Engaged Team
A fabric mill runs on machinery, but it’s people who keep 3 million metres of fabric moving through it every month. At Hayleys Fabric PLC, roughly 75% of our workforce is drawn from the communities immediately around our operations, which means investment in our people is, by extension, investment in those same communities. Building an engaged workforce isn’t treated as a separate HR initiative here; it’s built into how the company runs day to day.
Recognition and Growth
We run structured leadership and development programmes designed to build capability from within, rather than relying solely on external hires to fill senior roles, and we recognise milestones and performance achievements through programmes built into the annual calendar rather than left to individual managers’ discretion. Women’s empowerment initiatives run alongside these, reflecting a workforce where women make up a significant share of production-floor and supervisory roles.
Wellbeing and Belonging
Beyond training and recognition, we run wellness and community-building initiatives that bring teams together outside the immediate demands of production, from milestone celebrations to activities designed to build a stronger sense of belonging across departments and shifts. These aren’t cosmetic add-ons: a workforce spread across multiple shift patterns and departments needs deliberate effort to feel like one team rather than a collection of separate units, and that’s what these initiatives are built to address.
Transparent, Two-Way Communication
Engagement also depends on employees actually being heard, not just accommodated. We maintain channels for staff feedback and grievance resolution that feed back into how policies and welfare programmes are shaped, rather than treating engagement as something communicated only downward from management. That two-way structure is part of what keeps turnover manageable in an industry where skilled machine operators and technicians are in high demand across Sri Lanka’s textile sector.
Engagement Beyond the Workplace
Internal engagement connects directly to our external community work. Employees are often the ones delivering our CSR initiatives on the ground, from education and healthcare programmes to environmental campaigns like Breath, which means engagement at Hayleys Fabric isn’t confined to the factory gates. That connection between internal culture and external impact is deliberate: employees who see the company investing visibly in the community they live in tend to feel more connected to its purpose than those who only see it through a policy document.
Taken together, these efforts sit under our broader ESG commitments and align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals relevant to decent work and reduced inequality. For a company where the majority of the workforce lives within reach of the mills it works in, that alignment isn’t an abstract reporting exercise, it shows up directly in the wellbeing of the people producing the fabric that reaches our global brand partners.