We're not like other businesses - part 3

There are lots of things that we do here that other businesses and business people think are bonkers. I've been told so. Things that are time consuming, money eating. Things like working short hours during Ramadan, and allowing people time, paid, to pray during the day (this means three times during working hours in winter). You know the arguments people have about colleagues taking cigarette breaks and being paid? We have those exact conversations about prayer time. We've not found answer to them yet either.

There's a metric, a measure of productivity, that we talk about a lot here. It's PPWPH - Pants Per Woman Per Hour. In larger factories we have been told that this can be up to 12, occasionally even 15.

As no one pair of pants is made by one woman (there are lots of different jobs to do to make each pair and so we have women working at different stages of production, each doing the same job for however many Pants are coming through) we count how many hours are worked each day, count how many pants were made, and do some sums, and work out what our average PPWPH was. And at the end of each shift we talk about this number and what it means.

It tells us which Pants are the fastest to make. It tells us which days we are most productive. We have conversations about it and make decisions, together, based on it.

And it tells the team they are getting fast.

We're recently hit the heady heights of 7PPWPH. We have NEVER done this before and there was cheering in the factory. It was a proud moment for everyone involved. And what was really interesting was that this, coupled with an ongoing conversation with the team about how we manage holiday, led to one of the team suggesting that, even though it was Ramadan, a few extra hours could be safely worked, to ensure that when some holiday is taken soon, the factory doesn't lose too many hours and we can keep making those Pants. That was a huge moment here - a real moment of ownership. I'll be honest. I was speechless for a moment and then I asked if I could kiss her (she laughed and said, 'of course darling') It was a brilliant moment.

We've been working, and forecasting sales and production, on the basis that we'd get to 7PPWPH in a few years - slowly slowly. Talking to the team daily about how they are doing gets us all excited - those cheers I mentioned earlier happen a lot at the moment. We're not going to do that every day yet and that's ok. We don't beat people with sticks to motivate them - it seems excitement is working wonders.

The team set their own target for the week yesterday after smashing last weeks - they did a whopping 192% of what was expected. We're all excited for the end of the week to see what happens.

We're not like other businesses. And we like it.