Employee grievances at India's top firms up 30% in FY24

BSE50 companies reported 8,468 complaints

- JADEN MATHEW PAUL, PRACHI PISAL & AMRITHA PILLAY

Employee grievances at India's top companies are on the rise, the data collated for BSE50 firms suggests. There was a 29 per cent rise in such complaints during FY24 compared to a year ago. Company executives attribute the growth to greater awareness of policies, new methods of accounting for it and improvement in mechanisms to register them.

The data collated for 47 BSE50 companies (as of H1FY25) shows employees and workers filed 8,468 such complaints in FY24.

These are mandatory disclosures made by companies for complaints/grievances on any of the principles (Principles 1 to 9) under the National Guidelines on Responsible Business Conduct (NGRBC) and related to employees and workers as stakeholders.

In FY23, the same set of 47 companies reported 6,584 such complaints. The remaining three companies were excluded from the BSE50 data for lack of clear, comparative or continuous data.

In the context of employees, the NGRBC principles concern well-being and inclusivity as well as ethics, among others. Not all companies in the data collated have disclosed whether these grievances include or exclude sexual harassment cases.

A spokesperson for Larsen & Toubro (L&T) said that the 510 grievances mentioned in the company's FY24 annual report indicate employee queries related to people policies, company systems and processes. The engineering conglomerate saw such grievances double from 211 a year ago.