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Globally, 76.3% of women age 25 to 34 worked in 1998 versus 34% in 1950[1]. This increase continues into 2008 and we as employers and HR Professionals in the Caribbean region need to address this gender skew in our employee population.

At Guardian Holdings we have 78% females and only 22% males. At Scotia Bank Trinidad[2], 73% of their workforce is females. These statistics provide the employer with key information to craft a variety of work options to accommodate the increasing number of women in the workplace. One may even look at the age demographic to determine how many women are at the child bearing age.

We all speak about a war for talent and how important it is to retain our human capital. Our work conditions, benefits and work options maybe tailored to this large group of women in our workforce and thus prove to be a significant retention strategy.

Child care is a major concern for mothers in the workplace especially with the increasing difficulty to find trustworthy care givers. The mother either depends on her extended family or a nursery to provide the care when she is at work and or the school depending on the age of the child. However, when these options are not available, the mother may have to miss work and stay home.

This is an opportunity for an employer, especially one with a two thirds women majority in the population, to provide the needed assistance. In Trinidad and Tobago, the 2007 budget clearly identified child care solutions as essential for the development of the domestic social sector and improved national productivity. The Income Tax Act (as amended by the Finance (No.2) Act of 2007) allows for deduction for expenditure actually incurred for the construction or setting up a child care / homework facility for the employees’ dependants (minors) up to a maximum of $500,000 TT for each facility, not exceeding 3 million TT in the aggregate in the year on income.

The employer may structure the arrangement in a variety of ways that may range from absorbing the full cost to partial subsidy to outsourcing to an already set up facility. This may depend on the cost of facility, availability of space, cost to maintain and operate the facility while considering the benefits, both tangible and intangible.

A tangible benefit maybe decreased absenteeism rates. This can calculated using the current absenteeism rate[3] for the women[4] in the organisation as a baseline with the proposed decrease in absenteeism post facility.

Usually a parent has to leave work to pick up their child/children from school or nursery and drop off somewhere else then return to work. This delay in time may also be avoided with the provision of this facility. Even if the facility is not on-site but off site, because the facility is operated by the employer, the time to pick up the children may coincide with the end of a workday. The employee may continue to be productive without the interruption after lunch. This can also be monetised[5].

Retention rates may increase especially among the specific group of employees this benefit will assist.

The intangible benefit of a parent feeling at ease knowing that his / her children are close by and or well taken care of. This will allow for improved productivity per employee[6].

The increase of single parent homes is also significant in Trinidad and Tobago, where the mother must function in many roles to raise their children to become productive young adults. As a result, there are competing demands for her time.

An employer may consider offering the options of flexitime, telework for specific jobs or re-locating the employee to a location closer to home[7]. For example, a job like an Underwriter may be able to work from home. We have been doing a pilot with this work option and it has been working well for us thus far. The candidates who are involved in the pilot are so appreciative and very thankful. They have increased their output because they are no longer bogged down to answer operational queries and are able to work when they want at home. It is important to have definite parameters for this work arrangement with clear guidelines on reporting with periodic visits to the office.

Mothers of young babies are encouraged to breast feed their babies. However, after three months, the mother has to return to work, which makes breastfeeding challenging. The mother has the option of expressing milk and storing it, however, at the workplace, there may not be a dedicated private space to facilitate this activity or a refrigerator to store the milk or even the employee may not be permitted the time needed ( 20 minutes) to express the milk.

An employer may take the opportunity to provide a space, time, and a place to store the milk to assist the mother and the child to continue reaping the benefits of breast milk.

Breast fed children are less ill and as such the mothers will take less time off to care for their infants. The improved health of the children also decreases the claims made against the company’s health insurance resulting is lower health care costs. The employee maybe more productive, have greater loyalty and increased morale.

The employer may boast about all the family friendly policies to gain brand equity and be positioned as a employer of choice. Thereby, improving the organisation’s ability to attract and retain the shrinking talent pool.

