filled after the evaluation, we look for an external talent pool. For instance, if we are building a new business, and we need a skill set which is not available, we go to the market and hire someone who’s doing that role. The point is to make sure that there is a good mix of internal as well as external talent in the company,” Tewari adds.

Employee benefits

bigbasket has introduced multiple interventions around ensuring employee satisfaction. “One is, we hire them at the right salary, not just the minimum wage. We ensure that we are doing a competitive benchmark on salaries. We provide them benefits like term insurance, subsidised food in canteen, and also tie-up with caterers in the case of store houses,” Tewari says.

According to Tewari, bigbasket focuses on the upward social mobility of its workforce. The company extends the education reimbursement benefits not only to the employees, but also their families–their spouses, siblings or children can do the skill development programmes and claim the reimbursement. “A lot of our workforce claims reimbursement for their children’s education. Many people opt for computer courses and many employees’ spouses have done beautician courses. The eligibility criterion is that the employee should have completed one year with us; in the case of gig workers it is about six months,” Tewari says.

“The company has a working committee that evaluates all the requests to ensure that the reimbursements have to be genuine. There is a separate reimbursement limit for schools and colleges. We started this with the intention of building trust from our blue-collar workforce,” Tewari adds.

It is also made sure that the workers aren’t penalised in terms of payment even if there’s a business disruption. “At times, even if the gig workforce is available, we might not have orders, or when the workers are new, their efficiencies could be lower. We do consider such cases in the compensation practices. We’ve been on the top of the chart of the Fairwork Project reports for the last two years. The firm looks into the work environment, pay, conditions, contracts, management and representation of the gig workforce,” Tewari says.

Dealing with the major HR challenges

In 2019, the overall gender diversity percentage at bigbasket was 7. Now, it is 20 per cent. The firm’s DEI initiative, Aarambh, started in 2019, was the major breakthrough in spiking the gender ratio. The initiative emanated from a business case when bigbasket was doing slotted deliveries and the major problems the company faced were three:

• Absenteeism of the workforce
• Attrition
• Sourcing talent pool

The HR team dealt with these problems by bringing in a diverse workforce. “We piloted this initiative in Pune. When we started hiring women in dark stores and warehouses, their absenteeism percentages were more than 50 per cent better. Attrition was half of the male colleagues, and the productivity was almost at par. The biggest breakthrough that we realised is that if we’re not hiring one gender, you are not even focusing on almost 50 per cent of the population. Eventually, we rolled this across pan India locations. The results were terrific again,” Tewari says.

“These were very metric-driven results, which also resulted in drastically changing the organisation’s culture. Some conflicts on the ground could be vocal or could be physical, but when there was a much more diverse workforce, I think people were more careful,” she adds.

With the induction of more women into the workforce, bigbasket worked on the basic aspects in the first year like ensuring transport facility to the warehouse location, making sure there are separate washrooms, conducting sensitisation programmes for peers and very specifically for the managers because they were handling women workforce for the first time.

“Over the years, we have seen steady progress in advancing gender diversity through focused hiring and inclusion initiatives under our DEI programme, Aarambh. Today, nearly 25 per cent of our warehouse associates are women, a steady increase from earlier years. At the corporate office too, women represent over 24 per cent of the workforce, reflecting our sustained efforts toward building balanced and inclusive teams. Throughout our journey, we have consistently seen that attrition among women associates has been close to 40 per cent, comparatively lower than the rest of our workforce,” Tewari shares.

PWD hiring

bigbasket has about 1,000 people with disabilities at present. The firm did a role mapping across its stores and warehouses to identify the roles suitable for people with disabilities. “We worked with a couple of our partners who helped us do these diagnostics. Warehouse picking and packing operations have shown strong performance outcomes with hearing- and speech-impaired employees. We had sign language instructors. Today, if you visit our floors or stores, you will see that even the managers know sign language. We are also planning to pilot vision disability in our customer support now,” Tewari says.

Acting on employees’ feedback

According to Tewari, all HR interventions have to be calibrated while the workforce is engaged or when it is evident that they are moving to the passive or silent resignation phase.

bigbasket does many surveys. “We do surveys in terms of pulse checks that figure out how people are doing–whether they are enjoying their work. We evaluate the results of these surveys in detail at the management level. We have insights in terms of which kind of workforce, tenure of experience, region, city and the area that we need to focus on and what needs to be fixed. We act on it very fast to ensure that it does not become a problem,” she says.

Tewari believes what has happened well is the trust that the employees have on them. “They know the surveys are anonymous. They know whatever they say will be kept confidential and we work on the action points. We do it at a defined frequency. We also do manager feedback, where every manager gets to know how he or she is doing. The key objective questions shared with them also helps us ensure that the managers are treating their people right,” she says.

In the past, there was a concern about career development and promotion aspects like “my manager has not spoken to me about my career development or I am not sure why someone else got promoted and I did not get promoted correctly.”

