Building Trust Open Doors
Cambodian Case Study: The ILO Remediation Program
Companies engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a way to strengthen their business objectives and demonstrate their commitment to ethical labor practices, safe working conditions, and equitable trade.
The success of CSR initiatives is often expressed quantitatively. However, in my 20+ years of CSR practice and counsel, I have found that while the quantitative success is important for all parties involved to co-operate willingly, to meet objectives, effective CSR is essentially about relationship building that fuels opportunities for workers, in particular for women and girls in the workplace and in their communities.
Case Study - Cambodian Factories
To show this in action, I’ll share examples from my work with the ILO.
In 1999, the United States entered into a Bilateral Textile Agreement that linked export quotas with potential annual increases for substantially improving working conditions and respect for basic workers’ rights. The United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO) Better Factories, was commissioned to oversee its execution.
The ILO introduced a novel remediation program that combined monitoring with training aimed at improving working conditions, quality, and productivity through training for management and workers.
During my work with the ILO, my team and I trained local staff as well as international factory managers and workers. We also engaged with the subject matter experts (buying brands, government officials, United Nations representatives, NGOs, unions, and business associations) who were all new to the concept of corporate social responsibility and remediating workplace conditions.
As well, I negotiated with and leveraged stakeholders to improve working conditions for the workers in complex multicultural environments. I was their voice and their opportunity.
By doing this work, I realized that remediation was not just about fixing the issues. To get sustainable results, it also required a lot of hand-holding, patience, and persistence, combined with clear communication over many on-site visits with management and workers.
Building Trust Opens Doors
For effective CSR programs, it’s important to understand that management is the gatekeeper. If you do not build relationships, you will not build trust, and your CSR initiatives will fail.
Building trust is culturally bound and requires patience and time. In many cultures, including Cambodia, taking a tea break with others is deeply embedded and a way to build community. Sharing conversation about your family, favorite foods, hobbies, and so forth builds a bridge between people that allows you to move into more nuanced conversations about business approaches, fears, and roadblocks.
This can result in better engagement and support from factory owners, human resources, line leaders, workers, country buyer representatives, and more.
In other words, we build trust by building relationships.
CSR in Action - Making An Impact
By respectfully engaging with management and other stakeholders, factories can and do implement CSR initiatives that have a huge impact on the lives of the workers and their community - often while creating positive impact on the company’s bottom line.
Preventing Injuries & Improving Quality of Life
During one factory visit, my team and I witnessed an older worker collecting garbage from each of the workstations and emptying it into a heavy cardboard box that she manually pushed and pulled from one workstation to another. This process was slow, laborious, and painful for the worker.
We challenged the team to come up with solutions that would make her job easier. The idea? A cart with wheels. As a result, the worker was delighted and able to do her job easier and faster, without pain.
This small change also led to a bigger impact: the local team started drafting ‘good practice’ guidelines from the notes and photos they had taken, so other factories could learn from each other.
Improving Safety Practices
Unsafe practices are a common challenge in factories. With small changes, these safety risks can be eradicated, protecting people and profit.
For example, in every factory I visit, I look for evidence of fire safety measures, including fire extinguishers, fire evacuation maps, and emergency exit doors. Oftentimes, the doors were locked to prevent non-workers from entering the production areas and to protect the finished products. The supervisor has the only door key. This means if there was a fire, the workers would be trapped inside of the burning factory.
Small changes can make a huge difference such as ensuring fire extinguishers are in working order to keep escape routes clear, and basic safety precautions can be put in place. As well, installing doors with push bars on the inside that, when pushed, opens immediately, while always remaining locked from the outside.
Protecting Children and Communities
Too often, I see evidence of child workers. The factory human resources will frequently omit these workers from their reporting or conceal their existence - but not always for nefarious reasons.
Oftentimes, the children are important breadwinners for their families back in their home villages, where little to no paid work exists. The children feel a sense of pride and purpose for being able to contribute to the family pot.
But there are ways to create a win/win scenario. For example, at one factory, we created a program involving schools near the factory provinces that involved the buyers, factories, schools, and parents supporting their children to go back to school and to be rehired when they reached the legal working age.
Measurable Results - Production and Profits
CSR creates production efficiency leading to measurable results for the business.
By mapping workflows, identifying bottlenecks, and incorporating lean manufacturing, the results are higher productivity and profits.
During another factory visit, we noted that several workers complained about tired, aching feet, a common issue for workers who stand all day. The factory provided plastic stools but they didn’t seem to solve the problem. I could see that many workers were wearing worn flip-flops on the hard cement floor and that some workers were using cardboard boxes as footrests.
We came up with some solutions, including shorter stools that could double as footrests, adding a footrest bar around the work tables, and using leftover fabric to make foot cushions. We also suggested investing in fatigue mats.
We asked the factory to do a time study, adding stools and footrests to one table, and measure the results. One week later, the manager shared that the test group increased productivity by 15%. As a result, the factory ended up getting footrests for all the tables and investing in fatigue mats for several areas of the factory, such as cutting and quality control.
Overall, the changes resulted in a 30% total increase in productivity in less than a month. This led to many other factories expressing interest in similar changes for their factories. The project was noted as successful, with measurable results in production efficiency
And for the ILO initiative overall, our work engineered nearly 150% increase in factory program participation by conducting outreach to individual factory managers and persuading them to get involved by highlighting benefits of the program and ability to increase compliance levels while reducing labor strife.
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I provide high-impact CSR consulting, coaching & training for companies, organizations, suppliers, and people who want to make this world a better place.