Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jan 08, 2022 Letters
Dear Editor,
Kaieteur News – It was out of one of BSE’s dynamic Personnel Officers’ Conference in 1965, that two fledgling Personnel Officers – from Uitvlugt Estate and Blairmont Estate, moved and had agreed a motion to establish a Personnel Practitioners’ Fraternity. In a historic initiative, the first conference of Personnel Officers in Government and Industry was convened in March the same year, at the Public Service Training Centre then located at Red House, High Street, Kingston.
The main presenters were the Chairman of the Public Service Commission, who spoke on “Personnel Administration Practice in the Public Service of British Guiana”; and BSE’s Education and Training Officer on “Personnel Management in Industry in British Guiana”. The forty-one participants included the following representatives:
• The Public Service Commission
• Public Service Training Centre
• Ministry of Works and Hydraulics
• Transport and Harbours Department
• Mayor and City Council of Georgetown
• General Post Office
• Private Companies – Sprostons Ltd, Wieting & Richter Ltd.
• The Sugar Industry Labour Welfare Fund Committee
• Bookers Sugar Estates
• Demerara Company
• Guyana Sugar Producers Association
• Booker Group of Companies
As a result of that very productive interaction, the National Personnel Officers Association was conceived, and its Memorandum of Articles of Association was officially registered on April 30, 1966.
The records show that amongst the earlier training courses mounted by the Association was one on “Communication in the Organisation”, which ran for various groups on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays – from June 29 – July 14, 1967. Noteworthy was the degree of participation: from the Ministries of: Agriculture & Natural Resources; Communications; External Affairs; Finance; Health; Housing and Reconstruction; Labour; and the Public Service Commission. A USAID representative also attended.
Lecturers included Martin Carter, Minister of Information; Harold Davis, Chief Personnel Officer, BSE; Edmund Richards, Personnel Manager, Booker Georgetown Group of Companies; David Ford, Permanent Secretary, Public Service Ministry; George DePeana, Secretary, Clerical & Commercial Workers Union (CCWU); Dr. Bertram A. N. Collins, Professor of Public Administration, University of Guyana; Pat Thompson, Executive Director, Bookers Rum Co. Ltd.; and Bob Rosane, Assistant General Manager, Demerara Bauxite Co. Ltd.
By 1968, because of the clamour of other management categories to become members, NPOA’s executive had begun to examine the constitutional and name changes required to accommodate a wider membership.
It was still under the NPOA’s sponsorship, however, that in September 1969, a series of residential Senior Management Seminars titled: ‘Perspectives of Management’ was conducted by Hugh Barrow, of the Administrative Staff College, Henley, UK.
The range of participation was again instructive, including four Government Ministries; three public corporations; private companies – Demerara Bauxite Ltd., Demerara Tobacco Ltd., Guiana Timbers Ltd., Sprostons Ltd., and of course, BSE and Demerara Co.
The objectives of the seminars were:
a) To study organisation in a changing environment;
b) To analyse the behaviour and attitudes of work groups;
c) To examine managerial styles;
d) To study principles and techniques of:
• Management Development
• Manpower Planning
e) To review the personnel function of management
The Association even took some of its training courses into the countryside – as far as Rose Hall, Berbice. These addressed such topics as: “Relations between Government and Industry”; “Management Selection and Development”; and a symposium on “Training”.
After an extended period of gestation, the NPOA was finally transformed into the Guyana Institute of Management in 1970. Under the new banner, the first of a series of groundbreaking ‘Breakfast Lectures’ was launched at the Pegasus Hotel, Georgetown. Appropriately, the Guest Speaker was a Guyanese, Jim Adams, a former Labour Officer, who by that time was a Judge of the Industrial Court of Trinidad and Tobago. He spoke to more than 100 top managers from both private and public sectors on: “An Experiment in the Development of an Industrial Relations Jurisprudence” which was reproduced in the new GIM Quarterly called: “Developing Management”. Each quarterly featured a ‘Manager-on-the-Spot’.
The current environment, however, contrasts quite vividly, for now so much ‘confidentiality’ exists in organisations that Human Resources Management practitioners barely know one another – focused, as they prefer, on ‘downloading’ from the information technology facility that is more readily accessible.
Arguably today, with the invasion of a range of foreign sophisticated employment entities, there is a case for regularity in the observance of the applicable human resources regulations, so that employers do not subvert one another, conceivably to the detriment of the local employee, and to the possible embarrassment of union representation which appears to be subject to aggressive diminution.
There is a substantive case for a consensus in maintaining, and indeed upgrading, the sanctity of the human spirit in an age of rampant technology. He/she must continue to earn the respect of their progeny.
E.B. John
Human Resources Management Executive
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