Supervisor training has always remained a focused area for the garment manufacturing fraternity over the years. Factories take quite a few notable steps in this area, while leaving much of scope for improvement. This missing link in supervisor training is something that has been taken care of in the recent collaboration between India’s leading apparel exporter Shahi Exports and Good Business Lab (GBL), a labour innovation company that uses rigorous research to find a common ground between worker well-being and business interests, as both the companies have jointly unveiled a detailed study claiming that training supervisors in targeted skills can bring huge returns.
The specific training, called STITCH (Supervisors’ Transformation In To Change Holders), also brought down the turnover – the rate at which a company loses employees.
Incubated by Shahi Exports almost five years ago, GBL’s mission is to lead businesses to improve the lives of all workers by identifying workers’ needs, designing solutions, testing for well-being impact and financial returns, and driving the adoption of proven solutions.
In an interview with Apparel Resources (AR), Anant Ahuja, Head, Organizational Development, Shahi Exports & Co-founder and CEO, GBL; and Anant Nyshadham, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, GBL shared how this training has been a successful exercise in Shahi Exports’ 50+ state-of-the-art apparel manufacturing facilities across seven states in India with a diverse workforce of over 100,000 people… Here are excerpts from the interview.
AR: Shahi Exports is committed to train 100 per cent of its supervisors in STITCH, a holistic soft skills training programme. What is the current status of trained supervisors under STITCH and what are Shahi’s efforts to boost this training programme?
Anant Ahuja: Shahi Exports has trained close to 1,400 supervisors and enrolled more than 50 per cent of supervisors in STITCH since 2017. Our goal is to train 100 per cent of our supervisors by 2024 because we have buy-in from our factories and their management for running this programme, and a team of skilled in-house trainers across all units that conduct the STITCH sessions regularly. Each cohort takes up to six months to complete the training.
AR: There are a host of skills and managerial styles within STITCH. Please highlight some major styles that are benefiting Shahi Exports the most.
Anant Ahuja: The entire training has been designed based on surveys of over 2,000 supervisors at Shahi Exports to understand which skills influence productivity and effectiveness at work. There are four modules in total which are all interconnected. The first module ‘Me as a person’ helps supervisors understand and reflect on themselves as individuals in order to recognise their strengths and values. The second module ‘Me as a supervisor’ enables them to understand their roles by locating essential skills such as planning and organising, problem-solving, conflict resolution and prevention of harassment. The third module ‘Me as a team member’ supports supervisors to broaden their perspective of what it means to manage a team by being a team member and effectively motivating and building engagement. The final module ‘Me as a leader’ helps the supervisors to develop their leadership skills. These skills include coaching a team effectively, being open to feedback, and changing the work culture by encouraging dialogue, openness, respect and growth.
The sessions have been designed keeping in mind the need to support the transformation of supervisors at both a personal and professional level.
Anant Nyshadham, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, GBL explains these modules in his words:
- Me as a person – Self-esteem, behaviour and values, handling emotions, managing stress, being sensitive, effective communication
- Me as a supervisor – My role, understanding the need for capacity building, planning and organising, solving problems, conflict resolution, building respect, preventing harassment
- Me as a team member – Understanding my team, managing my team, building accountability, balancing technical and human competence, employee motivation and engagement
- Me as a leader – My learning orientation and growth, feedback and coaching, managing change, building a culture, being a role model
AR: As study says that training supervisors in targeted skills can bring huge returns to the firm. Please define what you mean by this ‘huge returns’ term?
Anant Ahuja: The study by GBL concluded that the supervisors who received the training had more skills in the dimensions trained, as they performed significantly better in post-training tests in all four modules. Further, productivity on lines managed by STITCH-trained supervisors increased by 7.30 per cent, and trained supervisors were 15 per cent less likely to quit relative to those who did not receive the training. Trained supervisors experienced 6 per cent higher salary growth, and everyone in their lines (supervisors included) had a higher probability of receiving incentive bonuses compared to the lines of untrained supervisors.
