Mae 00:16
From the Godrej DEI Lab, welcome to India Included. Here's your host, Parmesh Shahani.
Parmesh Shahani 00:28
Hi to my lovely fans and listeners all over the universe - from outer space, from everywhere. I’m Parmesh Shahani from the Godrej DEI Lab. Thank you so much for all your letters - some of you still send letters, awww - your pictures, your DMs and to the last DM, no darling, I can’t marry you because my partner won’t like that, but please do continue to listen to this podcast no, I still love you.
It’s very good - even if i say so myself and that’s the funda of what this episode is about. Goodness.
Now, anyone who does DEI will tell you - diversity and inclusion is good for business. Our friends at McKinsey regularly put out reports with numbers that show how the case for growth and the case for workplace inclusion go hand in hand. Basically, if you’re the type of business leader who thinks that DEI is fluff, or that it gets in the way of your bottomline, or that it’s fuzzy social service stuff – you’re very last-to-last century. I’m not saying this haan -the well paid consultants are, so please listen to them. We know enough consultant jokes na - how many consultants does it take to change a lightbulb? Four. How many consultants does it take to make the business case for inclusion? All of them are making it, so like, let's listen to them.
But maybe you’re not that kind of leader. Maybe you come from a society and a market that values respect and generosity – and you live in a state that is publicly committed to equality and social justice.
Maybe you work at an organisation like the Godrej Industries Group which was founded in the Swadeshi movement, and for 127 years has believed that doing good business also means doing good for society. In this case thinking of DEI is natural to you - and the fact that it also makes business sense - is a bonus.
My guest today leads an organisation that works on these big picture questions around goodness. He’s also a business owner himself. That makes him uniquely well placed to observe how business concerns and social concerns overlap. Anant Ahuja is the Director of ESG and Sustainability at Shahi Exports, the largest exporters of apparel in India, and it's a firm founded by his grandmother. He’s also the CEO and co-founder of the astonishing Good Business Lab, a research organisation dedicated to studying and advocating for worker well-being.
So Anant, welcome to our recording studio. I believe this is not an unfamiliar habitat for you. I believe you have side hustle as an independent music artist, do you want to start off by telling all our guests about that?
Anant Ahuja 03:19
Yeah, sure. That's my night shift, working in the studio, making music. And I've been doing it actually even longer than I've been doing Good Business Lab in Shahi, in some sense. I started composing music, when I was in maybe grade eight or grade nine.
Parmesh Shahani 03:35
And can we listen to it?
Anant Ahuja 03:37
We can listen to it. I mean, all the listeners should go on Spotify, search, MadStarBase, check out the music we've made. A lot of it is hip hop or rap music or dance music as well - electronic music. And we put out a project a long time ago where we took a bunch of classic Bollywood songs, remix them, so that, you know, they could fit in a DJ set that included hip hop and other kinds of music, so now they're on Spotify and all the streaming platforms.
Parmesh Shahani 04:08
Wow. Anant, and we have people in the in our studio holding their hands over their mouths and ears saying, oh my god, this is MadStarBase. So I'm sure after listening to this podcast, which has like millions of viewers, your fan base will increase even more. But when you're not being a musician, you know, how would you describe the work you do?
Anant Ahuja 04:29
First of all, I think music is something that actually unites me and my other co-founders as well. So I have two co founders, and the three of us started an organization called Good Business Lab. And Good Business Lab is labor, innovation, and research company. Essentially, our aim is to build the business case for worker well being, and we do that by showing to businesses the you know, impacts of these programs. Just as a side point, the other two co founders are great musicians as well - multi instrumentalists, vocalists. So when we're not doing research, and, you know, studying worker well being, we are finding time to get in studios like this and compose and create original music.
Parmesh Shahani 05:18
You studied political science in Pennsylvania, then Shahi exports, which - it is our country's largest exporter of apparel, garments, which your grandmother actually started as well. So, A, why study political science and B, were you always destined, then, to come back and take over the family business? Take us through that journey
Anant Ahuja 05:39
Like you said, my grandmother started our family business, which is, it's called Shahi Exports. We're a contract manufacturer. We manufacture apparel textiles, meaning to say fabric, as well as, you know, clothing and ready-made garments, all for export, pretty much. So we export to large brands and retailers - all the global ones you can think of. And when I got into college, I didn't have any intention specifically to come join the business when I came back - I was really going into college with a sort of, no clear direction on what I was going to do. But I realised when I was there that I should, in terms of, you know, the subjects I study, I should do things that I really enjoy, and I think that I was really drawn towards the political science department because they had great faculty. I don't think I was actually exposed to a lot of the, you know, topics that we discussed in poli sci in my high school
Parmesh Shahani 06:40
In India growing up -
Anant Ahuja 06:41
growing up, yeah, exactly.
Parmesh Shahani 06:42
Studies are so different,
Anant Ahuja 06:43
Very different - and just the lens, and, you know, the approach to studying these topics, right? Like - but I will say I also did study economics, so it was nice to, you know, be able to understand the world from the political sort of perspective, but also understand, yeah, you know, the economics behind how the world works and so on.
Parmesh Shahani 07:02
How was your grandmother like while growing up? I mean, it's pretty unique, right, to have a woman matriarch. Most family businesses are started by men
Anant Ahuja 07:13
Yeah, no you're right. I mean, she's a special person, for sure. I mean, growing up to me, she was my grandmother, you know, so I didn't really understand what all she was doing to build a business like this. But now, you know, when I talk to her, and now we're trying to document a lot of the process of how she built the company. This year is actually Shahi's 50th year. So
Parmesh Shahani 07:32
Oh my God, happy birthday.
Anant Ahuja 07:33
Yeah, happy birthday to Shahi. Happy 50 years. So, 50 years ago, she was actually not working in a formal paid job. She was obviously working a lot to run her home, similar to many Indian women, you know, in today's world. And, you know, my dad and uncle, they were getting a bit older, so they were in school, and she thought, Okay, now I have a bit of time, let me try to earn some money for the family. And so as a kid, she learned how to sew. Her mom taught her. So she said, Let me join the local garment factory. That factory was actually headed by a woman as well, I found out recently, so I thought that was kind of interesting.
