CaribHRForum

A performance management system is only as good as the people who use it. The system design can certainly shape and reinforce the desired behaviours while discouraging the poor work behaviours with minimal subjectivity but essentially the extent to which it delivers on its design is dependent on the users of the system. 

All the training, coaching, seminars, workshops, one to one assistance still yield managers crafting appraisals for employees that are not truly reflective of performance but are designed to meet the minimum target to receive a bonus. It seems that managers would rather alter appraisal scores and compromise the integrity of the system and all the subsequent triggers than to have an honest discussion with an employee about performance challenges.  

This is unfair to the employee who is probably none the wiser about the performance problems and this is unfair to the actual high performing candidates who now have to share their bonus pool with people who did not deserve it all due to the lack of courage by few managers. The said employee may not have the good fortune of having a developmental plan designed just for them to help them out of their performance slump. 

Senior Management then asks to see the distribution of performance scores across the company. When the results are skewed, everyone looks like a star but the overall company performance is poor. Then we all wonder about the disconnect. 

We suggest sanctions for the managers and holding them accountable for producing proof of high performance. HR must not be tolerant of poor appraisers. We must police the appraisers to ensure the integrity of the system. “Police” may be a strong word, but we have to actively support the managers all throughout the year to ensure they provide all the performance feedback necessary for optimum performance.  

As a Caribbean People, we must be comfortable with having difficult performance discussions with employees even if they are our friends or family outside of work. Historically, our Caribbean societies are close knit where our family, extended family, and friends are all interconnected and these relationships make it even more so challenging to have difficult performance talks. 

We must use tact, sincerity and facts to help these conversations along where we communicate the truth in manner that retains the relationship. 

Denise Ali

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Let us not be hasty, panic stricken and anxious to cut salaries and retrench staff across the board using a non-discriminate hatchet approach as a knee-jerk reaction to deal with the economic storm.

Instead, let us review all expenditures to determine where we can reduce or eliminate unnecessary costs in a very systematic way where the fall out is acceptable and or manageable. We must guard against and be quite wary of cutting expenditures that may negatively impact the growth of the business.  An aggressive growth strategy maybe now replaced with a conservative growth expectation which may satisfy the now risk-averse appetite.

As HR professionals, we must demonstrate creativity and innovation in how we reward staff since any salary increases and or bonuses may be  minimal or even non-existent.

One idea is to explore non-cash rewards as a key component in an employee’s compensation package during this uncertain economy. We need to counter the modest “cash box” with innovative meaningful and customised non-cash rewards.

Non-cash rewards connect with employees in a way that cash cannot. They help shape and reinforce positive company culture and core values that may manifest itself in sustainable productivity, high talent retention rates, and minimal absenteeism with dedicated, committed and loyal team members.

Non-cash rewards can be designed to be agile and very flexible to reward any desirable behaviour or outcome. There rewards are mostly instantaneous and this instant gratification is quite attractive to many employees, especially those in the millennial generation.

Non-cash rewards should be aligned and integrated to the larger total rewards philosophy to drive short term behaviours at first followed by long term performance improvements.

An advantage of non-cash rewards is that it can be customised to the recipient and to the behaviour being rewarded. A personal hand written note from the Chief Executive Officer or recognition on the company’s website or a customised certificate developed from publishing software and printed internally. The ideas are endless. An employee once asked for plant seeds to help start a kitchen garden. The variety of non-cash rewards makes it a very powerful tool that really speaks to the recipient in a personal way that cannot be monetised.  The employee must have choice.

The expectations must be clear, the desired behaviours or outcomes must be clearly understood. Real time visibility into rewards attainment is critical. The employees must be able to track their own progress along the reward attainment continuum in a transparent manner that is fair and equitable.

It is expected that the administration, accuracy and efficiency of the non-cash reward system must be spot on. This impacts the credibility and brand of the programme. It is critical that there must be no mistakes. Roles and responsibilities must be clear among all stakeholders. It must not be seen or perceived by the recipients to be onerous or time consuming but rather a pleasant enriching experience.

We need to reap the rewards of all the engagement work we would have been doing in the past. This is a turbulent time and we want our talent to stay with us. All the work we would have done in the past will come now have an opportunity to be clearly manifest itself.

