Penaaz Gupta - Manager HR, Pernod Ricard India

Penaaz Gupta is a part of the Commercial HR Leadership team at Pernod Ricard India. When she joined Pernod Ricard India in 2018, she realized Employee Wellbeing is at the heart of whatever we do. ‘Ananda’, the wellness program at Pernod Ricard India takes a holistic approach towards employee’s wellbeing, where each activity pertains to one of the 8 dimensions including Physical, Emotional, Social and a lot more. She has been closely associated with this since 2018, and her efforts reached their peak in 2020 when Covid hit us in India. As part of the HR Team her priority was to ensure physical wellbeing of their employees, and they rolled out multiple initiatives like hospital and doctor tie-ups for primary care, distribution of safety gear, multiple sessions on safety guidelines. As time progressed, they realized the long periods of lockdown and lack of social interactions had created feelings of isolation and started affecting employee’s emotional wellbeing. This led to introduction of multiple activities like yoga, meditation, art & healthy living workshops, and onboarding a partner to provide employee counselling. The idea was to build a virtual environment prioritizing employee wellbeing.