In terms of promotion, bigbasket has been following a very structured format for more than three years. It is done in an objective way of measuring, and the talent management teams look after it. “The intent of the promotion framework is to ensure a standardised process. We have an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology of tracking people’s performance based on their potential which is calculated on different boxes like high performance, high potential, medium performance, medium potential, etc. This is based on the six competencies ranked by bigbasket.The eligible employees are nominated by the functional heads, and they go through a proper promotion framework process which has a set of certified assessors–a mix of internal and external,” Tewari says.

She adds, “In fact, the subsidised food that we started was also emanated from these dipstick surveys. We continuously keep on redesigning the work through automation so that productivity keeps increasing. Now, multiple order picking can be done at once. For instance, with the 10-minute delivery, bigbasket has automated the allocation of orders to multiple pickers. In case the first picker couldn’t accept the order–if he/she is in the cafeteria or washroom, the order immediately goes to the second picker, so that there is no time lag. The same optimization is done in the case of delivery persons as well.”

Growing the internal talent pipelines

Catering to the redesigning of the job roles, bigbasket conducts Skill Assessment tests for employees who opt for job conversion from blue-collar to white-collar jobs.

“About 300 blue-collar workers got promoted to white-collar roles last year and a similar number a year before that. The roles include row in-charges, inventory in-charges, shift in-charges. There are a lot of people who have moved from very junior roles in the hierarchy and are today doing well for themselves in the organisation,” Tewari says.

She adds, “The movements have to be gradual. They cannot move directly to a function which is completely different. If you put them to something which is completely alien, then you are setting them for failure. Workers eventually will move to a role that they are familiar with. As they are mostly into operations, workers who have seen picking now can manage a team of pickers.”

L&D interventions

Learning and development has long been central to bigbasket’s people strategy. The L&D initiatives focus on multiple aspects like process learning, behavioural training and leadership development. Process learning forms the foundation of the L&D strategy. Every associate, whether in warehouses, stores or operations, goes through structured classroom and on-the-job training. Delivery personnel, who were earlier trained in-person, are now fully onboarded through a mobile app. “There is no in-person training needed now,” Tewari says, pointing to how digital learning has become integral to frontline enablement.

Every employee in the white-collar role goes through various developmental training on the identification basis–without considering the promotion aspect. The Individual Development Plans (IDPs) are curated for each employee to develop their competencies in the areas where they haven’t scored well and groom themselves for the next year.

Tewari says, “Behavioural training has been particularly critical for the delivery fleet. When bigbasket delivered primarily through vans, delivery executives often entered customers’ homes and handled returns themselves. We trained the delivery people on customer interaction, professional communication skills in English and local languages, etc. In the case of white-collar workers, the training extends into team management, conflict resolution, negotiation and interviewing skills. Even psychometric tools are deployed to help employees understand their strengths and development areas.”

“We have very robust online learning modules for every role in the firm. Also, we have about 70 certified mentors within the organisation. As a part of the IDP initiative, employees can pick their mentor and learn from them on the behavioural and leadership aspects,” Tewari says.

Training needs are reviewed every year on a half-yearly and quarterly basis. For functional training, bigbasket also invites external mentors. If a training need is identified, the Functional Head and the L&D Head will decide whether the training needs to be done internally or externally. External training is also conducted across the levels, and for senior employees, the coaches are external.

“For instance, when engineering teams need to upskill on new technologies or platforms critical to the business, we send the functional team to the external programmes,” Tewari explains.

HR concerns

Commenting on her core HR concerns, Tewari says, “Talent management will continue to be a big concern, because the quick commerce industry is very volatile and agile. As a lot of talent movement happens, there is a need to ensure that we are able to hire the right talent, retain them and keep them engaged, so that they can give their best.”

Her other concern is with adapting to changes brought in by the AI coming in. “This includes bringing in AI wherever it is relevant, and also ensuring that the internal talent is not getting impacted by it,” she says.

When asked whether AI will be replacing jobs in the firm, Tewari says, “AI will do what a machine can do and humans will do what humans can do. With every new technology, there is a new revolution. It is the job of organisations to equip people to see AI as an enabler more than a threat. We have to make sure that people are getting upskilled so that they can work on ‘thinking jobs’ and AI can do the jobs which may not need human intervention. Earlier people were working on personal files, and then computers came in. It was not an overnight thing. We learnt using computers. Similarly, people will learn using AI. I don’t see any worry there.”

“We have been using a lot of AI in our customer support. I do not see any such drastic thing happening right now and I don’t think AI will replace any of our functions in near future. If you start treating AI as a threat, there will be a lot of resistance in the organisation to allow AI, which is not right for the organisation at all. AI will help you transform your processes and bring in more customer-centricity, if you use data more intelligently. We need to ensure that employees are able to do things which AI can’t do. That’s the kind of work we have to focus on,” Tewari points out.