This Brazilian company taught its illiterate cleaning staff how to read

Nataly Bonato, the owner of Sao Paulo-based company WeWork, wanted to address office cleaning issues and asked the janitors to provide some very basic information like name of the janitor, which room they cleaned, why a particular room wasn’t cleaned (if any), and how much time was spent in each room in the form of a report.

When the first report took a week to be turned in and the answers weren’t even accurate, Bonato confronted the janitors. She surprisingly found out that the reason behind that was more than half of the cleaning staff was illiterate.

Instead of requesting new staff to get the job done, however, Bonato decided to help them out. Every Tuesday and Thursday, the janitorial team would have a longer lunch break so they could take literacy lessons. Five months later, the best students were already writing letters and every custodian could read simple texts.

Read full story here: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/intend-firing-illiterate-employees-company-teaches-read/