Enabling Worker Voice

While the majority of frontline operators in the garment industry are women, their supervisors are typically men. This disparity, coupled with inequitable social contexts and intense production pressures, manifests in the form of conflicts on the factory floor which often go unreported. While individual and collective outlets for voicing grievances exist, many labor-intensive industries lack a smooth facilitation of direct communication between workers and administration. Considering the urgent need for a safe worker voice tool in their factories, we developed a two-way communication technology. Inache is our homegrown anonymous tool designed based on our rigorous research.

How can workers report their grievances and suggestions in a safe and trusted way? Does a particular medium of communication work better than another? How can we generate buy-in from all stakeholders on the factory floor?

We first mapped the macro environment of a factory setting, including all the stakeholders a worker interacts with. Our exercise was to capture a worker’s “universe” which includes supervisors, doctors, guards, hostel wardens, and management, and their relationship with each. We also evaluated existing mechanisms a worker has access to for using their voice. Our research also investigated workers’ micro environment using qualitative research methods. We learnt that workers lack trust in redressal and fear possible reprisal. Inache is a low technology solution created in response to this need for transparency and accountability between workers and firm administration.

Through Inache:

• Workers can send a text or voice message about their grievances, suggestions, or questions.
• The mobile numbers are masked and the messages go to a central dashboard, from where it reaches a designated factory staff member.
• Inache’s dashboard synthesizes the existing staffing information. Factory personnel with comprehensive understanding of key staff members and roles assign anonymously received cases to relevant troubleshooters.
• For example, a person who already navigates canteen related complaints becomes the case troubleshooter for similar grievances.
• The journey of this complaint is then logged onto a system which incentivises accountability, speed, and transparency.

Inache is currently being evaluated across 60+ factories.

Inache has been being evaluated across 60+ factories. Results show that both workers and firms can benefit from strong, open channels of communication that build trust as well as accountability in labor-intensive contexts. We found that:

1. Inache’s utilization rate was 5% surpassing the 0.5% we observed for existing channels such as suggestion boxes and worker management committees. This shows there is a demand for worker voice tools in low-income settings.
2. The tool positively impacted worker productivity and retention with Inache-enabled factories seeing a 13% decrease in worker absenteeism and 4.3% increase in productivity. Firms can benefit when investments are made into worker wellbeing interventions like Inache.
3. While less than a quarter of the platform’s users raised grievances, the majority raised queries or provided suggestions, and treated the tool as a smoother form of two-way communication with factory management.
4. More than three-fourths of Inache’s users shared their grievances, suggestions, or queries using the voice feature of the tool. This is consistent with our previous research on certain technologies being inaccessible to workers due to lower rates of literacy.

The video takes us through the journey of how we developed Inache to address the barriers workers face from voicing their concerns through the story of Anita. Watch the video to know about the importance of worker voice, Inache’s journey and its impact.

Visit the GBL Ventures Website to know more about Inache.