Lack of attention towards the managerial skills of factory supervisors is a costly mistake that apparel manufacturing companies could be making.
As is the case with any business firm, dependent on human labour, in garment factories too, some teams are more productive than others. There seems to be a host of skills and managerial styles that make the teams managed by certain supervisors more productive.
Research by Good Business Lab (GBL) shows that training supervisors in targeted skills can bring huge returns to the firm.
Having active projects in India, the US and Latin America, GBL is a not-for-profit labour innovation organisation that uses rigorous research to design, test and scale worker wellbeing programmes– from changing the lighting on the factory floors to training frontline workers in soft skills.
In a statement, GBL informed that it documented this for one of India’s largest and most competitive garment manufacturing firms, Shahi Exports, in a learning paper published in 2021.
Shahi Exports is the largest apparel exporter of India.
Dr. Achyuta Adhvaryu, the lead author of the research paper, shared, “In a lot of manufacturing settings, middle management (commonly known as supervisors) are often just workers who have moved up the ranks. They might have the technical knowledge, but they don’t often have the necessary soft skills like basic communication skills, people management, etc. that are needed to make sure that everybody on their team feels empowered to be productive.”
Hence, by training supervisors in soft skills such as communication, and specific managerial skills and practices such as control, autonomy and attention, we could increase the productivity of their teams. In 2017, GBL put it to the test and rolled out a training programme designed to study the efficacy of training managers in these skills.
Firstly, the training, called STITCH (Supervisors’ Transformation Into Change Holders), brought down turnover — the rate at which a company loses employees — which is notoriously high in this industry. During the period of the study, of those who were studied, the supervisors who received the training were found to be 15 per cent less likely to quit their jobs than those who did not get the training.
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.
Chitra Ramdas, GM, Organizational Development, Shahi Exports, who has been closely involved in designing and implementing the training, said, “A high-pressure work environment, coupled with power dynamics, leads to supervisors often behaving in an autocratic and aggressive manner. STITCH is one way to tackle this issue by imparting soft skills to supervisors such as communication and problem-solving. In our experience, this simple training has had a transformative impact on workplace relations and the work environment, leading to wider benefits for our company. We have already enrolled more than 1,600 supervisors in the training and our goal is to train 100 per cent supervisors by 2024.”
The release highlights that production lines for which all managers were trained saw 7.3 per cent higher efficiency during the training as compared to lines under untrained managers. Furthermore, STITCH-trained supervisors experienced a 6 per cent higher average growth in their salary as compared to their untrained peers.
“What we are showing is that it is tremendously and persistently impactful in this really transformative way, even in a nuts and bolts technical manufacturing setting. So, it stands to reason, in my mind, that the results should be generalisable to other technical blue-collar settings; and I imagine the results could be at least as big in entry-level managerial roles in other sectors where soft skills are even more first-order — like the service sector. So, we’re now going to explicitly study this in fast food and retail settings,” shared Dr. Anant Nyshadham, Chief Strategy Officer, GBL and co-author of the paper.
