Worker issues such as engagement and absenteeism are the major problems for the Indian apparel manufacturing industry that have forced factories to stand on toes. It’s not like the industry hasn’t worked or isn’t working to address these worker related issues but the fact is the factories haven’t been able to hit the bull’s eye yet due to unavailability of right tools to map and evaluate the multitude of problems related to workforce.
The conventional methods such as counselling sessions, full attendance bonuses and a number of other incentive schemes are some of the steps majorly taken by the garment factories to boost the morale of the workers and bring in a culture that reduces absenteeism while keeping workers engaged wilfully but due to various reasons like the migratory workforce, festival and marriage seasons, and even workers’ attitude/discipline issues,factories’ planning most of the times go haywire. Therefore, the conventional methods fail to deliver, leaving enough scope for improvement.
Technology is part of factories’ working models in a COVID-19 era and workers’ engagement is one such area that’s also being addressed by digital tools. The interesting aspect is that, in India, the leading garment manufacturing group Shahi Exports is setting an example by using one such tool Wovo offered by Labor Solutions –a Singapore-based social enterprise founded in 2013 that leverages technology to engage and educate workers, suppliers and brands throughout the supply chain…Available globally for workers in 24 languages, the tool is being successfully used by Shahi Exports to engage its thousands of workers across 40+ factories…
What is Wovo and how it works
There are cases even in big factories when high absenteeism of over 15 per cent is experienced which gets reduced to 5-6 per cent by proper management and various worker-friendly schemes. This 5-6 per cent rate is still high and causes severe dent in the production planning and increases the cost of manufacturing as well as results in shipment delay. One of the major reasons behind this is – workers’hesitation in sharing their opinion regarding the scope of overall improvement in factories.
Wovo – founded, owned and operated by women – is an all-in-one application designed to instantly engage and educate workers that’s available through Mobile App, WhatsApp, SMS and WeChat and allows workers to access digital training from partners, communicate with their employer directly as well as anonymously submit safety reports, view their payslips and give input through worker surveys.
With the use of Wovo Dashboard,apparel manufacturing companies can manage, sort and respond to messages and can access live, secure data to track trends and understand challenges related to workers quickly and directly from this dashboard.It helps garment factories to have better access, easy data monitoring and quick and better communication. As garment factories have large and complex supply chain network, Wovo Dashboard is designed specifically for complex supply chains.
Apart from all this, Wovo has an e-learning facility and provides workers with access to training and content they need to grow professionally and personally. Factories can choose among its existing lessons created by leading subject matter experts or they can create their own lessons also that suit their own sets of requirement due to diversity in workforce.
Wovo ensures the experience is interactive for workers, reinforcing learning with quizzes along the way and incentivising continuation with badge rewards.It also has the option to easily add new features whenever a factory needs and that too without implementing it again.
This is how Shahi Exports utilises the tool Wovo in its working environment…
Now the important point to discuss is that how an apparel manufacturer can get maximum benefits out of this tool and what kind of improvements they can experience!More than 40 factories of Shahi Exports have a communication tool that engages workers via SMS and voice messages. Researchers* randomly placed 7,500 workers at two units of Shahi Exports dividing them into two groups – (1)Treatment group- the first group received training on the service and received SMS reminders encouraging them to use the service;(2) The second group – called Control group – received no training nor any kind of encouragement to use Wovo. Ethically,they weren’t stopped from using it but were not formally introduced to the tool or encouraged to use it.
*A study, done by researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Hawaii at Manoa in collaboration with Good Business Lab, The Children’s Place, and Shahi Exports, says that Wovo has sizeable economic returns for businesses. Retention, absenteeism and productivity were the core areas of the study.
It was found in the study that over the course of seven months, only 5 per cent of workers in the treatment group used Wovo to proactively ask a question, suggest or make a report to management. Still, business and worker outcomes drastically improved, suggesting that the mere availability of Wovo is enough to improve worker engagement and improve the bottom line.
Researchers found that “simply knowing it is possible to communicate concerns effectively, even if concerns arise only sporadically, increases worker utility enough to change workplace outcomes.” The report’s rate of return calculation section stated that attendance and retention benefits totalled about US $ 25,000, implying a net rate of return of approximately 52 per cent.
Workers in the treatment group were 5 per cent less likely to be absent than workers in the control group. Though almost all workers owned a phone or had access to a phone, only 50 per cent had a smartphone, indicating that in India, SMS continues to be a critical functionality to make available to workers in Wovo facilities. The study showed that investing in worker voice technologies can drive long-term profits by reducing costly worker turnover and absenteeism.
“Managers have come to me and said they need an effective communication system now (post-Covid)…Tools like the Worker Engagement Platform and Wovo are the future of how communication is done in factories,” says Gauri Sharma, Operational Development Manager, Shahi Exports.
There are enough possibilities that these results would motivate the entire industry to adopt innovative worker-management communication tools. As labour shortage is a regular affair in the Indian apparel manufacturing industry, such tools are the need of the hour. It can definitely help the manufacturing facilities. Shahi Exports is known for its best worker-friendly policies, system in place and despite that technology tool helped the company in a good way so it can’t be denied that most of the other companies can also improve their system and can overcome various challenges.
