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On Using CaribHRForum


I recently had a conversation with a young professional who told me that she wanted to get find a job in Human Resources. I met her through CaribHRForum — the online discussion group hosted by my firm, Framework Consulting.

It struck me that there were ways in which she and others were not taking advantage of the forum, and the opportunity it affords someone like her who was resourceful enough to learn how to design her own website — (which she did quite capably.)

But I also thought of the wider membership of the forum, which at the moment numbers some 160 users. How can a Caribbean Human Resource professional, perhaps a member of HRMATT, HRMAJ, HRMAB or HRPAG use the forum to supplement their membership in these organizations?

I have been a member of discussion lists of all kinds since the mid 1990’s, when they came into vogue. I joined the ones that I was interested in, and when the technology allowed anyone to create their own group, I jumped at the chance. Since then, I have created many such lists strictly for the purposes on enabling groups to communicate via email with each other with a stroke of the return key.

What newer members to lists such as CaribHRForum don’t know is that the behaviour from list to list is more or less the same, and that the best way to take advantage of them is to decide what one wants from their membership.

Discussion lists enable an online community to discuss topics of interest in a way that is unique. The technology is simple. Email sent to a single address is immediately dispersed to everyone on the list, enabling a conversation across thousands of miles to take place in seconds.

For a dispersed group of professionals such as those in CaribHRForum, it is the only way that currently exists to pull professionals in the field together. The remarkable thing is that the cost of membership is absolutely free.

Typically, a discussion list is dominated by the talkative 10%, and CaribHRForum is no exception. These are the members who send out the most information, ask the most questions, and carry the debate on hot issues.

The majority of members “lurk” in the background — following a discussion, but not actively participating.

My recommendation to users is that they decide what their goals are, and whether or not they include objectives related to the management of their personal brand.

Most users would say that they want to keep up on recent HR trends, while other would say that they enjoy the online companionship of their colleagues across the region.

For these users, merely lurking is sufficient.

For those who have a goal like my friend’s however, more activity and planning is required. If a member is interested in using the forum for networking, it is best if they come out of the shadows and become known.

Two questions immediately come up. What should someone aim to be known as, and how can they use their membership on CaribHRForum for accomplish the goal?

The answer is simpler than the question sounds.

First, answer the question “How I’d like to be known is as …….” Possible examples are:

– an expert in recruiting

– a fan of the balanced scorecard

– a free spirit

– a practitioner with multiple interests

– a superb networker

– a great writer

– an HR professional who keeps up on current trends

– a job-seeker

– a young, hot talent

Whatever the goal might be, CaribHRForum can be used to accomplish it.

At the moment, some of the most influential HR practitioners across the region are members of the list.

My recommendation is that a member of the list who has a specific objective should think about how they can promote, initiate and engage in conversations about their topic of interest on the list.

Some simple activities include:

– asking questions to find others who share the interest

– bringing up related issues to spur on conversation

– inviting others who share the interest to join the list

– finding the latest research on the topic and sharing it with the list

These are some simple suggestions that can be implemented without major effort, but the return is tremendous, due to the kinds of people that are members of the list.

The investment might not pay off immediately, but over time, a user who invests the time and then suddenly requires assistance can turn to a group of friends, rather than strangers, for direct support. In this way, the forum can act as any member’s safety net, and the more they invest in their relationship with the members, the more they can rely on their help when the time comes.

P.S. Pardon my manners — all HR professionals are invited to join CaribHRForum by visiting www.fwconsulting.com/CaribHRForum

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Podcast Interview with a Trini in Jamaica –Roger Bell

Roger Bell is the General Manager of Confectionery & Snacks (Jamaica,) a subsidiary of Associated Brands (Trinidad). He has found success in leading a Jamaican company, in a country that he had never visited before assuming the post.

He has spent the last four years running a Jamaican company, and learning a lot about what works, vs. what doesn’t

In this podcast, I interviewed Roger in his offices in Spanish Town and he shares some of what he has learned in his personal crash programme.

To receive the report, send email to fwc-triniexec@aweber.com.