Parmesh Shahani 08:14
So you all are tracing this history while -- Very cool
Anant Ahuja 08:16
Yeah. So, yeah, just, she joined the factory, and I think while working there, she didn't spend too much time, but she realised pretty quickly that it was hard for her to manage the home and be in this, you know, job for eight hours a day. And my uncle, her younger son, was getting in trouble, skipping school, so she thought, no, like, I shouldn't do this. She told the factory head, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I think I have to leave this job. The factory head was like, hey, actually, you know, your stitching skills are really good. Why don't you take some orders and work on them from home? So the flexibility allowed her to manage, you know, things much better. But the work kept increasing, and then at some point, she's like, Hey, why don't I get some help from my, you know, neighbors and people around - so as she started going door to door, asking the other women in her neighborhood, like, hey, come join, come work with me, and the the home that the family lived in turned into, like, a workshop, yeah. You know, the early years were like that, yeah. And then at some point they established an actual factory. And 50 years later, we have, you know, some 50+ factories spread across India. These factories employ over 100,000 full time workers, mostly women, and it's a really interesting industry in terms of the role this has in the development story of of nations, right? Like how we bring people into formal sector jobs, yeah, in particular, women.
Parmesh Shahani 09:49
Yeah. That's amazing, Anant, and congrats - your grandmother, the entire family, and indeed, all these 100,000 employees who are benefiting from, you know, this idea and this hard work of the past 50 years must be so proud, but there must be something in her, right? Because there were there were maybe many women who were working and bringing work home, but only one of them, like your grandmother, had the vision to imagine something bigger and and scale that up. So was she always, A - so ambitious? And was she - did she always imagine that it would be a place where women would, you know, predominantly be employed and rule?
Anant Ahuja 10:30
I mean, it's a story of organic growth, right? 50 years later, it's achieved this size. And I think when she was building it, she definitely wasn't imagining being the largest exporter garments in India - this scale, 100,000 people. Yeah. What I've learned from that is anything you put your heart, your mind into and do with full dedication - if you don't do it expecting to achieve a certain level, and you just do it because you enjoy it, or because it's adding value, I feel like that's the way to grow to unimaginable levels. But I will say to your second part of your question, I do think one of the legacies of Shahi has been to promote employing women in these jobs. I think that mindset has been something she's kind of passed on. And I think now what we've really tried to focus on more is, how do you create high quality jobs. Right? You don't want to bring 100,000 people into workplaces, and then expose them to, you know, harassment or shouting - lack of safety, poor working conditions, which, you know, often people think of, when they think of the garment sector. So I'm definitely, really proud of what the companies achieve, but I'm also, like, very motivated to work on all these problems and try to reduce the negative impacts and maximise the positive ones.
Parmesh Shahani 12:10
Yeah, you know, when I met you last at the UN conference, you showed some amazing images and spoke about, you know, some of the practices which are not rocket science, but we wish other people did, right, like having sanitary pad dispensers in every factory that are accessible with biometrics, and that just being able to measure usage, but also how much the presence of that facility and its usage leads to, you know, more well being more productivity and things like that as well, right? So it's really amazing how you've been able to do these small tweaks and then, you know, really, really take Shahi ahead, but also then become an exemplar for others. So tell me about some of these innovations you've done at Shahi. And I would imagine that working on these made you think about the larger ecosystem, and then co-found Good Business Lab, right?
Anant Ahuja 12:51
Yeah, I mean, my journey at Shahi began in, let's say, close to the end of 2012. I was actually really drawn to the work that was happening in the company because of the development potential that I saw, right, like all these people were coming to our factories for daily work. And then there were already some interesting programs even back then. So the first program that really drew my attention, it's called the PACE program. It stands for Personal Advancement and Career Enhancement. So what the PACE program was trying to teach to women in the factories was what they call soft skills, or life skills - communication, time management, problem solving, financial literacy, were some of the modules. But I think what was novel, especially at the time, was garment factories were not training their workers in this, right? But they often weren't training them in these sort of general or life skills, maybe even thinking that if we train them in these skills, they can go and get a better job, right? They'll leave our factories. So one of Shahi's customers is GAP - the clothing brand, and they have been a pioneer when it comes to the space of worker wellbeing in supply chains, right? They said, let's move beyond the usual compliance and auditing, and let's try to create some positive impacts. But they were really looking at this program from a, I guess you could say philanthropy, or, you know, CSR perspective. They weren't seeing it as a business tool, and that's when, you know, so we had Ach and the other Anant, who are the other GBL co-founders. They came to Shahi. I was connected to them because they both were at UPenn as well, at the same university, a couple years ahead of me. They're both PhDs in economics, so they're development economists. And they wanted to see our factories, and they saw the PACE program, they saw the scale of what was going on. And they're like, Wow, this is really cool. But they also saw some of the challenges that the business had. So at that time, Shahi had 60,000 workers. Now it's, like I said, 100,000 - but even 60,000 was really large operation. But these factories, every month, 10% of the workforce was leaving.
Parmesh Shahani 15:17
So attrition, huge -
Anant Ahuja 15:18
Really high attrition. I mean, if - 10% a month means that in a year, your whole workforce is - even more is being refreshed. Now, if you're HR and you're responsible for replacing this workforce, that's not fun. You know, that's a lot of work.