More than ever, we need to hold on to our core values, as this reinforces our culture and guides us in making tough decisions especially when we need to prioritise among all “equally” important things. Our culture is the tie that binds us in an extricable way that creates our behavioural bedrock on which we must rely to see us through this storm.

Denise Ali
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“Around the world stock markets have fallen, large financial institutions have collapsed or been bought out, and governments in even the wealthiest nations have had to come up with rescue packages to bail out their financial systems” by Anup Shah on 9th December 2008 from http://www.globalissues.org/article/768/global-financial-crisis

The global financial crisis has impacted and continues to impact many lives.  Companies are forced to retrench staff, freeze or reduce salaries, place a hold on incentive and bonus payments, postpone and or invoke a benefit holiday. Companies are challenged on deciding which formula is the most appropriate for them. The Human Resource team is a key contributor to those decisions and the Communications department is critical in crafting and engineering the delivery of the messages to the stakeholders.

How do we see this current situation of lay offs around the world as an opportunity? In Trinidad, we have experienced great difficulty in recruiting talent. We have seen numerous articles on the “War for Talent”, but now the landscape is changing. Should we, depending on our own business situation, do the expected thing and freeze hiring across the board? Or do we freeze hiring only for the positions that are easy to source candidates for?

An idea is to adopt a non-conventional approach to the sudden availability of talent in the market. We can use the sudden flood of retrenched talent to bargain and negotiate cost efficient employment contracts with an emphasis on lifestyle benefits.

In Trinidad, the construction sector is in the decline, this means that the construction companies that evolved to satisfy and support the Government during the construction boom are now closing shop or drastically scaling down. This means that their support staff (Information Technology, Accounts, Human Resource, Marketing), will be looking for jobs early next year. We can tap into this resource to supplement our pool of talent from which to recruit. Now is the ideal time to hire supreme talent.

In Trinidad, I have observed a number of Trinidadian families returning home from living abroad, and this is also serving to soften the job market.

We need to take the initiative to fill our critical roles and or start developing our pipeline of quality candidates in preparation for the economic recovery. Talent pooling is an emergent opportunity that we must take advantage of during this turbulent time. We can network and use this time to build relationships with targeted talent aimed at filling our talent pool.

We can use this time to negotiate cost effective training agreements with third party vendors. We can use any operational downtime for internal training to ensure survival team members are cross trained on multiple portfolios. If we have to retrench staff, we should attempt to retrench using strong performance criteria, where the poor performers are weeded out first. The company’s performance management system must be strong, transparent, fair and rigorous to stand up to scrutiny if the retrenchment process is challenged in the Industrial Court.

We have had times of peace, followed by times of war. Famine and depression have followed booms and bull markets. We should start preparing or planning for the impending boom that is going to follow this time of financial crisis. As a Human Resource Professional, we should be alerting our businesses to the human capital opportunities for selective recruitment, development, performance filtering, retention with reasonable and manageable compensation and benefits.

Denise Ali
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In today’s work environment, there are a plethora of factors than impact our staff and this impact manifests itself in a variety of ways. One manifestation is the visible increase in absenteeism and the general lack of grave concern about being consistently absent especially where a visible pattern is evident.

According to the CIPD Absence Management Report 2008, the absence level in the UK public sector is an average of 9.8 days per employee per year and among private sector organisations the absence level is 7.2 days on average per employee. In my company, we have an average sick leave of 7.44 days per person for the year plus an overall vacation liability of 49% as at October 2008.

I am yet to find a definition of what is considered absence in the UK survey. We have so many different types of leave in Trinidad, so it is important to measure apples with apples. There are some organisations that have pooled all the types of leave into one pool bank.

Yes, in HR we say high absenteeism is usually an indicator about the staff engagement levels, and we are right. To address staff engagement in a time of global financial crisis with high inflation rates seems even more so challenging. We are unable to pay our staff competitive market rates considering inflation levels, as this leads to an increased company cost going forward and may even serve to further increase inflation rates.

Outside of addressing overall staff engagement as a long term solution to curbing absenteeism, I would like to consider some short term alternatives parallel to pursuing the long term initiatives.

It goes without saying that the organisation should first know the levels of absenteeism and the associated reasons as this would largely fuel the interventions selected. One should try to cost absenteeism. We have looked at the annual work days lost (all leave except vacation, national or jury duty) and used the average salary to calculate the cost of the loss time. One should also consider the cost or replacement staff, impact of error rate for temporary staff and overtime costs.

