A crumb from Brazil

WeWork is a company in San Paulo, Brazil, whose employees are custodians who clean office work spaces. Recently, Nataly Bonato, community manager of WeWork, asked her janitor employees to submit daily reports telling their name, which rooms they cleaned, and how much time was spent in each room.  When the first reports were turned in, they were not accurate and Bonato asked the janitors why. It turns out over half of the cleaning team was illiterate.

                                                                                                          Natal Bonato Facebook
Instead of hiring new staff to get the job done, Bonato decided to help them out. "We have a school that uses our workspace, so we challenged them to help our staff with the problem, and they got organized and made it happen." Every Tuesday and Thursday the team had longer lunch hours to attend literacy lessons. Five months later, the best students were already writing letters and every custodian could read simple texts. They even had a "graduation" photograph, shown above.