For many years I have been associated with many social and charitable foundations in India. However, when I joined my family business I had a chance to be directly involved with the lives of our 1000+ workers. We clearly understood that our main goal was not only generating profits for our company but also at the same time we aimed to add value to the lives of our workforce.

With that in mind we started the employee training and hospitality program. With an initial investment of $10,000 the main goal of this program was to train the current employees to gain better working skills and at the same time we planned to dedicate a part of our profits into building an on campus housing for our employees.

The program was open to all managerial and job shop employees. The first part of the program was aimed at analyzing the current job skill level of the employees and then according to the results we allocated them to different mentoring programs. We held voluntary 2-3 hours of workshop post working hours every week. The program ran on a semi annual basis with a skill test at the end of each semi annual period. As we expected, more than 80% of our current workforce registered for our program and we received a positive feedback from the employees with respect to our initiative.

We hired 2 training professionals who were given the responsibility for conducting various class such as : English speaking, reading , writing, stitching, lasting and other product specific skills.

This training program was very valuable to the employees because the programs gave them an extra skill set and increased their chances of securing a promotion and at the same time the program gave everyone a chance to interact with each other post working hours. We added a mix of team building exercises in the program to make sure the program was interesting over the length of 6 months.

At the same time we finalized a plan for on campus accommodation for the employees. We ran a company wide survey to get an idea of the basic employee needs and got the approval from board of directors for our plan.

The plan was huge success and generated positive reviews from both within and outside the company. Using this plan we were able to establish a company wide culture that was unmatched in the industry. At the same time this helped our employees gain better recognition in the society and with the management within the company.  The “skill set” plan resulted in 25 promotions within the first year and 10 percent of our workforce could read and write basic English. Such an initiative also increased the employee confidence in the company and at the same time we had a better workforce that respected the companies human resource policies. The plan is currently in the third year of implementation and I am sure it will continue to add value to our company in the coming years.