One idea is to pursue improving the quality of supervision by training and coaching the line on how to manage staff and employee relation issues as it relates to different staff demographics. We have found from our exit interviews that employees cited poor supervision as a fairly significant reason for excessive absenteeism.

Flexible working arrangements may help curb absenteeism. We found that traffic is so intolerable that employees say they just decide to take a day because they project severe traffic congestion on that day.

When absenteeism is high, the employees who actually show up for work usually have to defer their own vacation because they are busy doing double duty for other employees on excessive sick leave. Soon enough, the toll is too much and the support employees are also on excessive sick leave due to high stress. This increases the leave liability that requires active management to maintain it at acceptable levels. Hence an idea, maybe to back fill with experienced staff in the high risk areas and the use temporary or contract staff to fill the non-critical roles. Ensure all procedures are documented to facilitate easy staff rotation with minimal learning curve and error rate.

The Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) should be a constant to address any employee concerns that may also impact on absenteeism. One example of a candidate for EAP, is an alcoholic employee who is absent every Monday.

The company should also encourage healthy eating, healthy lifestyles and may even want to subsidise gym memberships to increase the probability of a health staff.

The company’s disciplinary procedure should also seek to address excessive absenteeism as well.

Some companies also pay the employee for perfect attendance at the year end. I would like to suggest a twist to this, to make the earning and payment frequency of such an incentive to be more frequent with an option to accrue the payment. For example, monitor and track attendance per quarter and make payments half yearly. Earn quarterly and paid half yearly gives the employee four opportunities per year to earn the incentive as opposed to earning yearly and getting paid yearly. The advantage is that if an employee is really ill, and must take a sick day, he/she can still be eligible for the incentive next quarter rather than waiting a whole year.

The absence type in scope for the above programme is suggested to include personal and sick leave. For my company this is a total 19 days per year. We propose to pay the employee an incentive worth ½ month of their salary per year if they achieve the target of zero leave. We propose that in scope employees exclude managers and executives.

We have done some initial figures on the above incentive programme and if 75% of the employees have no sick or personal leave at an incentive of two weeks salary yearly and eligible for the incentive using an average salary of the in scope staff, this works to much less that our actual loss in productive days. One should also consider when the behaviour of poor attendance corrects itself, what do we do with the incentive programme, stop it, or re-design it? Each company should do their own cost benefit analysis before an intervention like this is pursued.

These are just some tactical suggestions to our daily challenges that crop up for us to deal with and manage.

Denise Ali
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Well I guess it depends on who is asking this question.

We will explore this from the business perspective that is from the eyes of the line. (The People Management magazine of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development dated 18 September 2008 was used to help develop this article.

First of all HR should understand) what drives the business and what is their optimal operating model. In my organisation, we have adopted the Business Partnering model where the line is our first customer. This model was driven by the business and adopted to deliver on the needs of the business.

We also used the McKinsey 7-S framework, the strategy shapes, the structure, systems, leadership styles, shared values, skills and staff. We had to review all of it and the transition has been and is still is challenging. The main change is who is your primary customer and what this means for your role and the associated services.

We are expected to work through the line, where the line assumes prime responsibility for their staff and we advise and support the line. It is just as important for the line to understand what this means as it is for all HR personnel to understand what this means.

Gone are the days when the line says “HR wants to see you” to an employee with the intention of delivering some kind of reprim. This is now the role and function of the line consistent with the total management approach.

One of the first things that we did before moving to this model, external consultants conducted in-depth  surveys with all the major stakeholders to determine what they like about HR and what they would like to see in the future and what HR can do differently to be of strategic value. We needed to ask our customers what they want and what they thought of our current services.

We found that HR needed to be more responsive, more visible, and more accessible with faster response times with quality and error free work and related advice. Managers wanted HR to understand the business and the workforce where they can help management balance employee needs with business needs. Our customers want us to have an increased impact on the strategy of the business, but we need to illustrate that we deserve that recognition and role. Essentially our customers want HR to identify potential people implications early on so the business can mitigate against potential fall out by working with the people affected.

