Yangon, 30 September 2015
HR management is essential in every organization but more crucial in labor intensive workplaces like garment factories. Productivity is key but it goes hand in hand with keeping the workers happy and make sure there is no high turnover by keeping effective systems, procedures and policies in the HR management system.
The second HR management training conducted from 21 to 23 September 2015 at UMFCCI was opened by the Chairman of MGMA, U Myint Soe and conducted by Nancy Feng, the social compliance expert from systain. 12 factories with 22 participants were keen to learn more about modern HR management. The HR management training was first conducted in August 2015, where 30 participants from 18 factories participated. Different factories that were involved in the SMART Myanmar social compliance academy but also other factories had a chance to benefit from the international knowledge on garment industry specific HR management. Ms. Moe Sandi, HR Manager from Anita Asia Co., Ltd, said “I hope to attend the next HR management training. I appreciate this training because we can learn a lot of things what we need to change in our factory.”
The EU funded project SMART Myanmar has been conducting “HR Management training course because functioning HR departments are the precondition for sustainable compliance with international standards. The 3 day HR management courses complement the SMART Myanmar compliance academy. Target participants are HR managers from the garment factories. The training has given opportunities for the participants to discuss, brain storm and share the experiences throughout the 3 day training period.
This time SMART Myanmar invited 12 MGMA member factories who were never involved in other SMART Myanmar interventions so far to make sure the knowledge is spread in the industry.
There are a lot of challenges in the HR area in the factories such as child labor, high worker turnover rates, excessive working hours and unbalanced workforce. During the workshop Nancy demonstrated the reasons for these issues and gave examples on how to avoid such problems and to solve them by demonstrating a proper HR management system and invited the participants to share their current systems in place in their own factory.
In addition all other important criteria of the HR management system were thoroughly discussed with the participants and the expert gave best practice examples and explained the root causes of the problems in the particular areas such as :
Communication channels between workers and the management
Disciplinary actions
POPEA (Policy, Organization, Procedure, Evaluate, and Adjustment)
Key elements to reach company’s goal
Health and safety committee
SMART Myanmar plans to conduct many more of such HR management trainings for the industry which consist of different modules.
Contact in Myanmar:
Su Tayar Lin, Assistant Project Manager(+95 (09) 515 – 8286)
Contacts in Germany:
Simone Lehmann, Project Manager(sequa) (+49 228 - 98238 – 47)
Background
SMART stands for "SMEs for Environmental, Accountability, Responsibility and Transparency". SMART Myanmar is part of the EU Switch Asia Program designed to promote the adoption of Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) among Small and Medium sized Enterprises and consumer groups in Asia. The EU-funded project will run until December 2015, and primarily fosters to increase the competitiveness of SMEs in Myanmar, especially in the Garment Sector, by promoting sustainable production of garments "made in Myanmar."
Local Partners
Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry - UMFCCI
Myanmar Garment Manufacturers Association - MGMA
International Partners
Confederation of the German Textile and Fashion Industry – t+m
Association of Development Financing Institutions in Asia and the Pacific – ADFIAP
Sheffield Chamber of Commerce and Industry- SCCI
For more information:
Website of SMART Myanmar project:
http://www.smartmyanmar.org/
Fact Sheet of the project on SWITCH-Aisa.EU:
http://www.switch-asia.eu/switch-asia-projects/project-impact/projects-o...
Website of the SWITCH-Asia Programme of the European Commission:
http://www.switch-asia.eu/
Website of European Commission:
http://ec.europa.eu/index_en.htm