In a fast-paced industry where speed of production and delivery is paramount, manufacturers often look to technical and operational solutions to drive efficiency. Soft skills training is usually not a top-of-mind solution for manufacturers. However, studies like this one by GBL prove that soft skills training is a simple yet highly effective tool to boost factory culture and performance, creating a win-win situation for both employees and the company.
AR: The STITCH training programme was rolled out in small batches in 50+ factories of Shahi Exports between 2017-18. What major changes/improvements have you witnessed in this first batch of the training programme?
Anant Ahuja: The study by GBL was conducted in 33 factories of Shahi Exports and since then it has been rolled out in nearly all of our 50+ factories. We’ve witnessed a range of impacts and changes among STITCH-trained supervisors. Their communication and counselling skills have improved which could potentially be contributing to lower attrition rates. For example, one supervisor told us that he was a demotivated employee and that would manifest in the form of anger and shouting, resulting in high levels of attrition in his team. After attending STITCH in 2021, his attitude towards life and work has completely shifted. He learned skills like patience and problem solving, which he now uses to motivate his team, listen to their issues, and coach them on how to do better.
Trainees have also told us that their communication skills have improved not just in their workplace but also at their homes leading to improved relations with their family members.
Another important aspect of STITCH is gender sensitisation. One supervisor told us that STITCH taught him that gender is not important in determining people’s growth, but rather the person’s interest and skills are what matters. He now actively supports all workers in his team to grow professionally.
AR: Does your implementing team find it difficult to obtain desired results in your factories that are spread from North to South? Do they come across any challenge in implementation as challenges may differ in small and medium-level units?
Anant Ahuja: Initially, it was a challenge to bring supervisors out of their production lines for an hour to do training. However, after one or two sessions, we noticed that they were keen and ready to do this more frequently. This can be attributed to the engaging and interactive format of the training which is quite different from the usual mundane training they are used to. We also involved factory management and the floor-in-charges in planning and rolling out the training. Their buy-in and support has been critical in implementing this programme at scale. We’ve incentivised those attending the training – this included prizes for 100 per cent attendance and certificates for 70 per cent attendance.
In discussion with Anant Nyshadham, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, GBL…
AR: What pushed GBL to conduct this study?
Anant Nyshadham: The first programme we evaluated under GBL was Gap Inc.’s P.A.C.E., a workplace training in life skills for female workers designed and first implemented by the clothing brand in garment factories in India. We partnered with Shahi Exports to see if the training programme not only delivered improvements in the lives of women workers, but also could deliver financial returns to the firm, through improvements in productivity. The results were startling – Gap Inc. P.A.C.E. had massive productivity returns, particularly in the period after the women completed the programme. The rate of return on the investment of training women in soft skills was astronomical to the firm — over 200 per cent— even after accounting for the fact that lots of women workers in our sample left Shahi over the course of the two-year experiment. And it made sense – A productive worker needs teamwork and effective communication skills to make sure bottlenecks and problems are resolved. The natural next question was if soft skills were so productive for frontline sewing floor workers, they should be even more valuable for managers, since the ‘soft’ parts of their everyday jobs — interacting with their teams, setting plans to make production targets, dealing with shocks to team morale or health, reading people, etc. — made up a much larger fraction of their overall responsibilities than technical skills.
And then we started on the long academic road to answering these questions about five years ago. Which particular managerial skills mattered the most for productivity? Could a training that sought to impart those skills actually make a difference in managerial behaviour and ultimately on the productivity of the teams they managed? Or were managers already optimising on these dimensions that suggest a training programme would have little impact? Or perhaps managers were just so set in their ways of doing things that they would struggle to learn new skills? This journey of understanding soft skills at the managerial level led to the culmination of STITCH.
