HR Impacts Lives

Approaching the 30th anniversary of the start of my career in industry, I have naturally started reflecting on the various roles I have held over this time and my achievements in each. I tried to figure out what if any might be worthy of calling out as ‘the greatest’ or ‘the best’.

Well not really, but there is certainly one that gives me immense satisfaction, even several years later on. The story starts sometime in the 1990s.

Consider a factory in North India, which was acquired as part of a business deal. It had about 200 employees, mostly the blue collar workforce who had been hired from the local population. Largely rural and first generation workforce, they had over the years built up a sense of pride and identification with the employer and brought that positive attitude to the new company as well. 

As we discussed the HR implications of the deal, I was struck by the fact that approx. 30% of the workforce was completely illiterate. I mean they could not read or write in any language including the mothertongue. And although it didn’t strike me as unique then, the attitude of the managers was revealing – both the HR community and the line managers, who believed that this was a ‘given’ and that there was nothing that could be done about it.

For me, personally, the situation was intolerable- if HR is about liberating the power and potential of every individual in the workforce, then a lack of literacy represents a very real roadblock in this effort. Second, if organisations are to be a positive force in the lives of employees, then here was an opportunity to make a difference. Third, an illiterate workforce is often vulnerable to exploitation from local moneylenders and other such elements. What that translates into is unusual demands for financial assistance from the employer, often backed by genuine emotional appeals, which then become difficult to deal with. So even from a very practical point of view, the route to eliminating illiteracy is worth exploring.

I was convinced, but evidently, my skills at persuasion were inadequate at the time, because I assumed that the rational benefits of the move would be attractive enough. I also thought of it as a typically old-fashioned education program, not engaging enough with the supposed beneficiaries of the program to determine their needs. Nothing I could say or do moved the literacy of the factory even an inch forward. The managers were reluctant to engage with what they saw as a given – and to be fair, with a situation where the productivity of the factory was a more pressing issue (though the ever-optimistic me thought that productivity would be enhanced with a literacy push!). The workers had never even thought of the possibility and didn’t know how to engage with it.

Fast forward to a decade later. My ideas about literacy and adult education had changed in the meantime, influenced to a great degree by Paulo Freire and “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Freire was a left-leaning radical, who argued that:

-         education is often a function of social class (meaning, to be born in a particular class can permanently deprive you of an education) - it is not always a function of your personal efforts

-         there is a conspiracy of silence that deprives the illiterate of education (mainly reinforced by the socio-economic status quo)

-         the existing models of education fail adult learning, since they are designed for children and typically revolve around theoretical concepts and reward and punishment as motivators. Freire’s own arguments powerfully make the point that adults learn when they see direct payoff from their learning.

What had changed also was that I was in a position in the organization to influence actions on the ground. Yet, it took a factory HR manager (I’ll call out Gurpreet Maan here for a compliment in public!) with imagination and drive to agree an agenda. We saw that a (more classical) adult learning program in the factory had failed, as there was stigma around describing oneself as illiterate. We decided to define ‘literacy’ for this purpose as:

-         read the headlines in a local-language newspaper

-         open a bank account, sign your own name (as opposed to a thumb impression) and operate a cheque book facility

-         write your own name in all documents

-         read all notices on the factory notice board

-         (and in an effort to demonstrate possibilities) discuss a page in your grandchild’s textbook with your schoolgoing grandchild at the end of a school day

The above objectives were used as a basis to create a hunger to learn; they contained visible, tangible payoffs that made sense to the individuals concerned and the potential to engage in a conversation with grandchildren was a very strong emotional hook (a source of quiet embarrassment to such individuals is often that the kids in the family shame them inadvertently in unexpected ways).

It took about six months. The faculty were drawn from the factory’s own resources: managers, officers, some other workmen and a few outsiders, including a retired primary school teacher who bought into the concept. And there was one uniform instruction to all the faculty: no shaming. Learning a new language, even when you know one, can be deeply frustrating and irritating; when combined with the stigma of being illiterate, all it takes is one sarcastic comment, one ironic voice, one sign of hopelessness to sabotage the entire effort. As far as costs were concerned, they were actually very low, and while there was initially a concern around budgets, it soon vanished as more time was expended than money.

I visited the factory about a year after the initiation of the program, and was invited to a meeting with a group of workmen. One of them put down a newspaper as I entered the room; the other took out a cheque book and kept it in front of him. Yes, they were making a point! One after the other, they acknowledged the initiative and spoke of how they felt empowered and articulate as a result of being able to do things that they earlier could not. And best of all, they were now carrying the message to others in their community, while expanding the goals for themselves: not just five goals, but several more depending on what made sense in their individual circumstances. I sensed pride and dignity: at the end of it, they were far more engaged and loyal than the workforce in most other parts of the company. (employee engagement surveys from this factory demonstrated that statement convincingly, to the point that I sometimes found it difficult to explain to outsiders how we could have such strong scores!).

I was humbled, and yet proud and delighted: this went far beyond changing the fate of a factory or managing a change effort in an organization. This initiative impacted an entire community and left a lasting legacy, far beyond employment for a finite period of time.

In fact, this initiative influenced quite a few of my thoughts around engagement, motivation and impact. More on that later!

This initiative still stands out in my mind as one of the most impactful I have ever steered.

As an addendum, as I became more interested in literacy amongst the poor, I realized that this is an issue you encounter in several countries, including the so-called ‘developed’ world. As one of my British friends was to tell me later, whenever a workman in his factory asked him to read out a letter or notice to him, the excuse would invariably be that he had left his spectacles at home … it took him some time to catch on to what the real, underlying issue was!

Make an impact. Make a real change. That’s the ultimate power and impact of HR.