Parmesh Shahani 15:32
But also, you're not invested then in training and keeping them, because you imagine -
Anant Ahuja 15:36
You know that they're -- when we spoke to a lot of people, it sounded like they were kind of just, like, accepting that this was a reality they would live with. They weren't thinking of it as, like, hey, there's an opportunity to do something. So they saw the PACE program, and they were kind of like, if Shahi's been doing this program for the 5-6 years and they've graduated, I think at the time, it was 10,000 women in the program. There must be some value to the business, and maybe it's impacting things like the attrition numbers, the attendance, the productivity. So they're like, hey, there's a way we can test this and create some evidence, and that way is a randomised control trial. So the way I could explain this, you know, for people who aren't too familiar with the concept: you select a sample size and randomly choose within that sample size, who gets the intervention? So with PACE, the intervention was a training. So we had a group of 3000 workers who volunteered, who said, hey, I want to do this program. And we said, okay, 1500 will be selected to be part of the training for this year, and the rest you'll be part of the next cohort. And so, we did it for eight months - the program, we're tracking both the treatment group and the control group. And the other thing I can say, which is really cool about the garment factory setting - there's a lot of data that we collect. And one of the pieces of data is productivity. So in a garment factory, each worker has a target. Let's say your target is 100 pieces. Yeah. Now your output or your efficiency would just be however many you produced against your target, so 80 out of 100, or whatever it might be. Now, if you were to do this experiment in a corporate setting or somewhere else, you wouldn't have that kind of like clear productivity data, but that lets us learn a lot of really interesting things. And what we learned from the PACE experiment was that it provided a 20% boost to productivity. And this is a program that wasn't designed as a business tool, right? It was just like - GAP was actually like, let's invest in women, because by investing in women, you invest in society and communities, right? And we were actually able to say, what's the ROI of doing this program right? If it costs Shahi x to do it, how much does Shahi make back? And the number was surprising. I think we were over 250% ROI. So then that becomes your evidence to then go back to your leadership and say, Hey guys, let's do this everywhere, and Shahi has actually done that. So after the results came in, we went back to the Shahi leadership and we said, look at these results. They're incredible. Today, Shahi has graduated 90,000 women in the program. And GAP also, you know, at first, a bit reluctant for us to do this experiment, but when we came back with the results, and again, this program had huge impacts and huge ROI, much more than what we expected. Then they made a commitment to take the PACE program to a million women. So I think they're either close or they've crossed that target now, and I think the evidence on the impacts was definitely a big driver for the scale up of the initiative.
** Gap Inc. P.A.C.E. is now part of RISE: Reimagining Industry to Support Equality. RISE brings together the four largest women’s empowerment programs in the apparel industry — BSR’s HERproject, Gap Inc. P.A.C.E., CARE international, and Better Work—to empower women workers, embed gender equality in business practice and catalyse systems change
Parmesh Shahani 18:49
And that's what we hear all the time, right? Because leadership wants to believe that there's a business case, not just that this is a good thing to do, so you were able to actually demonstrate -
Anant Ahuja 19:01
That research experiment we did was before we had set up the lab. But when we did that and a few other things, we realized, like, wow, this is there could be a whole lab just studying this kind of work. But one thing I can kind of make the distinction of is that as Good Business Lab, obviously our work is focused on improving the lives of workers, but the way we do it is by convincing businesses to invest in workers, right? Like, if we're saying, Hey, you should do your job, you should continue maximising profits, yeah, but there's a way to do that, through investing in the development -
Parmesh Shahani 19:36
because most companies still think of this as a trade off. And what you're saying it's not a trade off, it's a win win.
Anant Ahuja 19:41
You know, I don't blame companies, right? Like the classical approach to this is to say that maximise your profits, minimise your costs. And in the garment sector, for example, 30% of your cost is wages. But I think the shift in thinking is here workers are not just the cost, they're actually your most valuable asset, the same way your machinery is, you know, or whatever -
Parmesh Shahani 20:05
or your design is
Anant Ahuja 20:06
yeah, exactly. So you invest in developing them. And don't just view it purely as a cost.
Parmesh Shahani 20:12
Well, I'm glad the experiment worked out, because then you could scale it out of Shahi and set up GBL. And GBL works with companies across, right? I mean it started with Shahi, but it serves the -
Anant Ahuja 20:23
Yeah, I mean, our, a lot of our early work was with Shahi, and even now, we have some great programs, which, you know, I'll tell you more about, but the idea of GBL is definitely to work with across industries, across geographies - really, any labor intensive organisation, and
Parmesh Shahani 20:40
And not just women in manufacturing, but labour. Yeah.
Anant Ahuja 20:43
Yeah. I think here, you know, there is an emphasis on supporting women in India, but, you know, in other parts of the world, there's other, maybe, you know, more local challenges that we would focus our work on.
Parmesh Shahani 20:55
Is it also to perhaps reimagine the future of work altogether?
Anant Ahuja 20:59
I think that we tend to think of development being led by NGOs or governments or charity organisations, but there's a huge role that businesses can play, right? Because firstly, I mean, just think about the fact that by Shahi's workforce of 100,000 people, right? There's 100,000 people that show up at the factories every day, so you save your mobilisation costs. The other thing is that, because they're spending eight hours a day in a factory, it's an opportunity to learn about them and what challenges they have, and then design the right solution. So I think if businesses start to realise doing this is going to help them further their goals, and all of those realisations, I think, get put into action, that's when you can drive so much positive impact through private sector.
Parmesh Shahani 21:52
Yeah. Why did you set it up in Bangalore?
Anant Ahuja 21:55
Bangalore is like a second home at this point. You know, Shahi has a lot of their factories there. I think out of the 50, 40 are in Bangalore.
Parmesh Shahani 22:04
Okay, wow. And now your team is all across - the Good Business Lab team is across the country.
Anant Ahuja 22:08
They're everywhere, yeah.
Parmesh Shahani 22:10
They're everywhere. Tell us about how you grew out and scaled, and how do you decide which projects to pursue now, now that you're growing so fast and there are so many pressing issues in the Indian labor force, like, what do you focus on? What are you focusing on now?