[1] According to the U.S Department of Labour: Changes in Women’s Work Participation

[2] Revealed by Martin De Gannes at AFETT Child Care Symposium on 14th July 2008

[3] Absenteeism can be monetized by using an average salary for target group multiplied by the number of days plus cost of any replacements for the periods of absence.

[4] Mothers with minor dependants

[5] One can find the average hourly rate of pay multiplied by the number of times this occurs for the month

[6] This is challenging to track but not impossible. One can look at the number of objectives, deliverables or targets achieved before and after this service. If the organization uses the balanced scorecard, it will be easier to track.

[7] This will be applicable to employers with branches spread geographically through out the island

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I read an excerpt from Claire Raines’s book “Connecting Generations” (2002) and found it to be outstanding in describing the characteristics of each generation — she is spot on.

However, I have found that our new recruits who fit the Millennial profile (age) with first degrees have certain characteristics that have proven to be a management challenge to generation-x managers.

These new graduates have just received their Bachelors degrees and are already aiming to their Masters Degree right away with little or no work experience.

When they enter the new organisation, their department is populated with a cross section of generations working at various tasks; this poses a diversity management challenge in itself. Apart from the obvious differences, the attitude, work ethic and expectations are so far removed from the other generations.

With minimal work experience, they expect to be placed in high level jobs. Organisations need to determine the candidate’s ability to do the job at a lower level first before entrusting the candidate with higher order responsibilities. They think they are much better than they really are.

On way of managing such situations, is to give the candidate projects that they believe they can deliver, while allowing for time to do any necessary re-work. I have found, after much time, and many excuses for non-completion, an admittance of ignorance and a request for assistance with a humbling demeanour usually follows.

The humble, open, attitude is welcomed by all co-workers and now the substantive on the job learning can take place without the inhibitors of “feeling of this is beneath me”. This usually builds competence, experience and ability.

The notion or the perception of a false sense of ability coupled with an air of arrogance can be addressed with a sobering dose of “on the job reality”.

Compensation is another high expectation that follows from an inflated sense of ability. Millennials benchmark themselves against their peers and expect the same status and or compensation even if they as individuals are not as competent in their respective fields as their peers. Long ago, I (Gen X) was told by my parents (baby boomers) “don’t look at what other people have, you don’t know what they had to do to get it”.
The Baby Boomers in our organisation also complained to HR about the lack of manners by the young millenial employees. The comment was “they don’t even say good morning, good day, please, thank you, excuse me”. We are in the process of addressing this in our orientation and diversity management workshops leveraging off our Guardian Angel programme here at Guardian Life.

The older generation considered it an honour to have a job and worked for work’s sake. Baby Boomers characteristically have worked hard because their self-image was based on their career. The teenagers and the twenty something year olds are in the “no fear” category, they are not motivated by threats, progressive discipline or loss of job and this comes across as arrogant and disrespectful to the other generations.

Claire Raine identified unique and compelling messages fed to the Millennials. They are: be smart, you are special, don’t discriminate, 24-7 connectivity, achieve now and serve your community. As I reflect on this, I tell my one year old son, he is smart and special all the time and I chose a pre-school for him to start attending in 2010 by placing his name on a waiting list since he was one month old.

In conclusion, the key is to get to know each individual and what drives him/her to be able to determine the best work plan and style that will achieve on time deliverables. It would be interesting to know if any other organisations in the region experienced similar behaviour.

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Competitive pay and benefits can get talent in the door, but can the money keep the talent? When employers demonstrate a commitment to work life balance, commitment to providing career development and training opportunities, with a supportive flexible working environment, caring attitude towards staff and a strong balanced emotionally intelligent management and leadership, they have found the key to retaining high-potential employees.

Often I hear employees say all they want is more money and they will be motivated. I had a conversation with a senior engineer recently and the discussion started off by him saying HR people need to understand that money is the ultimate motivator, just pay people more.

