Laborlink: Providing ‘A New Dimension Of Insight Into Workers Job Satisfaction

Dailycsr.com – 15 November 2016 – Chinese factories are being pressured to “retain” their workers as “high rates of worker turnover” continues to seep into the sector. Replacing old workers and training a new crew in a “large percentage” on an annual basis becomes a costly affair. Likewise, its turns out to be “precarious” that the factory owners “find out” the cause of their workers leaving their jobs.
 
The “State of the Global Workforce” report of Gallup indicates that China holds “one of the lowest rates of employee engagement” on a global scale. As per a survey, ninety four percent of workers from the manufacturing unit who were part of the survey reported that the workers did not feel “engaged” or they felt “actively disengaged” at their place of work.
 
In an attempt to figure out what could be “positive drive” for “worker satisfaction and retention”, in the year of 2014, the “Laborlink China Collaborative” along with ten other “leading brands”, like “American Eagle, C&A, Harry’s, Hasbro, J. Crew, Marks & Spencer, Mattel, Vodafone, Walmart, and Walt Disney”, launched a unique programme. The said initiative was sponsored by Walt Disney Company.
 
The Laborlink mobile “survey platform” was “designed and managed by Good World Solutions”. Seventy Chinese factories were invited between the year of “2015 and 2016”, whereby almost “119,000 workers” were requested to complete a short Laborlink survey anonymously, while answering questions like:

 
According to the workers’ response, forty three percent of them were “dissatisfied with their current job”, while only thirty percent of the workers participating in the survey had plans of continuing in their current job for the following six months at the least.
 
So to turn the tables, the employers need to look into the key drivers that cause “workplace dissatisfaction”, the average correlated reasons were “bad worker-supervisor relationships, frequent stress, and distrust in the grievance mechanisms”. Nevertheless, there have been some interventions into this problem which looks like is already bringing in “significant increases in job satisfaction”.
 
Statistically, “between the baseline and follow-up surveys”, there has been a fifteen percent reduction in the workers’ percentage who reported less stress at the workplace, while there were ten percent more “likelihood” of workers remaining in their current workplace in the following six months’ time. The Mattel Human Resources’ senior vice-president, Huey Wilson, stated:
“Working with Laborlink provides a new dimension of insight into job satisfaction amongst our workforce. Along with our existing audit and engagement practices, Laborlink helps us understand what is most important to our workers, and enables us to better engage with them.”
 
In the words of Walt Disney Company’s vice-president of ‘International Labour Standards’, Michael Widman:
“Disney is proud to have supported and participated in this initiative. We believe that the benchmarking data generated by this project will drive factory improvements and help foster safe, inclusive, and respectful workplaces.”
 
 
 
 
 
References:
ethicalperformance.com