Anant Ahuja 22:22
Yeah. Now we're doing a lot of different interventions. There's a bunch around health - So physical health, such as vision or eye health, is an area we've worked on. Iron deficiency is really common among women in India, and it's relatively, you know, low cost problem to solve, with a lot of potential benefits - at the personal level, but also maybe at the firm level. Mental health - So again, that that's probably a huge driver of people quitting. So then if the cost of all these people leaving is whatever it is, then you should be willing to pay that cost, maybe just under that cost on the interventions. And one future project that we're really excited about - it's not been launched yet, but it's, you know, we're sort of preparing for it. So Shahi has, as part of its 50 year sort of campaign, has decided to introduce a free lunch program. So, again, it sounds quite simple, but the logistics of doing it at this scale are pretty complicated. It's 100,000 meals a day. And I think this is an opportunity where GBL can say, firstly, how do we design these meals to optimise nutrition for workers? And secondly, if Shahi spends, let's say, 80 crores on this, how much do they make back through attendance, retention -
Parmesh Shahani 23:51
Better health, less illness and so on.
Anant Ahuja 23:54
Yeah, exactly. I've spoken a lot about the garment industry, but just to shift for a second, we're working with the auto sector. But one challenge in that industry is that there's really low participation from women. We're trying to bring them together to say, how can we bring more women into these factories and workplaces. So it's not the traditional way we do research, but it's more of a, I guess, programmatic approach, where we're taking insights from past research. We are studying interventions as well, but the program, the idea is to really say, how do we drive up the participation of women in this sector.
Parmesh Shahani 24:32
- of women. So for a program through GBL, you go with a proposition, and then your team designs a solution, and then you experiment and you try it out, right? That's how typically it works?
Anant Ahuja 24:44
Mostly, I mean the one - the one step I'll add to that is we often actually get a lot of our ideas, or at least the beginning of ideas just from being at the workplace, right - observing, collecting data. And I think now, you know, in the last few years, we've actually created, like a design team - but design in the sense, like human centered design, so the idea is to really put the worker at the center of our programs, and I think the ideal research project for us is something where it's a real problem for businesses and their workers, right? Like the problem is observable and clear, but it's also something that you know, from a research point of view, hasn't been solved. Like, for example, the free meal thing - it sounds simple, but no one's actually done a rigorous evaluation of, could it be profitable to give your workers food for free -
Parmesh Shahani 25:38
for businesses - Yeah. You're like a combination of a McKinsey, a good economics department and an IDEO, right?
Anant Ahuja 25:45
Yeah, actually, yeah.
Parmesh Shahani 25:47
Anant, I believe you've got some very good data from, you know, a mental health project that you've run yourself. Do you want to share some of that with our listeners?
Anant Ahuja 25:56
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we did the experiment through Good Business Lab and designed the program, but it was run at Shahi. So migrant workers that were joining the company were paired with other migrants who had been working in the company for, you know, some time. So you could say, like these, junior migrant workers were paired with more senior ones, and they were given a set of activities to do together. Senior migrant workers were trained on different aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy and different parts of the activities they were going to do, and we just concluded the research, and we found, like you said, some pretty significant impacts on anxiety and depression. There was a 5-6% reduction, and I think this was really encouraging, because the Buddy System Program, as we call it, was, I remember conceptualising it early on and thinking, hey, you know, we should create a space for, you know, people to build these social networks and get to know each other, but to see how it actually worked, and the huge impacts it had, was really encouraging. And so this is something - now that we have that evidence, this is something where we can say, let's find ways to scale this up.
Parmesh Shahani 27:06
5- 6% is actually huge, right, in terms of - it's very, very good. Tell us about some of the other exciting programs that you've been doing, I think, around workers. I mean, you have so many, but just if you can tell us about -
Anant Ahuja 27:17
I'll tell you about one in specific that I think is really interesting, because this project has gone through almost all the stages. The project is around a topic called Worker Voice. So just for some context, if you run a large factory, let's say you have 2000-3000 workers in your factory. How do you listen to their feedback, right. So traditionally, factories will have a suggestion box, a helpline, maybe a committee, you know, all the things that are actually required by the law to have, but there's not a lot of enforcement to see how well you're running these things. So just as an example of kind of the flaws in some of these traditional channels, grievance channels - think about a suggestion box. Now it's placed in the middle of a factory. First of all, someone has to make sure that there's pens and papers so people can actually write the suggestion, yeah. But even if you have all that, there's some maybe anxiety around writing a suggestion and putting it -
Parmesh Shahani 28:14
Or being seen when you're putting it
Anant Ahuja 28:16
Exactly, the supervisor might say, Hey, what did you say in there? You know, they might call it out, and no one wants to -
Parmesh Shahani 28:21
Or open the box and,
Anant Ahuja 28:23
I mean, in a worst case, yeah, it's not supposed to be like that. But you're right, anything can happen. So we realise, like, there's those flaws in the traditional systems, but there's still a need to listen to your workers. And so we created a tech enabled solution which allows workers to anonymously share their grievances or feedback. The way it works is there's a phone number. They dial the number, they can leave a voice message, and that voice message can be on anything, any grievance feedback they have. Then there's a case manager, so usually someone in HR who will listen to the message, transcribe it, and then assign it to the relevant department. If it's a payroll related question, it gets assigned there. If it's an HR thing, it gets assigned there - wherever - maintenance, the AC is not or the fans not working in this section, it's really hot over here, the bathrooms aren't clean. It can be anything like that, all the way to "my supervisor is harassing me." And so that allows us to track or trace the grievances that are coming in. And the reason that's important is because we can create more accountability. We can say that all right, we're going to track how long it takes HR to resolve the case. We're not going to just leave it open, and we're actually going to provide this feedback back to workers, kind of like a ticketing system. And I think what's one way to say it is that it's a new way of thinking for businesses, right? It's basically, if a business adopts this solution, they're basically saying that we value the feedback of workers, and we want to use it as data to improve, right. We're going to find ways to capture their feedback, understand it, analyse it, and then use it to improve. So if we're hearing a lot of negative feedback about - around the supervisor, maybe we go in and do a training on some skills that they're missing in terms of management. If we're finding maintenance issues, you know, we try to address them and so on. So the solution is called Inache. That's the name of the tool, and it's a Kannada word, it means squirrel, there's a story behind that. But anyways, the point being that it's actually based on, like I said, a lot of evidence, like, we've tested the solution, we've seen the impacts, and now it's a commercially available solution. So any firm that's interested in having this can reach out and we'll provide it to them, you know, at as low cost as possible. But here's the idea. So, why is a non profit commercialising tools, it's a good question. But one sort of new area of work is for us to take the solutions that we've tried and tested and have positive impacts, spin them off as these social enterprises, right? And if these solutions really have business impacts, then the market should be willing to pay for them,
Parmesh Shahani 31:08
Completely, yeah, and you can money from it, and spin it back into the lab, right?
