Value of Voice

“Hello, Can I get some help here?”?

Calling for help may seem natural to some and a very efficient way to solve a problem you are facing.? Research indicates that people are 48% more likely to be helpful to those who ask for it . However, to a low income factory worker, especially a woman worker in the developing world, it can be an overwhelming task to ask for help or voice a complaint at her place of work, the factory.?

Let's take an example of a global clothing brand serving a million customers, likely one with the infrastructure to map each of those customers' journeys, whether online or offline. The fashion brand has in place a customer support team to look after each of these journeys. Customers mean business. And satisfied, happy customers mean better brand value. Being heard, and sharing feedback stands to be the most important part of a customer journey. Skeepers lists down ten unique ways top brands such as Apple, Nordstrom and many others collect feedback from their customers . If you are unsatisfied with the product or service, you want to share your grievance, know that you have been heard, understand that someone is working on it to make sure you are satisfied. For any business an existing customer is much more profitable than a new one.

However, feedback is not limited to customers. The clothing brand also invests in supporting their employees, to ensure the business functions smoothly and keeps growing. Employees mean stability and growth and a satisfied employee will stay with the company and help it grow. Similar to a customer journey, when you work for a company, you know that you can reach out to the HR or People Ops team regarding the work environment or anything else.

Now looking deeper into the critical function of such a clothing brand. They probably have their own factories which produce their products or source them from suppliers. A typical factory producing garments likely houses xxxx number of workers. There are typically xxx number of workers working in each function and x such functions. The factory floor looks somewhat like in the image below:

Each worker starts work at a specified time, sits in a designated area, performs a specific function, eats lunch within a specific interval, and logs off at a specified time. On paper, this seems like a predictable work environment. But multiple industries in India face a lot of turmoil around the period of the annual wage hike due to worker dissatisfaction.?

Chief Strategy Officer at GBL, Anant Nyshadham , shares on GBL’s podcast What about work?, how it became important for GBL to understand why this was happening:?

“We kept hearing from the firm that you might want to navigate around this time because multiple industries have this kind of turmoil during this time when the minimum wage increments get announced. And there’s a lot of attrition and turnover, and as economists, this sort of thing left us scratching our heads. Because it seems like what you’re telling me is that at this time you tell workers that you’re going to pay them more, and then they get really upset and leave. And so that was kind of a puzzle that we wanted to unpack.”

In 2018 Good Business Lab evaluated a worker engagement technology designed by Labor Solutions Solutions around one such wage hike in India resulting in a tremendous uptake of the technology compared to traditional suggestion boxes/methods as well as other benefits to the firm in which it was implemented. The workers who used the technology to voice grievances were 10% less likely to quit and saw 5% less absenteeism.?

Throughout each of these scenarios, voicing your opinion, concern or suggestion, is the common thread that brings satisfaction to the role each stakeholder plays in any business.?

“From an inclusion perspective, it becomes important to understand what your employees are feeling. If you understand what they are saying and what they’re feeling, then you can take a proactive measure and reciprocate, which is why worker voice becomes an important part of your organizational culture.” Arvind Patil ,? Associate Director, Design at GBL shares in GBL’s podcast , What about work?

However, workers in developing countries face several shortcomings when voicing grievances, concerns, or suggestions. When GBL decided to embark on additional research and later developed a worker voice tool, called Inache, they went to the factory floor. Arvind Patil , shares in a recent case study by ISDM , “It was the first project where we used design research methodologies. We interviewed 30+ factory workers to understand their relationship with the shop floor and how they felt on the shop floor. We tried to map a day in the life of a worker, what the lows and highs were in their lives, and how different stakeholders on the shop floor, such as supervisors, quality checkers, the factory manager, or HR staff, interacted with the workers.”?

In 2019, GBL partnered with Shahi Exports Pvt Ltd to develop this tool - Inache, - a digitized and anonymized worker voice tool.? Shahi Exports Pvt Ltd set a goal to achieve 100% accessibility in all its factories by FY 2024. It is currently running in all its factories.

Apart from operational benefits such as reduced absenteeism and increased productivity among workers, the tool enables inclusivity on the packed factory floor, where voices are so easy to drown out. Chitra Ramdas , General Manager, Organizational Development, Shahi Exports Pvt Ltd shared at a panel discussion on the value of voice , “Since 2016, there has been a shift. We have seen this play out amongst workers and in public discourse. We’ve seen that if workers are provided with a grievance redressal system, it has positive impacts on their satisfaction, and firms also manage to retain their workers.”

It is reasonable to presume that voice already has value for the majority of enterprises. We merely need a mechanism to enable it.?

Know more about GBL’s research on worker voice and the enabling platform Inache, which can benefit both workers and businesses here .