I, like Herzberg, believe money to be a satisfier not necessarily a motivator. After an employee is being paid competitively, any incremental increase in money will not necessarily translate into any related incremental increase in performance. One person’s capacity is finite and one usually has an equilibrium point of effort they exert to achieve company targets, objectives and tasks. What do I mean by “equilibrium point”, you know when someone has peaks and depressions of performance, due to various reasons, well they eventually return to their normal work pace.

Our challenge as HR professionals is to optimise employee’s performance by moving their equilibrium work pace upwards. This means that we work towards achieving sustainable high levels of quality performance by fully engaging the employee and thereby retaining talent. The phrase “fully engaging the employee” is a compounded concept that is as a result of many contributing factors, some of them were mentioned in the first paragraph above.

Towers Perrin’s 2007 Global Workforce Study explored the drivers of workforce engagement and noted that although relationships with managers are important, the actions of senior leadership and workplace programmes hold even greater weight. I will share my thoughts on the line manager’s role.

Line managers and their ability to manage people is a current challenge. This has been brought about by promoting technical competence into managerial positions, thereby losing a good technical resource and possibly gaining a bad manager. More often, these newly appointed technical resources are not equipped with the tools necessary to manage people. Yes, sometimes we make grave errors in using wrong criteria for promotion and we further compound the error by not providing the necessary training intervention and then we expect stellar performance from this promoted candidate.

The first challenge after finding yourself in this situation is to get the managers to accept people management as their responsibility. This message must come from the top and continuously be supported by all the senior Executives. The managers must not be allowed to abdicate their people management role to Human Resource. They also must not use HR as a “scapegoat” where they often say “It is not me, that is a HR policy, HR set that rule”. The Line Managers often want HR to write a rule about everything under the sun. This way, the line can refer to rule 3.2 under subsection 4 of policy x as the reason why they cannot do something.

I suggest a comprehensive training programme comprising of seminars, workshops, role plays, and mentors supported by the performance management system to help drive change among the manager group.

The training I played a part in develping looks at thirteen sections. Section one focuses on the big picture, role definition, organisational culture, reason for their team and managing upwards. Section two addresses the issue of transitioning from employee to manager, followed by managing tasks and objectives, setting targets, managing and measuring team performance. Section four looks at leadership, styles of leadership, and how to vary styles according to staff demographics (generation, age, gender, etc…). The other areas are customer service, networking, time management, delegation, coaching, industrial relations, using the HRIS and performance management with emphasis on managing poor performance. These areas should also be slanted and aligned to the strategic direction of the organisation.

In addition to the training, we designed a 180 degree feedback form be completed by the managers’ direct reports. The form was designed according to the ideal profile of a manager in my organisation. The ideal profile also informs the promotion criteria and the selection criteria and is also used as the benchmark when conducting training needs assessments. The form was designed to produce one single score and this is used as a measure in their people perspective of their respective scorecards.

We identified a number of measures that are indicative of the Line Manager’s people management skills. One of which is the number of employee relation issues that have been escalated to the division head and or HR which could have been handled at the managerial level. Other measures are the percentage of leave taken, the turnover (for specific reasons) within the department, and number of employees nominated for and received spot awards, and quarterly awards. The criteria for these awards are also aligned to the organisation’s desired culture and strategic direction.

One should also have baseline figures for these measures before using them as legitimate measures to track progress.

We have also re-organised HR to provide an increased business focus and support to the line managers in carrying out their duties.

In effect, when a decision is made to empower and train the line to have total responsibility and accountability for managing staff, the rest of the employees in the organisation have to align themselves to support that decision. The Mckinsey Seven S model is a useful tool to ensure all areas are addressed.

At the end of my conversation with the Engineer, after we exchanged stories about managers and how they manage, he admittedly declared that when his manager behaves in a certain way, it encourages him to surf the internet all day regardless of his high salary, positive upbringing and work ethic.

