HUL launches mental well-being initiatives for blue collar workforce
Hindustan Unilever, the country’s largest fast moving consumer goods maker, has put in place a well-being plan specifically aimed at its blue collar workforce on factory shop floors.
From Covid insurance coverage, awareness generating initiatives, to connecting regularly with individual shop floor members and their families to address issues around physical and mental well-being, the FMCG major has initiated a bunch of programmes that covers its 11,000 shop floor workers and around 30,000 indirect workers.
“Our HR teams made sure we reached out to each and every member of the field force…we believe that as people are geographically dispersed we have to make that much more effort to reach out to them and address any issues related to well-being,” said Anuradha Razdan, executive director – HR at HUL.
The company has extended Covid-19 insurance coverage to all its employees across factories and distribution centres.
“For all our factory employees as well as 30,000 employees in our outer core – that is people who are not our direct employees – we made sure that we offer best in class Covid insurance,” she said.
The company is also working at the community level – generating awareness not only among the workers but the local community they live in.
“One of the biggest issues while our factories kept running was that how do these people come to work without the fear of social boycott because of the fear that the person who is going out to work may bring back the infection from outside when coming back home,” Razdan told ET in an exclusive interaction. “So we not only focused on generating awareness among the employees but also building awareness and advocacy among the communities where they live,” she added.
In addition to this, the entire factory leadership team keeps regular connection with the workers and their families. On a weekly basis, members from the leadership team connect with every employee.
“We have 10-15 members in our factory leadership teams and between them they took ownership of every blue collar employee. In some factories there are as many as 2000 blue collar employees. We made sure that someone from the leadership team is doing regular connect with the shop floor employees on the phone talking to them or their families,” said Razdan. The focus of this initiative is to build trust by disseminating awareness about the safety of the site, giving them information on health and and hygiene, and building a connection with their families. “This care-to-connect programme we did in more than 30 of our manufacturing sites and in every factory we ensured that the leadership teams mapped themselves to individual employees and covered their families.”
The company has also strengthened its medical care processes and infrastructure across sites to ensure readiness and build psychological safety net and wellbeing for blue collar workforce.
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This story has not been edited by SightsIn Plus, published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text