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Honey, sweetheart, darling, babes

Coming back to work in the Caribbean has meant getting used to using words of endearment that professionals in developed countries have long eschewed, including “honey”, “sweetheart”, “darling” and “babes”, and even male versions such as “boy” and “man.”

As a professional working in the U.S., I learned long ago that such words are to be completely and entirely avoided. The professional women who took me under their wings when I was a fledgling employee made sure that I learned my lesson in this regard (thank you Mary, Beverly, Kandi, Celeste, Janice…).

I also learned the importance of the firm handshake as a form of generic greeting in the workplace. The rules were dicey back then about how male to be, as I remember a colleague of mine pointing out that I needn’t hold open the door for her, as she certainly was not interested in being treated any differently from the men around me.

Working in the Caribbean is quite different. Warmth and friendship is felt in the embrace of a boss, friendship in a familiar greeting and respect in how we introduce each other to friends and colleagues.

This all takes some getting used to, as these behaviours are exactly the ones I learned to avoid in my early days working at AT&T in New Jersey.

While I do not want to offend, I don’t miss for one minute that cautious feeling I knew in the U.S. workplace, darkened by threats of sexual harassment, racial prejudice and politically incorrect behaviour. My hope is that we in the Caribbean can learn to be sensitive to others preferences, without having to become fearful and paralysed by the threat of a lawsuit.

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Treating Suppliers and Vendors — an Indicator of a Culture

I recall doing business with a company that refused to honour a signed contract.

The CEO let me know in no uncertain terms that the signature of the Chairman held no water because “he didn’t know what he was doing,” and that “I should know that.” It was an ugly situation, and I have done no business with that company since then, but their advertising that is filled with messages about how great their company culture is still reminds me of the disparity.

I have always remembered this event, and it’s led me to conclude something about companies: that they are good as how they treat their vendors.

Why so?

Mahatma Gandhi said: “The best test of a civilised society is the way in which it treats its most vulnerable and weakest members.”

I say that the corporate corollary is “the best test of a well-developed corporate culture is the way in which it treats its vendors.”

Not shareholders, employees or customers… but vendors: suppliers, contractors and consultants.

The same company I mentioned above had a habit of beating down every price that I ever presented to it. I sometimes felt like a thief trying to get away with something, rather than a business partner.

They were proud of the fact that they put their customers first, and would very quickly interrupt a meeting with a vendor to meet with a customer who had a problem of some kind. After all, they put customers first.

However, I think they missed the point of the customer revolution, as do many companies. The point is not that customers come first, but it is that the company can treat every human being that it engages in business with respect, dignity and care. The revolution was meant to show companies that focusing on themselves only resulted in poor performance in the mid to long term.

In this sense, vendors are no less important than customers.

And, in a way, vendors are among the weakest members of a company’s stakeholders as they must wait for payment from companies that lose invoices, have inefficient bureaucracies, force cuts in prices to make greater profits, and treat suppliers like thieves.

The joke is that I am also reluctant to do business with the same company as a customer, and would think twice before recommending them to a friend. I have heard other vendors express the same sentiment about the treatment they received from the company, and I imagine that they, too, would feel the same way.

I imagine that if they understood that we are all connected, and that here in the Caribbean the small size of our economies means that we cannot hide from each other, our corporations would act very differently towards its suppliers.

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Networking vs. Building a Network

It seems that people who get caught up in the idea of “networking” can get confused about the goals of their efforts.

It’s easy to think that it has something to do with socializing, selling, making friends or liming. These activities all have their place, but they don’t accomplish much in the long term.

Instead, the purpose of the activity is to “build a network.”

The word “build” is important here. It implies the slow but steady expansion of something that starts off small, but eventually turns into something substantial.

Of course, once the network is built, it must be carefully pruned, fed and maintained to help it thrive. In this way, a good networker is more of a careful gardener than anything else, who has the patience to allow small actions to produce large results over time.

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Press Release — Upcoming Customer Experience Speech

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A NEW FOCUS ON CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE COMING

Companies are betting that a new focus on “experience” will help them better serve local customers

One of the major trends in the world of customer service seems to making in roads in Jamaican corporations. Instead of merely serving customers, companies are hoping that by going after a precise experience they will be able to motivate employees, raise standards and provide customers with more of what they are looking for in their interactions with companies.