Anant Ahuja 31:11
Exactly. You can do all of that. I mean, so now it's our first attempt at really doing that through Inache. But I think Shahi has implemented the tool, so the tool's already running in 50 factories. It's been stress tested, right? There are other solutions like this in the market, but oftentimes they are either grassroots solutions or they're solutions that have been developed for the corporate environment, that are being -
Parmesh Shahani 31:35
Not for factory settings.
Anant Ahuja 31:37
This has been developed for workers with workers, you know, using our human centered design approach, and it's commercially available at as low cost as we possibly can -
Parmesh Shahani 31:46
Well I'm already going to tell all our Godrej teams who - which have multiple factories, so you may have your customer number two, and to everyone listening, this is actually a great example of win-win right, where you can do good, you can develop solutions at work - if it works for you can share it with the other world. And honestly, I think that's the only way we're going to make significant progress, if we're all not reinventing the wheel, but if someone has and then they can share it with others so that we don't have to do this labour, we can use that energy in doing something else. So thank you for that. Tell me about your team, like, what is -
Anant Ahuja 31:21
The team is full of all kinds of people. So the research team would be economists for the most part, and our field team - they're the ones who are going out in the field, doing the surveys or training our enumerators to do the surveys, managing all those operations. Because with economics research, a lot of the way you're capturing data is through surveying, and, you know, the data that -
Parmesh Shahani 32:45
And secondary data, yeah.
Anant Ahuja 32:47
And the data that firms collect - they'll give you, like attendance data this, that. But if you're trying to observe the changes people are experiencing, then a lot of it is through surveying. I mentioned our design team, so that's more, you know, kind of qualitative work, and I think it's added a lot of value to our organisation, but I will say this. So when we started GBL, it was very much focused on creating evidence through research. We realised like, okay, it's great to have this evidence, but it's just gonna sit in journals and academic journals unless we do something about it. So that's when we focused on building our marketing or communications team and also partnerships team, you know, really, to be able to connect our work with what was going on in the broader business world. And then, of course, the usual functions, you know, you as an NGO, it's one challenge that nonprofits face is proper, fund utilisation or management. So, you know, we've invested in all of those systems. Now we're seven years in, so, building out the organisation in that sense,
Parmesh Shahani 33:51
And in terms of how it's funded, it's like all three of your own, I mean, through your organisations, but you're also looking to others, to make it -
Anant Ahuja 33:59
Yeah, I mean, we have a team that helps raise funds. A lot of it is grant funding, whether it's academic grants or institutional, you know, we have partners we work with. You know, as a not for profit, we're able to do research in the most kind of, like, unbiased way, yeah, and then make all the learnings accessible to everybody.
Parmesh Shahani 34:19
And it's all on the - it's on the Good Business Lab websites for anyone who wants to
Anant Ahuja 34:22
Yeah, anyone who wants to do something due diligence, please feel free. Yeah, yeah. It's all online.
Parmesh Shahani 34:28
What about your own Good Business Lab team itself? How do you practice well being and self care within the team?
Anant Ahuja 34:34
I think it's something we thought about early on, when we were building the organisation, right, where we were saying, if we're gonna promote worker well being in the business world, we have to, like, demonstrate it, maybe even go the extra mile to, you know, experiment internally and demonstrate what it means. And I think early on, there was a bit of a challenge in kind of finding the balance between, how do you build a performance culture, but how do you also prioritise well being? We would find ourselves giving higher priority to well being of workers. But I think as you deal with different situations, you realise that, there are different ways to think about well being, right, like there's worker well being, but then, you know, there are managers - the well being of managers and different levels. But overall, I would say, a lot of the best practices that we had seen around the world, whether it was like remote working, even before COVID, now it's much more common - whether it was flexibility on timing, whether it was well being budgets, the way we recruit, definitely having an emphasis on cultural values, and promoting certain types - or being deliberate with your culture. I think there's a couple key things, you know, that we try to maintain or embed in the way we kind of manage our own teams. I think good management is definitely one of them. I think in general, I would say, like, our managers are sort of trained to have kind of a coaching kind of approach to management. So we would obviously do annual reviews, or, you know, we do them twice a year, formal kind of reviews. But then there's also, like a monthly development session where managers talk to their team members about their general development goals and their career goals - and it's still a young team, you know? So I think it's really helpful for people to have the space to have these conversations, and the other thing is trying to find work life balance right, like making sure that work doesn't prevent you from doing all the things that you want to do to like, be healthy, sleep enough, work out if you want to be active..
Parmesh Shahani 36:53
Yeah. I asked this because our Godrej DEI Lab is also relatively new, and one of the things we've been saying is, as we talk about diversity, equity and inclusion in the world at large, how do we ensure that we practice what we preach within -
Anant Ahuja 37:08
Yeah. What are you learning? Maybe I can pick -
Parmesh Shahani 37:10
All of - everything that you're saying. But I think our greatest and which is also why we structured ours as a lab, is that the you know, the learning possibility in that world is so much more than say, center, which speaks with a place of authority, whereas, you know, a lab is a place of play and exploration and possibility. So I think the humility of calling oneself a lab and saying we're always going to learn, we're going to adapt, we're going to has been very good, and it's also - with our very small team, these are all things that we've learned, and we're iterating as we go along.
