Bigbasket lost 80 pc workforce within two days of lockdown, bounced back with resilience: Hari Menon

'Bigbasket' lost 80 percent 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 percent 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 in Coimbatore on Saturday.

"An organisation needs to be a learning organisation and the first thing we did at Bigbasket was set up an excellent training and innovation function."

ALSO READ

How Big Basket spurred this logistics startup to scale new heights

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

Earlier this month, the grocery ecommerce platform faced a potential data breach that could have leaked details of around two crore users, according to cyber intelligence firm Cyble.

The company has filed a police complaint in this regard with Cyber Crime Cell in Bengaluru and was verifying claims made by cyber experts.

(Disclaimer: Additional background information has been added to this PTI copy for context)