AR: As you believe managerial skills of factory supervisors are hardly paid attention to – a costly mistake that firms could be making, how can factories improve this? Do you think small factories find it difficult to improve as they lack resources?
Anant Nyshadham: 1. Factories can improve this by rolling out training and development programmes. The resource requirements – in terms of trainers and time – are not that large compared to the returns.
- Small factories might find it difficult to improve because small factories also find it difficult to ‘experiment’ with solutions. If they know something works, they will definitely reap returns same as large factories and therefore can probably also adopt and benefit but the exploration and experimentation it takes to identify and test solutions is more difficult for small factories. Moreover (a) the economies of scale might not be that large and (b) they perhaps might not be aware of the business case for it in light of which even if interested, it could be overshadowed by other business-critical decisions/ investments
AR: How much time STITCH training takes?
Anant Nyshadham: STITCH training takes 25 hours in total; at Shahi Exports, it was delivered through weekly one-hour group sessions to a batch of ~20, at the factory, over a period of 25 weeks (6-7 months).
AR: GBL claims that the average returns from this training were found to be large and consistent, and the return for the firm was hundreds of times over its investment. Please share the cost of this training to train a supervisor and ROI calculation!
Anant Nyshadham: We did the ROI calculations from the start of the training till 6 months after the training ended, for all 33 units which constituted our sample size for the research study. It is worth noting that the ROI generated from STITCH was partly shared with the supervisors in the form of salary increase and incentive payment (for trained supervisors). Even after accounting for that in the cost calculation, the return on investment was significant. The numbers tell this story:
- Overall, the total gain from the training captured by ‘additional revenue-cost’ i.e. the additional revenue Shahi generated owing to productivity increase net the cost of training (which was the cause or “cost” of the productivity increase), came to be US $ 4,542,544. This implies per unit there was a gain of (total gain / 33 units) US $ 137,653.
- The direct cost of the training, which included training materials and trainer salaries was US $ 13,085, and the total cost taking into account salary increase/ incentive payment came to be US $ 81,875.
- Hence the Return on Investment or ROI = (total gain/ total cost) x 100 ROI = (US $ 4,542,544 / US $ 81,875) X 100 = 5548%
AR: According to GBL, some supervisors (managers) benefited tremendously from the training, while some gained almost nothing…What do you think of this?
Anant Nyshadham: I think it is reasonable and maybe even expected that there are some who benefit a lot and some who benefit little. The research study upon which the curriculum was based, already showed that at baseline, some managers were enabling more productivity and resorting to beneficial managerial practices and styles more than others and so we expected some managers had more room to improve than others. To me there were a couple of things that were surprising though:
- That despite the fact that training of some managers contributed to the cost of training but returned little, the average return and the ROI was large.
- It was interesting to see that middle managers would not necessarily nominate or allocate the training to those supervisors who had the most to gain from it, so in absence of our experiment, business decision-makers might actually miss this hugely beneficial investment. Usually a firm resorts to the strategy to let middle managers suggest which few supervisors to train in the first phase and wait to see the benefits before deciding to scale up.
The study shows that because middle managers might prioritise other objectives above maximising productivity, they would actually have started with managers who would have exhibited little gain and the firm might then have erroneously concluded that the training was not that impactful and abandoned it rather than scaling it up to achieve the tremendous gains we document. This suggests one reason why these types of training investments are not happening as business as usual despite being so beneficial. Our experiment sheds light on the other side of the story.
AR: Is there any planning that you will implement a STITCH programme in the industry after the successful collaboration with Shahi Exports?
Anant Nyshadham: Yes! We are very committed to scaling up anything we find works. We are starting with scaling up STITCH across the rest of the factories at Shahi Exports and with a few pilot engagements with other firms in the industry, but are also investing heavily in building our team to be able to execute engagements with other firms in the industry at scale. One important way we are doing this is by perfecting a tech-enabled self-administered version of the curriculum which can be scaled up more quickly and easily.
