More Than Meets the Eye
Posted by Stephanie on Friday, February 15th, 2008I love getting an unexpected gift or “added bonus”. Anything from the fortune cookie with my Chinese take-out, to the two dozen beautiful roses that arrived at our office from Organic Bouquet thanking us for connecting them with great projects to support through their sales.
One thing I wasn’t expecting was learning about the amazing, exemplary human resources practices of one of our project leaders in India. When I went to visit Anshu Gupta, Director of Goonj, at his office in Delhi, I was expecting to see a lot of hard working committed people. They do, in fact, process (wash, sort, mend, and in some instances create from recycled cloth and disburse to those in need) 6,000 kilograms of textiles per year, everything from a sweater that goes to a 35 year old in Bihar that has never worn a woolen article of clothing in his life, and had to dig a pit to sleep in when the weather turned cold, to sanitary napkins for girls who previously had to miss school during menstruation.
Yes, I did find committed, hard working people. 
I also found a manager with human resources practices that I found innovative and made me love his project even more. In a former life, I worked at the Corporate Executive Board in research of best practices in human resources for large companies. A recurrent challenge of all the savvy human resources executives that I met was inspiring loyalty of their workforce and retaining their best employees.
Anshu Gupta seeks to employ people that are poor-in debt from buying basic necessities (food, electricity). All new employees receive an interest free loan to pay off their debts, no questions asked. The result? Zero defaults. Committed workers. No disgruntled employees. A successful organization. A lot of benefits to people that really need them.
Watch a great video about Goonj.
Tags: Basic Needs, committed employees, india
February 16th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Thankyou for the nice video about Anshu Gupta and Goonj.