Anant Ahuja 37:44
Are there some workplace policies that your organisation has that you think are like, stand out as you know, promoting well being of workers, or
Parmesh Shahani 37:54
We're always looking all around the world, and we want to be a little ahead. If you look at care, how we think of care? We think of it as self care, child care and elder care, and in each of these we've broken it down around various things. So self care includes mental health and so many other things, right? Elder Care would include tying up with facility providers to maybe look after your, you know, the elders in your family, and to give you the help in that, right? So, whether it's from a policy perspective, whether it's from a benefits perspective, whether it's from coaching, training, sensitising, we're always striving at a group level to be in line with our values in which we were started, right? Godrej is 127 years old. And how do we always live up to those foundational values in terms of being good, being decent, contributing to the country and to the world at large, with that spirit of goodness and decency is something that we're all very conscious of, and when it's a very large group with so many thousands of employees, as you yourself know, it's - you have to constantly re emphasise because there's always new people coming in. How do you get how do you attract people in who embody some of these values? How do you keep on articulating these and how do you, with intent, create this workforce that can take you in? It's something that we're obsessed with - again, it's been like just it's been a year or so since we started the lab, and we're seeing the changes in India even within the short time frame. We've been thinking of formally with intent, diversity, equity and inclusion for many, many decades, but the pace of change that we're seeing now is incredible, and the ability to learn from each other and push each other as well. So whether it's the auto sector, whether it's telecom, whether it's the not for profit sector, we're always talking to others and we're always learning and we're always sharing. So we also have on our DEI Lab website, we have a directory with 500 resources that anyone who wants to be inclusive can, you know, just access and start using - you know, here's what we found, let's just go do this together. And that was my question to you, you know, in the seven years since you've started, you know, what has changed like? Do you need to explain GBL now to people? Are people seeming more enthusiastic about coming on board and doing these projects to you, versus seven years ago? I would imagine, when you started telling people about this, people were like, what?
Anant Ahuja 40:32
Yeah. I think it has shifted in terms of how, you know, firms sort of react to the ideas we have. Doing an experiment isn't easy, in the sense that, like, firms move quickly, right? They want to make quick decisions. They want to be decisive. They want to sprint, you know. So there's this sense that you have to grow or die, or, you know, all these ideas, yeah, traditional ideas. And I think with research, with the lab, as I'm sure you also can relate to, sometimes the introspection, the learning, takes a while to figure out right. In particular, with research - the PACE program, again, eight months, we're just testing, right? We're collecting the data, then you're analyzing the data, then you're understanding what the data is saying and finding ways to communicate it. So it can be a long process, right? With this kind of research, we want to establish causality, we want to be able to say that this program caused these impacts, we can say with full certainty. So I think that's always going to be a bit of a challenge. But like I said, since GBL is really trying to lead businesses to improve the lives of workers, we've also probably gotten better at talking to firms, and, you know, an example is with the auto sector. We've created a consortium. And the idea is, it's a gender champions consortium. So we're bringing together, you know, a handful of auto sector companies, and through joint action or collaboration, really trying to drive this agenda of getting more gender balance in their firms, using the evidence that exists, the evidence that we're creating.
Parmesh Shahani 42:18
And when you do all of these, who pays for it?
Anant Ahuja 42:21
I mean, in this case, we actually have a grant from the Gates Foundation. I think they're really interested in this area of work, and they've also now bought into the idea that private sector can help them a lot in achieving the goals that they have.
Parmesh Shahani 42:38
I just want to ask you about whether how you think of your mission has changed over the years, because you know you did all this work with Shahi, you create an impact. Now you've done Good Business Lab, you're creating all this impact. What is your own appetite for your own message and for the work you do? Are you done or are you just getting started? Or, like, where are you personally on this journey.
Anant Ahuja 43:02
I think it's still the beginning. I mean, obviously, in the last 10 years that I've been kind of working in the garment sector, and then, you know, now, seven years working on GBL, we've accomplished a lot. I've gotten a lot of clarity on, like, what I want to focus on. I think with Shahi, the opportunity is to say we can grow the business without growing the negative impacts of the business, and, you know, if we talk about the fashion industry in general, it's considered one of the most polluting industries, you know. Because it's employ so many people, specifically women, there's a lot of labor, you know, issues that get called out. There's a lot of also visibility on the industry, right? I think the opportunity for Shahi is to say there's, let's take all this evidence around what really works, and let's try to change this reality.
Parmesh Shahani 43:57
For everyone who's listening, Anant is very modest. He's the first South Asian supplier to join the Better Buying Institute Board, which is a big deal right, do you want to tell us about it?
Anant Ahuja 44:05
Yeah, no, that's - okay. So that's a good topic as well. So Better Buying is -
Parmesh Shahani 44:10
it's a global organisation, yeah.
Anant Ahuja 44:12
The idea was to say that the purchasing practices of brands and retailers were unequal, unfair at times, and they wanted to create more transparency around that. Also because a lot of the sustainability goals we have as an industry are being slowed down or prevented because of purchasing practices, right? If you run a garment factory and you're making clothes for any brand, let's say GAP or Nike or whoever - you make the clothes, and you pay for all the costs, right? The labour costs, the raw material costs, the shipping costs - you might spend - The shipments on sea. So the goods from the minute we get the order to when they hit the store and when you get paid, it can be six months. One way to look at it is companies in South Asia, or Asia in general, or manufacturing countries, are financing large corporations in the West, right. Because for six months, they can keep the money that they will eventually pay us, and they can do other things with it. The model obviously isn't completely flawed, because many companies like Shahi have grown and so on, but if we look at what happened during COVID, that was really scary. That's when it exposed the issues around purchasing practices. Think about this. So let's say you're booking a hotel. Now if you cancel your booking, unless you do it way in advance, there's usually a small fee you pay, right? Brands can cancel their orders without any impacts, and that's what happened during COVID.
