Latest update April 24th, 2024 12:59 AM
Apr 17, 2018 Letters
DEAR EDITOR,
Although I have lived with the terminology of ‘Human Resources’ almost all of my working life, I have always quietly grappled with a feeling of contradiction of a human being regarded as a resource, like minerals; and soon oil and gas.
So that when last weekend (April 7) a group of us practitioners from private and public sectors met, at the historic ‘sugar’ house Herdmanston, to review the state of the Human Resource Management function in Guyana, and found cause to lament the hierarchical imbalance between ourselves and so-called colleague managers; not to mention the distant CEOs and Chief Administrators, one could not help but refer to Frederic Laloux’s book titled ‘Reinventing Organisations’.
It provides instructive exposure to a developing organisational construct, revealed in a survey of highly successful businesses (including on Wall Street) where the CEOs have demitted office, while at the same time delegating decision-making further down, and in instances as far as the shop floor – indeed with rewarding production and financial success.
In the process the language expressing the relationship between supervisor and supervised became more humane, with ‘employees’, becoming ‘human beings’, more so with ‘heart’ and ‘soul’.
In our environment, such an approach to employee communication would very likely be regarded as reckless adventure. The more perceptive would argue that the current portrayal constitutes of ’boss’ talking down to ‘subordinate’ or for that matter, even to colleague managers.
The indifferent tone of the communication can be further compounded where there is a gender differentiation. All this brings us circuitously back to the status and role of Human Resources practitioners – Officers, Managers and a sparse of Directors – positions in which interestingly, enough women appear to have now outnumbered men. So that at last weekend’s discussion, while not specifically articulated, one could detect an environment of chauvinism, however professionally depicted, in which authority relationships are conducted. The acknowledgement of equality is not immediately forthcoming and the lesser of the equals sometimes have to concede to the authority of imperious decision-makers.
It would be useful to learn how many of our CEOs would lay claim to being sufficiently acquainted with, or indeed trained in, the human resources management philosophy, to the extent that they can set the model for treating ‘human resources’ as ‘human beings’. Which of them would have been heard to make a public utterance comparable to the rather old sugar industry cliché that: ‘people are more important than shops and ships and sugar estates’?
Not totally irrelevant, the discourse addressed the confusion surrounding compensation management; and identified that even where the structure may have been based initially on a reasonably well conducted job evaluation exercise; it was not unusual for special interests having to be served, and as a consequence the system being continually compromised, beyond and above the level of the incumbent Human Resources Management authority, and too often post facto.
While such situations as described are hardly exposed in private sector organisations, there is more of a window to look through into the machinations of the Public Service, so far as the compensation management is concerned.
For ready reference, one can turn to the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Public Service (2016), of which Chapter 4 deals with ‘The Compensation System of the Guyana Public Service’. Its paragraph 168 refers to the most recent compensation reform initiative which (incredibly) was as far back as ‘1991/1992’.
See following quote.
“168. The most recent Human Resources Reform initiative in Guyana that dates back to 1991/1992 states:
A job evaluation panel was selected by the Public Service Management, Office of the President, comprising Senior Officers from several agencies. Union officials were also invited to participate as panel members only (only the Guyana Public Service Union took up the invitation). The Chairman was selected from the Public Service Management, and a Consultant from Peat Marwick McLintock supported the programme for part of the time (i.e. with effect from September 1991 to November 1991).
The Consultants used the following six (6) compensable factors:
qualification, knowledge and experience
decision-making and problem solving
impact on results
resources management
communication
working conditions”
Curiously, it is in relation to those ‘Compensable Factors’ that the following job hierarchy would appear to have been since established:
Administrative
Senior Technical
Other Technical and Craft skilled
Clerical and Office Support
Semi-skilled Operatives and Unskilled
Quite irrelevantly, during the last Administration the category of ‘Contracted Employees’ was added to what is intended to be a Job Classification Table. Where then is the rationality in ‘Contracted Employees’ which includes incumbents of all the categories and levels of the jobs in the Public Service being included in the Classification Schedule?
What this exposé says in fact is that there has long ceased to be any job classification, even related to the aforementioned ‘compensable factors’.
But attend to the following observation at the COI’s para 187.
“187. We draw attention to the following observations:
• Job Classifications cut across almost all Grades. The most alarming are grades under the respective classifications: ‘Administrative’ and ‘Senior Technical’, starting from GS2 and continuing to GS4-GS14.
• A Job Classification System cannot be used for positions, which do not match in terms of their duties and responsibilities. Instead it is used to group positions that have similar duties and responsibilities, require same or similar qualifications, experience and training as relevant.”
Yet, nearly two years after, the Public Service Management Department continues to ignore this very defective faultline, amongst a workforce (in 2016) of ‘approximately 14,466 employees inclusive of 4,471 employed on ‘contract’. [COI Report]
So that the recommendations 23 and 24 of the COI Report read as follows:
“Recommendations # 23 – 24
We accordingly recommend:
23. That an Organizational Restructuring be undertaken in two Phases. In the First Phase, emphasis should be placed on rationalizing the status of pensionable and contract employees and the ‘de-bunching’ of employees in the Salary Structure.
24. That the Second Phase continues the restructuring process by way of a thoroughly conducted job evaluation study.”
Of course, there is much more in this Report alone that underscores the lack of respect given to the sapiential authority that should normally be attributed to Human Resources practitioners – both in the Private and Public Sectors.
But the status of the five grades of Personnel officers in the Public Service is a separate discomfiting issue. The Personnel Officer I functions at the Clerical level (Grade GS5).
The further major implication to be explored is what mechanism is now being utilised, in the face of all the new technical and technological jobs created in the Public Service, to measure with any accuracy, the various levels of skills and competencies needed to be assigned a classification.
In any case, do those involved pay attention to the ‘compensable factors’ abovementioned and their relevance?
So that in the milieu, one must ask about the role of a Personnel Officer (not even ‘manager’) in a dispensation that demands that even the latter should be treated more humanely.
One must also enquire about how much longer will the Public Service Management Department take to transition and rise to the appreciation for the need for instituting a proactive human resources management philosophy, the implementation of progressive practices aimed at appointing Human Resources Management practitioners who can address the numerous (unspoken, but perceivable) needs of its employed human beings.
The reality is that the current placidity subverts the dynamism now needed in government agencies who must react at a faster pace, and perform at a higher level, with increasingly new and sophisticated regional and international counterparts.
In the end, morale needs desperately to be upgraded; motivation energised to achieve targets; discipline towards balanced accountability relationships must be the goal of a dynamic human resource management function – which must recognise the worth of the human being.
E.B. John
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