Local companies such as Scotiabank, Cable and Wireless and Victoria Mutual have all recently appointed high level executives in charge of “Customer Experience.” They understand what many companies are trying to grasp: the customer’s experience is impacted by every single “touch-point” or interaction they have with a company, including their website, the front-line staff, how they pay their bills or make deposits, and even what they see in their advertising.

On November Wednesday 21st, Francis Wade of Framework Consulting will be addressing the Jamaica Customer Service Association’s International Certificate Graduation, and will be describing this important shift in emphasis that is already positively impacting service standards in the Caribbean region.

According to Wade, “Employees across the board are finding it much easier to appreciate this new approach. Companies are finding that they can tap into an employee’s understanding of “experience” more easily than they can describe to them what happens in some far away company they have never visited.”

“Managers that are still talking about Walt Disney or the Ritz Carlton are speaking over employee’s heads, and are having a hard time relating to their daily experience of the service they experience from their minibus driver, post office, bank and grocery store.”

By adapting this new best practice, local companies are able to do what many companies around the world have done, and start with a set of “target experiences” that the company has decided will support its brand. Once these experiences are defined, they are translated into standards at each “touch-point.” Employees are taught how to deliver these experiences consistently, and how to monitor the customer’s reaction with a combination of advanced interpersonal skills and personal intuition.

Websites are tweaked, process are changed –all in order to produce the particular experiences. Wade said “Managers who think that they can motivate employees by speaking about the service they experienced at their last trip to Sandals are mistaken. They don’t appreciate that a major reason that front-line employees deliver better service in North American companies, for example, is that they have many, many examples of good service that they have seen first hand.”

“They merely have to copy the service levels that they see every day. In Jamaica, employees cannot do the same, and their job is much, much harder.”
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The Young Future Busines Leader: An Endangered Species? part 2 of 2


EARLY BIRD RECRUITMENT (FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGE)

Are the universities taking a proactive role in identifying what the island’s companies need and grooming their students to be the answers to that need? Are they going out there and soliciting relationships and identifying opportunities within companies that perhaps have been overlooked? With all these upper-level positions to be filled, surely if a serious collaborative, detailed, and comprehensive internship program designed to TRAIN and prepare graduates for certain management roles was put in place, wouldn’t that person then upon finishing their degree be able to step into that role with at least some familiarity with the company, culture, and position requirements? This requires forward-thinking five and ten years ahead by today’s leaders, to determine what the leadership needs will be and developing talent to fulfill those forecasted needs accordingly.

Benchmarking Successful Human Resource Management

Jamaican companies want leaders, but they are not cultivating them. I will soon have an MBA, beyond the required BS/BA degree for most jobs, but the ads will usually indicate needing 5 to 10 years experience for things the U.S. requires maybe 1 to 3 years experience for. I believe in part it is because they usually only require the BS/BA degree, while the U.S. might simply require a Masters degree in place of some of the years of experience required in Jamaica and other countries in the Caribbean. However requiring that amount of years for the position still excludes many people who are bright enough to learn the requirements of the position given comprehensive and supportive on the job training! Caribbean companies need to embrace in-house training and development and stop requiring or waiting on someone who can walk in the door able to take the position and run with it unsupported.

Companies throughout the region need to take a page from the recruiters swarming U.S. college campuses every semester, and off the Bible verse that says “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it!” The concept behind that is you don’t wait for someone to walk in off the street groomed by some other company for some other company’s purposes…you actively develop a comprehensive yet focused relationship with known sources of talent, and invite the best you can get into a solid leadership preparation program with the goal of training them YOURSELF and developing their loyalty and drive to see the company succeed.


Activity: Survey of Your Responses

Please respond with your ideas on how Caribbean companies can halt the brain drain of young college graduates, and ideas for attracting, retaining, and DEVELOPING for leadership the 20 to 30 year olds in (and even outside) the island who want to be part of stimulating the economy if they only had the opportunity! (There are also other logistical issues with reversing the brain drain as far as those who have already left, but that is a story for another time.)

