Sidney Harman, cofounder of Harman Kardon music systems was told in 1968 that his company’s factory at Bolivar, Tennessee, USA was having a crisis. Harman rushed to the factory and saw a ‘raw, ugly and, in many ways, demeaning’ facility.

The crisis was that men on night shift were supposed to get a coffee break at 10 pm but the management arbitrarily decided to postpone the break by 10 minutes when another buzzer was scheduled to sound. One might see this as no crisis.

But one worker, ‘an old black man had an epiphany’ as Harman described it. ‘He said, literally to his fellow workers, ‘I don’t work for no buzzer. The buzzer works for me. It is my job to tell me when its ten o’clock. I got me a watch. I’m going on my coffee break, and, of course, all hell broke loose’.

The worker’s principled rebellion and Harman’s refusal to be cowed by management’s senseless rule was a revelation. Harman realized ‘The technology is there to serve the men, not the reverse.’

If Harman would have sided with management at Bolivar it would have created a lot of resentment amongst the workers and a dwindling performance.

In the years to follow, Harman revamped the factory and its working and turned it into a kind of college campus offering classes in the factory premises including piano lessons. Moreover, the workers were encouraged to take most of the responsibility to run the workplace. Revamping the factory also meant providing safer and better working conditions to the workers.

Harman also created an environment where dissent was not only tolerated but also encouraged. The factory’s inhouse independent newspaper, the Bolivar Mirror, gave workers a creative and emotional outlet and they criticized Harman in its pages.

Harman thus became a pioneer of participative management, a movement he continued to influence workplaces around the world until his death in 2011.

The idea of participative management wasn’t conceived in CEO’s office and imposed on plant, said Harman; instead, it grew organically out of his going to Bolivar ‘to put out this fire.’

Harman achieved a lot more in his lifetime – he founded Harman International and was deputy secretary of commerce to the US President Jimmy Carter. But Harman looked back at the coffee break incident in Bolivar as an important event in his professional life and emerged into his own as a leader.

As an Occupational Health physician, the coffee break incident can be viewed as a change in thought process of an employer that resulted in revamping the factory (that was in Harman’s words, raw, ugly and in many ways demeaning) to provide better and safer working conditions resulting in fewer work-related illnesses and accidents.

Harman not only became a leader but somewhere unknowingly he also introduced good practice of occupational health as the era of sweat shops was long over and he must have viewed the coffee break as an important link between worker health and work performance.

Harman demonstrated then what I often preach now – that if employers exhibit alertness, compassion, and willingness to situations at workplace during their walkthrough rounds, a lot can be done and achieved in the arena of OH (occupational health) and eventually in protection of worker health. Read article on Ratan Tata and Occupational Health.

Today short breaks are advised especially for jobs that can cause repetitive strain injury and good employers encourage short breaks (example, for those who work continuously with computers) to protect health of workers, rejuvenate them, and bring them back to perform optimally.

Short breaks also convey a strong message – that the employer/management understands and cares! And this goes a long way in creating harmonious working atmosphere.

Occupational health (OH) as a medical specialty prevents illnesses by identifying and reducing workplace risks to health leading to improved performance in workers, and the OH physician is a leader who leads the health agenda in the corporations he works and apprises the management for necessary establishment of good occupational health practices at workplace.

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Dr Ajay Sati is an Occupational Health physician who prefers to describe himself as an Occupationist, to denote, ‘an expert in diseases and other concerns of occupations’. Dr Sati has managed health and wellness programs in industries he worked, like the atomic energy, and energy (oil & gas) in India and overseas. He was involved in many greenfield and brownfield projects providing inputs from health point of view. Known for SOPs and protocols, he is currently involved with an energy MNC in designing protocols to support employees during the covid pandemic, and protocols to safely reopen offices and plants.