For over thirty five years, we are engaged with Indian industry and the last fifteen years of our engagement has been primarily in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In particular, we focused in and around Pune based SMEs which were largely engineering companies. Till now, over 100 SMEs have been supported to implement basics of Lean techniques and total Quality Management (TQM) to make them more competitive. Our counselling support spanned over a time period ranging from 12 to 48 months in each of these companies. During this process, we realized that for a significant improvement in bottom-line and overall effectiveness; the work systems, work profile design at all levels might require a complete review. Also, attitude and value system of every employee engaged in work should be reviewed for alignment with their work profile. We witnessed several instances of total mismatch between employees' work profile and aptitude. The shocking truth we stumbled upon was that the assessment of work profile, review criteria, feedback and improvement process were hardly done and were mostly poorly defined and ineffective. We also realized that the activities performed by operators and also supervisors had little to do with brain work and were largely comprised of repetitive activities involving physical movement. This scenario didn’t change much from one factory to another. Therefore absence of joy was quite noticeable in these workplaces.
We tried to understand the relationship between joy in workplace and the manner in which an employee is engaged in the workplace. We tried to find out the change in value addition by employees with change in the employees’ work profile design. The topic of value addition was of primary importance to the employers as value addition improves bottom-line and effectiveness. Our studies helped to recognise a relationship between design of work profile and value addition. However, one critical factor for creating joy in workplace was found to be passionate involvement in work which hardly occurs without addressing the aptitude of employees. It was clear that passionate involvement emanates from the heart! Our attempts to engage employees at all levels through both simple and complex problem solving exercises at workplace often resulted a sense of achievement and some joy. These activities also brought a relief for them from their monotonous routine job involving body-centric activities. However, the most intriguing part of the study was to find an approach to engage an employee in a meaningful manner which resonates with their heart! Such instances were rare!
In our country workplaces are mostly devoid of joy. It is shocking given the fact that in the country, there are 63 million SMEs which employ over a staggering 111 million employees i.e. 40% of India’s total industrial work force. Most of these employees do not experience joy from their work during prime time of their life as there is hardly any engagement of heart in whatever they do! It is clear that an approach which engages the heart would trigger joy and at the same time could be of immense benefit to employers as this would improve both bottom-line and effectiveness! Workplaces could really become a source of joy for many if only they could engage themselves through 3H (Hands, Head and Heart). They should be given an opportunity not only to use their hands but also opportunity to engage their head and heart. It would also improve their value addition in workplace and improve their employability. 3H could really be a win-win proposition for both employers and employees. We started working towards this vision of creating this joyful workplaces in Indian SMEs with the main focus of `hands joining the head and heart’. For this transformation to happen, certain factors have to be kept in mind. SMEs, unlike large organizations, have to be led by the entrepreneur directly to bring about any change! Structurally, small enterprises often have at the most one or two professionals to support the entrepreneurs in such change initiatives. Due to lack of competent resources it becomes difficult for SMEs to keep pace with the advancement in modern management practices, systems and shop floor innovations. Therefore, shadow of entrepreneurial gap looms large over the small enterprises. This gap results typical short sighted approach of management around profit and numbers only. Gaps were observed in long term planning, performance measures, timely corrective actions, training and development, review and assessment of employee performance against `key result areas', new product planning and process development, market data analysis, etc. All these take a back seat while priority is given to today's numbers and `fire-fighting in most critical areas continues unabated. In this context we believe that the the vision of Joyful Workplaces to bring about a sense of joy among employees in Indian SMEs would transform industrial environment as a whole!