The line also needs tremendous support in time of change, either a system change, a structure change, a new product line or a new distribution channel.  Whatever the change; HR must show the line the required support by being present and providing solid advice and required tools to work through the challenges.

We also received feedback that our advice seems inconsistent at times as it depends on who an employee speaks with. This means that all HR must be on the same page and general internal training among the HR team is compulsory regardless of a specific role. In addition to knowledge sharing, it also helps create a positive learning environment for your HR team to learn, develop and grow.

The transition to the “Business Partnering” model has been painful but fruitful. The HR representatives had to make leap in their thinking, where they are more empowered to solve problems and suggest solutions as opposed to processing transactions. The majority of the administrative transactional activities were stripped away from the HR staff in the business and hived off to the shared service. All the roles in HR had to be revised with high expectations while ensuring the right skills existed among the selected candidates.

The HR team has been a great asset and I congratulate each of them on their willingness, cooperation and commitment as we continue to take on challenges and succeed – The Guardian HR Team (Guardian Holdings Group, Trinidad).

Denise Ali
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In today’s Trinidad Daily Express (14th October 2008), there is an article that speaks to the Inter-American Development Bank’s agreement to loan local companies US$6 billion. The IDB noted that the origin of economic crisis is outside of the Latin American and Caribbean region but can have potentially serious repercussions. They feel the need to protect the strides made by countries in the region to promote growth and reduce poverty.

Against this backdrop of a looming world economic crisis, companies need to be increasingly innovative in the use of scarce resources to remain viable.

How do we as Human Resource Professionals address these challenges? We have a situation where we are increasingly unable to pay market prices for talent that can hit the ground running with minimal training. Hence, we are often forced to compromise on the quality of hire and recruit the more inexperienced candidates (maybe inconsistent with our espoused people philosophy) with an intention to train to perform the job.

Then we run into another challenge: “where do we find the funds necessary to train?” One idea is to incorporate the concept of an internal faculty into the company’s training philosophy.

An internal faculty is based on using the internal employees who are experts in their fields or possess other skills and talents to train the employees with performance gaps.

HR can review the training needs assessments to determine the different interventions required and then match that with the internal skills inventory of the employees. HR can identify potential candidates for the internal faculty and provide them with guidelines, roles, expectations, outcomes, amount of volunteer time required etc. The potential candidates can then decide if they are willing to assist.

This provides an avenue for the employees to communicate and get to know each other as a networking opportunity. It also affords the experienced employees an opportunity to be recognised, showcase their knowledge and share it with other employees in a structured manner.  More importantly, it decreases the cash out flow due to training and supposedly minimises the training gap. There are some concerns with this approach as one maybe unsure about the quality of training being delivered or the manner it maybe delivered.

In addition to benefiting from the company’s internal faculty, one can also investigate offers of free training. For example, the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago provides free lectures, workshops and seminars aimed at educating the public on finance. The Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business in Trinidad has a free seminar on October 22nd 2008 entitled “The Economic Partnership Agreement”. The National Insurance Board and the Board of Inland Revenue all have free seminars on national benefits and income tax laws respectively.

If the company must seek an external vendor to provide necessary training, always negotiate group rates with agreements on key training outcomes.

Developing an Internal faculty, exploration of free sessions and skilled negotiations are just a few ways to address some of the challenges that may be coming our way or for some of us the challenges are already in our back yard.

Denise Ali

Current issues in the newspaper refer to poor public health services, serious traffic congestion, spiralling crime rate and double digit inflation. What can we do as Human Resource Professionals to assist our employees in dealing with the current socio-economic conditions?

The newspapers have numerous articles on the public health care services in Trinidad, where citizens are reporting on the poor services received and the medical professionals reporting on the staff shortage, poor facilities, equipment and scarce resources and where the Government, by way of the Minister of Health has continued to debate these allegations.

In today’s Trinidad Daily Express (September 30th 2008), there are two articles that refer to poor health care. One article refers to lack of follow up when baby Justin Paul was burnt in his incubator at Mt Hope Maternity Hospital. Another article speaks to a young boy’s scholarship achievement and he attributes his inspiration and choice of study (maxillofacial surgery) to his brother who suffers with cerebral palsy. His brother has been placed on awaiting list for surgery for three years at Mt Hope, so he hopes to be qualified to reconstruct his brother’s jaw.