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How does an organisation gain buy-in and support from the general employee popuation about adopting the BSC?

First thing employees want to know, what is in it for me? Different staff levels are interested in varying benefits. The general employees want to know if this system will afford them more money or any added benefits at least within the Trinidad context.

There must an intimate understanding of the employee population, the demographics, variations of likes and dislikes, the culture, expectations and work ethic. This understanding will help inform a stakeholder analysis which will be used to design a strategy to gain employee buy-in. All presentations must be customised to the target audience.

I suggest starting with identifying the gaps and the weaknesses of the previous performance management system citing some of the employee comments validating the dissatisfaction. This could be used as a tactical platform to partially support the adoption of the BSC. One should emphasise the advantages of the BSC, especially its use as a strategic management tool for the senior management team and its use as an increased objective way to measure performance for the general employee population.

From my own work using and implementing the BSC, the employees who supported the BSC implementation are the ones who are the high performers. They welcome a system that objectively measures their achievement of objectives using agreed upon metrics and targets with reliable and valid data delivery systems. These star performers noted that in the past the traditional performance management system was unable to easily identify poor performers. Hence all employees were generally rated high or at least towards the right of the bell curve for performance ratings resulting in a skewed curve.

The employees who are unsure about their own performance are the ones who are hesitant to adopt the BSC since their performance outcomes will be under increased scrutiny and as a result will impact their annual bonuses.

During my work, I also noted reluctance on the part of a number of appraisers to confront poor performance issues with staff. This resulted in poor performers with a satisfactory performance rating under the traditional performance management system. The BSC provides more rigour and discipline to managing performance using agreed upon measures and goals, thereby supporting the appraisers to rely less on their subjective opinion and more on undisputed facts. Yes, on some occasions, there are shades of grey, but this is another issue and I can talk later on how I have dealt with these real challenges using the BSC on a daily basis.

One of the key strategies I suggest is to identify the informal leaders in the organisation across the organisation and gain their buy-in first and use them as change agents to reinforce the benefits of the BSC and to support and embrace the BSC adoption.

In addition, to constant communication, posters, workshops, seminars, customised presentations, segmenting staff and identifying the “what’s in it for me” per stakeholder group, giveaways to keep the BSC top of mind, I suggest a game show. Of course, this will have to be culture specific and appropriate and supported by the leadership. From my own work, I designed a game show that built on the elements of “Jeopardy”. There were a series of questions that were disseminated on a weekly basis about 4-6 weeks prior to the actual game show event. Employees would submit their answers and be awarded prizes weekly. The questions were all about understanding the company, especially the BSC and some questions were quite silly and culture specific. From the weekly winners, there were selected finalists who competed against each other by answering a series of questions with the President as the host.

The actual game show resulted in lots of laughter, increased knowledge of the BSC, increased awareness of company issues and a curiosity about the BSC and the business in general among the employee population.

I hope you enjoyed this article. I will be writing on other topics, all based on my experience, after all there are enough text books out there to satisfy the most avaricious appetite for learning.

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This is Denise Ali’s first post on CaribHRForum.

This article seeks to document and share my experience and knowledge with designing and implementing scorecard systems in organisations.

The first order of business before embarking on a scorecard implementation is to conduct a thorough literature review regardless of how much you think you know about the BSC.

The literature review will inform or validate the choice to implement the BSC. The organisation should be very clear on if they are using the BSC as performance management tool or as a strategic management tool and they must understand the difference and its implications.

The BSC implementation is not the whole responsibility of the Human Resource department. One organisation actually placed this responsibility initially within HR and the results were disastrous especially since the entire leadership team were not in full support of the BSC. An Executive Sponsor should be appointed to drive the implementation. Many case studies cited the formation of a steering committee as being very helpful to dislodge obstacles and to drive acceptance and buy-in.

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