Did you know that the housekeeping staff of most 5 star hotels in Mumbai live in the slums? I didn?t believe it either, until I befriended a few of them in my different stays there and managed invitations to visit their homes.
No, it?s not high officials at corporate boardrooms or head offices who deliver a product or service. In any business domain, execution is always in the hands of the shop-floor. That?s habited by common people. High disparity in our socio-economic living context ensures that common people have little mindspace to understand quality excellence, and hence know little about it except what?s taught at workplace training sessions. Working classes earning a maximum of R20,000 per month save for food, medical expenses and children?s education. From among them, an emerging new breed now spends R500 for an outing two/three times a month. Their homes are mere covered shelters, TV is their entertainment source. All these workers deliver from Lux to Mercedes Benz, the way 5 star hotel housekeeping staff in Mumbai lives in slums, but delivers luxury lifestyles. The stark difference in hygiene of where they work and how they live is incredulous. I marvel at the superior training system of such hotels. They?ve made people who haven?t been entitled to minimum hygienic and civic comfort put in the effort to project society?s wealth.
Making and delivering outstanding quality in every sense of business can create a huge social impact. It can change India?s economy, industry, global reputation, making it a value-led global hub of outsourcing in every domain. The common man?s way of living can change too, as also those with no understanding of the right parameter for global quality. The government has taken no serious initiative to drive hygiene quality. No mass scale education system enlightens anyone of quality benchmarking systems. So willynilly it?s the organised industry that has the responsibility of inculcating quality sensitivity into ordinary people. It reminds me of the Sony Chairman?s determination after World War II. His vision was that Sony will be the first among Japanese companies to reverse Japan?s image of being the maker of low quality products. With fantastic, game-changing quality initiatives Sony has proved today that Japan rules the world in quality. Even Toyota says ?Quality Revolution.?
Let me narrate how hygiene can lead to political victory in a developed country. Paris is the world?s most beautiful city, but Parisians, in the name of walking their dogs in the promenade, have an obsession of making their pets do their bio-business in front of the neighbour?s house. Jacques Chirac who twice served as the Prime Minister always harboured the ambition of becoming the President, but failed to get elected in 1981 and 1988. He finally won in 1996, before which he was Mayor of Paris. During this time he tried to prove his administrative ability to French citizens. Suddenly one day we started to see big, specially designed motorbikes with white-and-green uniformed riders reaching every corner of the city to perform a service. They operated a hand vacuum cleaner-like sucking system attached to a storage bin at the back. The bikes moved throughout the city and very elegantly ?schwhoop! schwhoop! schwhoop!? sucked in every big or small pile of doggy poo on the road. He understood that asking Parisians to change their habit may make him lose his electorate, so it was better to find a proactive approach that innovatively kept Paris clean of dog shit. We used to call these bikes ?motto merde? (shit bike). However, Chirac became the President after Mitterand?s death in 1995 upto 2007.
Every month I travel alone or with my team to underprivileged areas in India to understand the psychographics, living style, economic and social factors of the human ocean. The hygienic situation is pitiably different from my Parisian or European experience. When I present my research findings to gauge the market potential of my clients here in their sophisticated corporate meeting rooms, I wonder if the management understands the practical living condition of these low-income people. Is a corporate house only for production, advertising and selling? In what condition does it sell?
Every company puts up quality messages as picture boards in the premises. Yes, quality training is imparted to scale up industrial production, but unless it?s extended to their personal living style, employees will never internalise quality sensitivity. Can industry raise the bar of our society?s living condition? I?m not talking of luxury living, but just habituating people to better hygienic and civic conditions. It?s not easy, but as an industrialist you need to do that to improve the perceptible quality of your deliverable. Perhaps the basis of the annual bonus can be the uplifted level of the worker?s living condition. Such an initiative can change the Indian paradigm of quality excellence. Your consumer will be benefited. They will not need to pay more to get 5 star quality in every purchase.
Can a beautiful Indian advertisement made abroad with a famous film star, a hullabaloo communication spend in all TV channels and cinema halls justify return on investment or define the quality parameter? Your product at the retail may still be in some horrible, unkempt condition.
What?s the meaning of dogmatic ISO 9000-type cultures, unless the customer experiences real perceptible value in the product or service to be upgrading his quality of life? Making the working class highly sensitive to hygiene, civic and aesthetic sense will already boost quality. These three fundamental attributes combine to impact positively on people?s working delivery sensitivity. This should have happened before economic liberalisation.
Raising the consciousness of the masses can ignite them to demand better implementation of our hygienic system. Otherwise dirt will spread unabated like it is today, huge housing developments have drains with floating faeces, yet nobody cares.
Shombit Sengupta is an international creative business strategy consultant to top managements. Reach him at http://www.shiningconsulting.com