Think of all areas that need to be addressed, when submitting your suggestions. Examples (this list is not all-inclusive) include:

  • Company support for furthering education
  • Support for on the job training (internships, new hires, existing employees to be developed, etc.)
  • Development of professional skills that may otherwise be lacking (technical “hard” skills)
  • Development of professional skills such as networking, teamwork and team motivation, time management, etc. (“soft” skills)

Please email responses to michellegrahamday@yahoo.com

  • Indicate your career level and academic level (e.g. student, pursuing [insert] degree in [insert major], senior manager, BS or assistant manager, certification in [insert]). No names will be used in results.
  • Responses are due by December 30, 2007.

By Michelle Graham Day
Contributing Business Writer

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The Young Future Business Leader: An Endangered Species? part 1 of 2

This discussion was triggered by the following Facebook.com group forum question: “What do you think of the 80% of the UWI graduates that leave Jamaica???”

I think after receiving an email from an executive on the island in response to my search for a postgraduate job so that I CAN move back home, I can understand why the UWI graduates leave…he reports plenty of bachelor degree-holding intelligent young people answering phones in call centers or stuck in positions that pay US$17,000 a year, because there are just not enough positions at the post-graduate entry level for them.

Then I see another trend as I survey SplashJamaica and other Caribbean job banks, where there are a lot of higher level roles that are empty and the companies are DYING for people to fill them, to the point where they hire expatriates, foreigners who need work visas.

There is obviously a disconnect there…and I know one immediate issue that causes it: the putting down of roots in the years following graduation from college. In the 5 years between graduation from college and the accumulation of enough experience to qualify for the higher level positions, people are not going to stop living their personal lives, and the ties that develop and the roots that are planted become the ties that bind. I for one wanted to reach back ASAP after graduation, and among other reasons, it was so that I would NOT encounter Mr. Right up here, and end up attached to someone whose career and immediate ties are with the U.S.! In those 5 years, people’s lives become more complex at a faster rate than at any subsequent point in their lives…between 25 and 35 is the prime time that people are meeting, marrying, and laying the groundwork for advancement up the career ladder.

It becomes so much harder to successfully move back and reintegrate once those roots are set (especially if the other person is not from Jamaica, or at least from the Caribbean), versus the relatively simple shift when you are single, and fresh out of college (read: no roots implanted yet). Even without the relationship and other attachments naturally developing, there is the concept of getting “Americanized”…becoming so comfortable with the American way of life that it becomes hard to adjust to, or even understand any longer, the Jamaican way of life. (And this concept can be generally applied to becoming “foreign-minded” in any other destination country). Think of the analogy of a tributary flowing from a pond out to an ocean: The longer Jamaican companies leave Jamaica’s pool of talent spread out in foreign oceans, the more they assimilate and the harder it becomes to remove them from the masses and return them home.

EARLY BIRD RECRUITMENT (FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGE)

So that 80% that leaves, leave because they have no job waiting on them in Jamaica, and end up staying where they have gone because by the time they are qualified for the decent-paying positions, they have set down roots and become less flexible than they were as new graduates…in the U.S. companies are recruiting on my campus NOW for graduates in December 2007, April 2008, August 2008, and some are even recruiting now for as far out as December 2008! They jump on talent from EARLY. Success for a college program here is measured by what percent of each year’s graduates, on average, are placed in a job relevant to their academic level within six months of graduation. What is the measure of success for the University of the West Indies and other Caribbean institutions of higher learning? Are these institutions being drawn into a commitment to do their part to keep the majority of the brains of the Caribbean IN the Caribbean?

Are Jamaican companies providing relevant, detailed internships for college students with progressive levels of responsibility that give them exposure to the business, the normal duties of the position, and to the executives? Are companies in Jamaica, and across the Caribbean, developing leadership programs to develop talent from early in the way they want that talent to go? One of the places I am interviewing with has a 2 year rotational leadership development program that gives you 6 months in each major facet of the business, which is crucial knowledge that would take way too much time (years-wise) to accumulate by working up and laterally through the ranks! Is anything like that happening in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, or anywhere in the Caribbean?

To Be Continued…

By Michelle Graham Day
Contributing Business Writer