How do we protect our employees from suffering similar fate? Quite often, the view to these issues tend to be one-dimensional but it should be noted that a 360 approach may yield substantial results in the long term health of our employees.

We can explore making arrangements with private health institutions and our health insurance providers to ensure our employees get the care needed with the adequate health care coverage. We have negotiated to increase our major medical limit to five million renewable over three years. Also, review the preventative schedule of benefits to ensure adequacy and or acceptability against the premiums being paid. The key recommendation is to discuss needs and costs with the various stakeholders to get the best deal possible to assist employees in times of a medical emergency.

Another option is to organise a subsidised or free vaccination programme within your organisation for the employees. This may encourage employees to get vaccinated since they would not have to be inconvenienced to visit the local health centre and they can enjoy decreased costs or none at all. This preventative measure may result in decreased absenteeism levels.

We can also encourage our employees to live healthy lives to avoid lifestyle diseases. There are some diseases we may be predisposed too and others we may increase the probability of its occurrence when we smoke, drink alcohol excessively, lack of exercise, improper diet, excessive stress and the like. We can engage the services of a nutritionist and or a dietician to assist our employees and their families with eating right. We can also subsidise the fees to attend a local gym to encourage exercise.

An employee assistance provider (EAP) can also be quite helpful by targeting stress areas and also by providing therapy sessions on an individual basis for those that may need it. The EAP is a great network of resources that can be tapped to help improve our employee’s ability to capitalise on day to day character building opportunities.

Many articles have been written on the benefits of a mother’s breast milk to her baby; yet, we ask that our new mothers return to work after three months of giving birth. Returning to a workplace that provides a private area or at least twenty minutes to express breast milk would encourage a new mother to express milk to feed her baby and thus decrease the probability of partial or full transition to formula. Breast milk is said to improve the health of the baby and a healthy baby means that the mummy will spend less time worrying or by the Paediatrician and more productive time at the office. This may also re bound to the claims made against the company’s health plan and thus improves the claims loss ratio.

One final suggestion is a committee that is focussed on encouraging healthy lives, bodies and mind. At Guardian, we have a committee called “Life Pulse” and the committee promotes healthy living through hosting fun walks/runs, hosting various health weeks, where employees can get screened for specific illnesses, sight tests, cholesterol tests, blood sugar testing, blood pressure testing and the like.

The above are merely a few ideas and suggestions to provide care to our employees. The suggestions may serve to build employee commitment and engagement where employees exercise increasing levels of discretionary behaviour and result in improved productivity.

Denise Ali

Human Resource Professionals have a responsibility to advise our clients (Line Managers) on the practices of good industrial relations.

This role has many challenges. There are times one may come across a Line Manager that really grasps the importance of managing people and does not shy away from difficult or character building conversations with employees.

Then there are times, when one may come across the Line Manager who complains about how they are doing the job of the HR department and refuses to accept responsibility for their own hiring decisions.

I recall one manager who opted to hire an employee from a sister company, after being warned about peculiar behaviour by this said employee. The manager experienced many challenges with the employee. However, nothing was well documented or even properly discussed with the employee according to the rules of good industrial relations. When the manager had enough of the alleged poor behaviour, the manager wanted the employee out of the department. At the late stage, the manager sought to involve HR to dismiss the said employee.

Does the above incident sound familiar to any of our readers? Too often, our line managers are hasty, they don’t document any critical incidents and they want to terminate at will.

Training the line on the value of HR is a critical component to the line manager’s success. The important of documentation, how to have performance related discussions and how progressive discipline works are crucial elements of such training. Usually, the line is more receptive to such training when they are the reason the organisation must pay an ex-employee hundreds of thousands of dollars for a wrongful dismissal. Sometimes, the consequences have to become a reality first before we can truly appreciate the value of HR.

Denise Ali
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According to a CIPD  report in 2003, one of the keys to managing performance through people is triggering discretionary behaviour in employees so that employees go the “extra mile” for the organisation.

People are more likely to engage in positive discretionary behaviour when they feel motivated, are satisfied with their jobs and are committed to their employer. These outcomes are usually a result of many factors. One factor relates to the Front Line Manager and if they embrace their people management role and how well they execute this function.

The People Management function is often thought to be the sole responsibility of Human Resources and any people problem a manager experienced, the employee would be quickly referred to Human Resources. This view is quickly changing to one that holds the Line Manager responsible for people management as well.