Parmesh Shahani 45:57
Yeah. And even while the ship might just be hitting the port -
Anant Ahuja 46:00
We were loading up the shipments, and we're getting calls that your orders are canceled. Force majeure is the word we kept hearing. You know, I didn't even know what that word meant before, but now I do. And that's an example of, like, how vulnerable the sector can be
Parmesh Shahani 46:16
So you're changing this
Anant Ahuja 46:17
We're trying to. We're trying to at least put more visibility on it. And the way we're doing it is kind of interesting. So now Better Buying - what they've been doing is, brands sign up, then they facilitate surveys, so suppliers like Shahi will receive a survey that you rate your customer on their purchasing practices. And then the brands get this feedback, so then they kind of see how, yeah, their customers think of them. And the best brands will actually publicly say last year, our suppliers rated us whatever they did, and here's what we did to improve, and this year this is what they - you know, they'll be transparent
Parmesh Shahani 46:56
And customers care about this now
Anant Ahuja 46:57
I don't think it's so much customers, but I think the folks within the industry are paying attention to this. And like I said, if we look at sustainability goals, right, if we say, okay, we want to improve the well being of workers, we want to decarbonise our supply chains - all of these things require tons of investment and tons of action, but most of it in the supply chain. So if your suppliers are struggling and being squeezed and not able to, like, you know, cover their finances or manage their finances because of payment delays and this and that, how do you even work on phasing coal out or improving the lives -
Parmesh Shahani 47:33
Or treating their workers fairly or giving them lunch or, you know -
Parmesh Shahani 47:37
Yeah, how do you do free lunch? Yeah, exactly, yeah. So I think for Shahi, you know, fortunately, Good Business Lab has served as a place of lot of knowledge and evidence and innovation, yeah. So now even at Shahi, we built a large team that can focus on these areas more so than the core operations.
Parmesh Shahani 47:57
Yeah, no. So you said, I'm just getting started, so one bit is in this.
Anant Ahuja 48:00
Oh yeah. I think there's a lot of work to do. I honestly, every day I think about, like, positive about, like, the things we've done, but also, like, sometimes overwhelmed by the amount of challenges we still have to solve.
Parmesh Shahani 48:11
Yeah, so tell me about some of them. What's a dream project, and what would Good Business Lab look like successfully ten years from now?
Anant Ahuja 48:18
First of all, the nutrition or free meal program, it's very exciting. We're on the cusp of hopefully doing this in the next few months. Like, think about what impacts you can have by improving the nutrition of women, right, of workers in general. Like, it's not only going to affect them, it's going to - a lot of these women are young, maybe they're starting families. They already have kids, so it's gonna have intergenerational impact, right? And you can literally create a smarter next generation by working on this right now. And think about what that means for the country, or any country that's doing this. The other area is wages. So most garment factory jobs pay minimum wage. Minimum wage, depending where you live, can be Rs 12,000, Rs 13,000. If you're the only person earning in your family, and you're only bringing in Rs 12-13,000 - it's not easy to run a household with that amount of money. So that's why - there's different estimates of what a living wage should be, but I think often it's like almost double what the minimum wage is. So how do you get there? Like I was telling you, if our business is saying that 30% of our cost is wages, and you want to double that cost, suddenly at 60% there's that erases your margin and then close your business, right? So that's what's kind of kept people away from working on this or, like, people kind of work around this problem, or, you know. But actually increasing wages is a big challenge. We have a experiment ready, if anyone listening wants to like, help us work on this, or has suggestions. But the experiment, it's a wage study, yeah, and it's based on the idea of efficiency wages. So in economics, there's an idea that you could pay higher than minimum wage, and it could be profitable, yeah. But let's say Shahi starts paying, instead of 12,000 if that's the minimum minimum wage, we start paying 15,000, and then, as a result, people don't leave anymore. Now maybe that extra Rs 3000 per worker actually drives enough business impact where, like, I said it's profitable - but the only way to know is through an experiment. So we have an experiment drawn up, loaded up, ready. Shahi actually, we proposed this to them, and we said, hey, this is what we're thinking. We're trying to bring a brand on board. We're trying to bring a funder on board. I think for Shahi, it was actually something they were interested and open to what they needed, which we couldn't make happen at the time - this was a few years ago - they need a brand on board that says we will guarantee orders for three years - for the duration of this experiment. And the reason you need that is because you need that stability, right, if you're going to start paying higher. And you also need the orders to flow for you to actualise any efficiency, but we have strong reason to believe that paying more could be profitable. I mean, if you go back in time, the auto sector in the US, I believe Henry Ford famously started paying above market wages. There were lines of people outside his factories to join. They didn't do a randomised control trial. So we don't have the evidence around what that really meant, or what it did? In today's world, we can do it, but it requires some partnership, and -
Parmesh Shahani 51:43
And we're already hearing these say from Chief Economic Advisor and others in India as well, saying that some of the GDP challenges have come due to lack of consumption, and the lack of consumption is linked to low wages. So higher wages would mean more consumption would mean a GDP bump and so mean, so I mean, we're already hearing these how to translate that into actions is I think, one of GBL's challenges, right going ahead?
Anant Ahuja 52:12
You know what, though, I think now is probably the best time for us to do this. Because what I'm also seeing on the kind of government policy side is that different states are rolling out incentives to bring in investment into different areas. And one of the incentives we're seeing is like wage subsidies. So some states are saying, if you put a plant in our factory, we'll give you Rs 3000 subsidy per worker on wages for 10 years. Now, if a firm like even Shahi, right, we're talking about this at the leadership level. If we get that Rs 3000-4000 subsidy, can we then pay a little bit more
Parmesh Shahani 52:55
and you add it to your work.
Anant Ahuja 52:56
And then what would that mean for all the other you know, outcomes?
Parmesh Shahani 53:00
I love the way that you're thinking about this at Shahi. And I really, really, really love how you've gathered all these thoughts into these experiments that you're doing through the Good Business Lab. I'm so grateful that you chose to set this lab in this hyphenated space, not university, so we can very publicly see some of the thinking and the outputs of the experiments. What gives you hope as you're doing all these things and moving ahead into the future?
