Firms deliver happiness on a plate for employees | Economic Times

When Akkshayaa Kumar, a senior software engineer at Capgemini in Mumbai, and his family were down with Covid-19 and in home isolation, food was one of the least concerns.His employer ensured that the family got hot cooked food delivered to the doorstep three times a day for seven days.“None of us were in a position to cook our daily meals. We availed of this service for seven days for all meals including breakfast, lunch and dinner, cost of which will be borne by Capgemini,” said Kumar.The French multinational is among many companies that are going the extra mile to comfort employees down with Covid-19, as more are falling ill in the second wave of the pandemic.With a majority of such patients suffering from mild symptoms and in isolation at home, these companies are tying up with food vendors to send nutritious meals to them and their families. CEOs like Mercedes-Benz Research & Development India’s Manu Saale and Amway India’s Anshu Budhraja are personally overlooking these efforts at their companies. Mindtree and HCL Technologies are among other companies that have started this initiative.Mercedes-Benz R&D, Capgemini and Tata Steel take care of the entire cost of the food and delivery. HCL and Mindtree have partnered with vendors to home deliver cooked meals to employees down with Covid-19 and are partially paying for the delivery.“Our employees and their families were struggling to put together a meal while down with Covid. It was then we decided to go ahead with arranging hot nutritious meals delivered in association with vendors,” said Saale.This will start in the coming week and Saale has already set aside 30 minutes daily to ensure seamless delivery of food to such employees.At Capgemini, Kumar, the senior software engineer, was one of the beneficiaries of the ‘GoodFood’ project it started in April. Under this, it provides simple and healthy meals to employees and their dependent family members infected by the virus. The company has roped in an organisation called GoKhana, which is preparing and delivering breakfast, lunch and dinner for seven days to the employees. “Employees and family members afflicted by Covid are unable to cook daily meals. Hence, we have partnered with organisations to provide home-cooked food right at their doorsteps,” Capgemini executive vice president Narayanan Balasubramaniam said.Under its ‘Thought for Food’ programme, Tata Steel Foundation has been offering meals to Covid-19 employees and even outsiders in home quarantine in Jamshedpur. It has roped in people who are out of job since the outbreak of the pandemic for transportation and delivery.Amway is supplying meals to its employees quarantined along with their families at home through vendors mostly in Tamil Nadu. As many as 42,000 meals have so far been delivered under this programme.HCL too has significantly boosted its efforts in the second wave to send hot meals to employees. This facility is available in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Pune, Mumbai, Nagpur, Hyderabad and Bengaluru since early May and is being extended to Lucknow, Kolkata, Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai and Vijayawada.Publicis Sapient has internally developed a community-driven mobile application called ‘Meal Care’ that provides food-related information and help to all the Covid positive employees. “‘Meal Care’ enables people to sign up as subscribers within the community either as a requestor or provider, thus enabling and connecting families locally for meal arrangements as suitable,” chief people officer Kameshwari Rao said.