People Management comprises activities like employee relations, performance appraisals, coaching, mentoring, developing, training, recruitment, absence management, work life balance, career management, problem solving, listening, communicating, enforcing policies and the list can go on and on.

Promotion from within is an excellent motivational tool (career mobility) and organisations sought and still seek today to ensure a proper balance of internal promotion (consistency) with external recruitment (creativity). However, when an employee is promoted to a manager role because of the great job they did in the old position, hoping they will perform equally well in the new position regardless of the fact that the new position requires a different set of knowledge, skills and abilities, this leads to a misfit and the results are disastrous to all concerned. You gain a bad manager and lose a great technical expert.

In the past, the Line commented that the people management activities made up the Human Resource function and “why Human Resources wanted to pass on their work to them, they have enough work as it is, no time to manage people”.

How do we move from the Line expressing the above sentiment to a complete turnaround of embracing the people management function with complete ownership and accountability?

One of the first things, I would recommend, is to refine the role of the manager with a specific emphasis on people management and decreasing their transactional role as a normal worker.  Traditionally the job details for a manager include processing duties like that of his /her employees plus the management duties. Hence, a re-definition of the job, the expectations and the requirements to fill the role with an emphasis on the behavioural competencies are needed. Keep in mind, this must be consistent with the company’s core values and people philosophy. Anything we do in Human Resource, organisational alignment is critical.

We don’t have the luxury of starting from a clean slate, what do we do with the candidates in manager’s roles who are not best suited for those jobs? Well, we systematically compare their performance and their tool kit of skills, abilities, behavioural competencies and knowledge to what is listed in the re-defined job. We may also want to solicit some feedback on the people management aspects from their staff. This can be anonymously done and it would serve as a great source of data on the actual people management skills of the manager. The results will help identify varying degrees of job fit or gaps. A decision will have to be made on which candidates can be trained to perform or maybe from the onset, a candidate maybe seen to be a clear square peg in a round hole and may perform better in a highly technical role. It is important to note that the manager who does not perform well in the people management role but was great in the technical role may be suffering great internal chaos and may welcome reverting to one’s comfort zone.

By now, we would have identified candidates that need to be trained on how to perform their people management role. In my company, we developed a “Management Development Programme” which is aimed at training our managers according to our re-defined manager profile (emphasis on people management). Our programme is staffed by an internal faculty, that means our own Executives and selected managers are intended to deliver the training. This allows for increased networking among the staff and Executives. It gives the Executives an opportunity to showcase their knowledge of the respective discipline or area of expertise and also provides a sense of satisfaction knowing that they are helping the staff develop.  The key about the training is not only about the “what” but more importantly about the “how”. The “how” speaks to the soft skills training of handling performance challenges, grievances, discipline problems, communication and the like.

Measures of success may range from turnover rates with reasons, absenteeism rates, employee feedback scores, number of employee relation issues escalated for resolution at a higher level, percentage of training gap among team, percentage of new employees confirmed on time among others that can be aligned to one’s won situation.  In my company, we have a 180 degree feedback form completed by a manager’s direct reports on the manager and we also include people measures and targets on the people perspective of their respective balanced scorecards.

Line managers should specifically pay attention to conducting frequent quality performance appraisals where performance feedback is exchanged periodically. Training, coaching, guidance, involvement and communication are key areas for the manager to invest time in. One’s direct reports must feel a sense of openness to discuss matters easily. Work life balance is becoming increasingly important and as such should be respected by the manager and finally recognition is critical, a simple “thank you, great job” does not cost much. It will be wonderful if the organisation has a reward and recognition programme that is easy to use without any bureaucracy and too many authorisations to slow down the process. Rewards should immediately or as close to the action being rewarded.

Managers are people too  and as much as they have a huge responsibility of managing their staff, the organisation must recognise that the managers also have needs. Too often, the organisation may take the middle level managers for granted, where they are expected to turn stone into cheese with little or minimal resources. Lack of resources, unrealistic deadlines, with conflicting tasks and deliverables only serve to manifest itself negatively in the way the employees are treated by the same manager is stressed.  Organisations are well-advised to listen to their managers and treat them in much the same way they would like them to treat the general staff.

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