Anant Ahuja 53:29
Like, I said, the power of businesses. How do we harness that for the benefit of society, right? And there's obviously tons of challenges. We've spoken a lot about social issues, we haven't even touched on environmental issues, right? Like we are sitting in Bombay today, and the air quality outside is not the greatest. In Delhi, it's, you know, even worse. So we're all suffering the consequences of the damage to the environment that, honestly, corporations have contributed to, right? Mostly
Parmesh Shahani 54:02
Yeah, and need to help solve, yeah
Anant Ahuja 54:04
Yeah, because here's the thing, if I as an individual, drive an electric car, don't use single use plastic, do all the right things, keep my footprint really low. That's not going to move the needle. But if Shahi does it, now we're talking scale right now, we're talking impact at scale. And I think the more we kind of find ways for businesses to do these things, to make these investments in ways that make sense, the more quickly we can reach all these development goals. And I think it's also a bit unfair to put the burden on individuals and make us all feel like it's our responsibility for reversing, you know, the negative impacts that we haven't necessarily contributed to to that extent? I mean, you can have the same conversation at a national level, right? You look at the OECD countries and, the non OECD countries and so on. But I'm encouraged at the rate of which, you know, innovation is happening, because things that seemed impossible before are now looking very real, and I think that driving growth through sustainability is really exciting, right? Like, sustainability will cost us absolutely. If you're running a business, and you're in it for the long term, I think, like, that's the right perspective to have, right? Because, you know, you find ways - for example, with solar - if your business uses lots of energy or electricity, and you found a way to set up solar, maybe the ROI is longer than five years, six years - but once you get to that point where you've earned back the cost of setting up your solar panels, now it's like all benefits. And I think, like, that's what's really exciting, seeing how businesses will actually drive growth through investing in fixing social problems, but environmental ones as well.
Parmesh Shahani 56:01
So, Anant I want to ask you this, because I know many founders, I know many people who run companies - they're not like you. I've just done this intense seminar in which we've done lots of readings, and there's a theorist called Nell Noddings, who's done the Theory Of Care, and she differentiates between caring about and caring for, right? Caring about is, I care about the world. I care about climate change, - you know, you can just care about and do it. Caring for demands a certain kind of attention and commitment, and then working through some of this. You really care for stuff. You're paying attention to it, you're solving some of this, so why are you like this? And why aren't others like you?
Anant Ahuja 56:43
That's really, that's really flattering. I definitely feel lucky to be in a position where, you know, I was connected with our other co founders. They made me understand a lot of aspects of economics that I didn't really know, and it really sparked an interest in growing the company. Because the purpose for Shahi is providing high quality jobs, in particular for rural Indian women. That purpose can drive a lot of people to continue to want to grow and so on. When you tie it all in with growth, and if you're you know, have those business ambitions, but understand business holistically in this way, then it doesn't feel like you're caring necessarily. You're caring for growth, but you're looking at it holistically. And actually, we look at so many companies, Godrej included, yeah, and they have such great values and such great perspectives on business. So it's not uncommon. It's just that if we only rely on businesses who have leaders or teams that have these values, then a lot of firms will be left behind when it comes to us transitioning to being more thoughtful about all these things, but with Good Business Lab, the idea is - you don't have to care for people necessarily. We don't rely on only leaders who are empathetic and so on. The numbers will motivate you hopefully. If you care about business,
Parmesh Shahani 58:07
then you should care about this.
Anant Ahuja 58:09
Yeah
Parmesh Shahani 58:10
Yeah, well, I'm so glad for you being who you are, because it's actually made such a difference. And I think make friends with PhD students early on in life. Maybe that's another thing as well.
Anant Ahuja 58:20
Yeah, no, I meant Ach and Anant are definitely, like, I've learned so much from them, but they're also not your usual researchers, they really think about the world and business in so many unique ways. Maybe I would say this make music, you know, I feel like that helps you balance out the, you know, realities of working in a factory or working on these issues
Parmesh Shahani 58:41
with what is possible in the world of imagination. Anant, thank you so much for everything you are and everything you do. And just like with your music, your experiments with Good Business Lab are making the world so much more cooler, so much more better, so much more meaningful. Can't wait to see all the progress that you do in both your music career as well as with Shahi as well as Good Business Lab. I love that your approach is always glass is half full, and there's so much potential in terms of what we can do together. It's one of the reasons why we started this podcast, India Included, to together come and as a community - and I use that word wholly and at large, not just for India, but for the world - think of and then solve some of these challenges together. And thank you for leading the way in so many of these with Good Business Lab.
Anant Ahuja 59:34
Yeah, Thank you so much, no, and it's so great to talk to you. Thanks for the conversation. We also admire the work that you're doing and the perspective you have towards your work and also towards other people's work, right? Just having this conversation is getting me excited about things that that are going on and yeah, I mean, I definitely feel a shift is happening in the business world. In the world in general, you know, it's been really tough few years for, in a lot of different ways. You know, through COVID and everything that's happened. But, you know, I'm feeling optimistic about the fact that - these problems are real. Like, you know, the the issues that we see in the factories and in business and in the world are obviously concerning and real, but I think it's helpful, at least for me, to think of them as exciting challenges that require solutions, and, you know, solutions that will last, that are sustainable in themselves. So that's what's exciting to me, and I think I'm also encouraged by the fact that, like these conversations are happening a lot more. You know, I talk to people today, and it seems like everyone is quite aware about a lot of the work that's happening in sustainability and quite in tune. So, I'm enjoying observing that shift.
Parmesh Shahani 1:00:52
Yeah. Thank you. Lots of love. And to everyone listening, all our millions and millions of followers, we love you. Be good. Be cool.
Anant Ahuja 1:01:01
Thank you.
Parmesh Shahani 1:01:02
Yeah. Thank you.
Mae Mariyam Thomas 1:01:05
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