Nurture, trust and patience: Our mantra for our people

Creating a diverse team

At PRAYOG, we are proud to say that our team is the heart and soul of our organization. Our library educators are motivated, dedicated and passionate about creating a place of openness, exposure and opportunities in the lives of children and young adults.

They are responsible for curating the collection, planning and facilitating activities, and creating a welcoming atmosphere for children and our community members. They set the ambience of the library with a welcoming smile and a helpful attitude with growing knowledge about the collection. This enables the users to connect with the library.

Our team is a microcosm of the local community, representing various castes, genders and religions. It comprises individuals with diverse backgrounds, skills and expertise. We work together in a collaborative and supportive environment, sharing our knowledge, experiences and insights to enhance our programs and contribute to collective learning.

Our full-time team now has 13 members. We expect to triple this size by mid-2024. For a long time at PRAYOG, we remained as a small team, with just thee people. The importance of identifying suitable people, nurturing them and staying with them, has always been a core value.

The seed to focus on nurturing was sown during the first ever visit by a Wipro team member in 2016. Then very few children could share about the library’s books. This was despite us highlighting about our library work.

Building a culture of inclusion

We started in 2013. The first phase of PRAYOG (2013 to 2018), which was also the phase of initial learning, had four paid volunteers. The volunteers were from the same community. They themselves had shown interest in engaging with our work. It was because of this we decided to pay them, so that they could also continue with their education.

Our intention to engage with children was pure. What has remained constant is the integrity of our people and the commitment to stay with them. By the time we got associated with the Wipro Education Fellowship Program, one of the volunteers, Binit, was ready to take on a central role at the organization. He applied for the Fellowship as well. This was the turning point. Through our association with Wipro, we have benefitted a lot on building our capacities. Binit is now leading our library programs. He has emerged as a thoughtful educator and leader.

The second phase, during 2018–23, was the period of aligning our vision and intervention design. We re-visited our strategies. We also focused on building a team, not only in numbers but also in terms of its quality. In this phase, we included six library educators, five of whom were women. The hiring of the female team members was a result of a suggestion which came from one of our mentors. It has worked beautifully for us.

Keeping capacity building at the centre of people practices

While hiring was one thing, we also realized the need of capacity building. One of the team members, Ragini, often recalls – “When we joined the organization, we had never thought that reading books and discussions around stories would be an essential part of our daily job.”

We have collaborated with organizations and experts in the field of library and early childhood education. We have invested a lot on building our team’s capacities. We plan to continue this at PRAYOG. The effectiveness in our work has come because of this approach. The team’s motivation has also been sustained as a result. Every day, there is something new and no one is bored in their jobs.

We try to ensure that each team member gets sufficient exposure. We send them to attend appropriate training courses outside Bihar. For travel, we take care to make the best possible arrangements. Many a times, they travel by air to save time. All this has also been possible because of the trust that our donors place in us.

Looking beyond formal qualifications

Educational qualification is important in hiring. However, we know our context in rural Bihar. Knowing our youth has been very important. We know that our youth drop out after their higher secondary education and only go to college once a year to appear in their exams. So, what qualifications do we keep as criteria while selecting people for roles?

In the recent hirings over the past one year, we had higher secondary pass candidates appear in interviews as well. In this process, we have seen that the selected candidates have turned into valuable team members just by constant daily engagement and structured capacity building exercises. They have been quick learners. They have also been taking on responsibilities quite fast. Their longevity in the organization is also high. Since 2020, we have hired eight people. Out of them only two have exited PRAYOG, that too because of personal reasons.

What has also worked for us is patience on our side. Not all will begin to perform and engage as desired. Anita, one of our library educators since 2020, is one such case for us. She would not at all speak in team meetings. Or her voice would be often very low. Sometimes, we would question our decision to select her. However, we then came back to question ourselves. Why did we select her in the first place?

She was selected because she could sing well during the selection process. And then we stuck to our decision and continued engaging with her. Our selection criteria were not based on the qualifications, but on assessing what additional qualities and skills a candidate could bring to the team (e.g., sewing knitting, singing, poetry, dancing, etc.), and the commitment to work with the children in our communities. Today, Anita engages very effectively with children. She is also able to present her work to various stakeholders. She is a classic example of what happens when we trust people and give them time to live up to their potential.

When people join us, it’s also for their growth. At PRAYOG, we now have a well-defined salary structure which has incentives like health insurance, accidental insurance, and allowances for mobile recharges and travel. For the people who joined in 2020, their salaries have doubled by now. This is also because of the quality of the work that they have been doing.

The self-dependence and mobility that our work offers to women team members is also an additional attraction for them. This is especially true in the case of married staff members, as everyone has to learn riding a two-wheeler. They have expressed their happiness to us many a times that joining PRAYOG marked one of their major life changes, as it involved the freedom to move out of their house for work.

For the library educator cadre, everyone must engage with children in schools and community sites. The more experienced educators are now getting to lead this process. In the upcoming projects, the experienced library educators are getting the supervisory/co-ordination roles. This is because they know much of the details of the work. We plan to hire only for the entry level positions now.

Challenges

By mid-2024, we expect to triple the team size. We are very excited in this journey. However, we do realize that inculcating the values in new team members is a tough task. It will take a lot of sincere effort. The existing team members who will play a larger role in this process also need to be continuously engaged with. This is because values are something that need to be constantly demonstrated through our work. We also need to go deeper with reflections on our practices.

We have a very well-defined and rigorous hiring process. This helps us identify the potential candidates. However, our induction process needs to get more streamlined. The supervisory cadre, comprising of the more experienced library educators, are almost ready. We need to nurture them and have trust in them. They are the ones who have lived through the values of PRAYOG. And they are the ones who would nurture the next pool of people joining us.

Nurture, trust and patience are the three values that we have been learning through practice. We want to keep this process of learning alive!