HR – HR Bureau Ghana

19Mar

Preaching Virtue but Practicing Vice

Over the last decade, we have witnessed strong storms blow, disorienting big and small fishes alike in corporate Ghana leaving behind debris that has not be restored till today. Are these failures the result of poor governance structure or the exhibition of unethical behaviours at the workplace?

We see fancy and beautiful display of organizational values on pull-up stands, ceiling drops and walls in reception areas, offices, board and conference rooms. Values such as integrity, speed, honesty, respect and passion are quite common. These values are to guide behaviours at the workplace.

The recent storms in corporate Ghana raised a lot of eye brow about preaching and boldly displaying these values in organizations to make it look like our lives depend on it. It shows how hypocritical we are as a people when it comes to preaching and not practicing what we preach. It means that corporate governance and ethics in business is not adhered to and people generally are not sensitive to them.

Behind closed doors we go against these very values we preach to our team and clients in the name of profit making or keeping the organization alive.

Heads of Accounts are directed by top management members on what to do in preparing financial statements to make organization’s look good in the eye of regulators and customers. In fact different management accounts are prepared for different stakeholders when bidding for the same project. When the Head of Account expresses misgivings about such practices, he/she is given the ‘get out of the kitchen if you find it too hot’. Where is your value of integrity?

Your production team take up overtime assignments only for you to refuse to pay them the approved rate. Your mood and desire to make profit determines the rate and not what is approved. Honesty is shoved out of the window in this scenario I guess, it just needs to be hanged on the ceiling and displayed for people to see but not act it out.

You indicate your disdain for preferential treatment at the workplace time and time again. Yet vacancies in the organization are filled by your friends and family. The organisation’s neatly written recruitment and selection policy is of no relevance here too.

When staff are nominated for external training programmes as part of the organization’s learning & development policy you refuse. Even internal training with external facilitator’s are not regular. All this happens in the context of the organization recording high profits.

There are cases where employee salaries are not increased for over 5 years. The excuse being ‘there is no money’. Yet employees see senior managers and their family living affluent lives.

It has been observed that managers receive low scores even when sales performance is overachieved by over 120%. The motive is to avoid increasing their salary and to eventually reduce cost. Fairness & Equity doesn’t really matter.

During your presentation on corruption and anti-bribery at this year’s Business Executives Summit, you expressly showed your concern on the effect this is having on our society. Great presentation by all standards. As a further step to illustrate your commitment to fighting bribery and corruption, you have also signed several anticorruption/bribery policies that are beautifully framed and displayed in your reception and office. In fact, staff are required to take a compliance anti-bribery and corruption test on an annual basis. How then do you direct your Marketing Director to ‘find’ something for the Procurement Manager of that institution to influence the award of that contract in your favour? How then is it the practice in your organization to pay ‘facilitation fees’, ‘donations’ and all manner of ‘sponsorship’ to other persons for conducting one business or the other with your organization? What happened to the anti-bribery and corruption policy? I guess it doesn’t apply here because in your opinion if business is not approached that way ‘nothing’ will happen.

An organization’s values determine its accepted behaviours and ultimately its culture. When an organization’s values are weak, one does not need to think too far about practices that pertain in the organization. Senior Management for that matter play a crucial role to achieve this. In most SME’s the culture of the organization is determined by the Chief Executive Officer. It therefore means leadership should be strong enough to hold such values in high esteem and live it in the day-to-day operations of the company.

Leadership now cannot be separated from values of an organization. Your personal values as a leader of an organization must tie in with that of your organization. That is how it must be to develop a value-based business leader. It is not enough to be just a lip-service leader anymore. If you don’t believe in those values please don’t have them visibly displayed and please don’t preach it! We cannot be led to believe that only ruthlessness and profit can enable us run businesses successfully in this country.

14Mar

HR Retention Strategies

4 key retention strategies to ensure you don’t lose your best HR talent

Thanks to HR’s position on the frontline of so many of the seismic shifts that have hit the workplace in recent times – from hybrid working and the Great Resignation, to the cost of living crisis and now the challenge of ‘quiet quitting’ – life has never been more hectic for hard-pressed people teams everywhere.

Under such trying circumstances perhaps it’s not surprising that looking after the people who look after your people can sometimes take a back seat when it really shouldn’t. A recent survey of 200 UK HR managers showed that almost half (45%) had considered leaving their current roles due to the pressure of dealing with employee burnout and mental health concerns. Furthermore, 23% reported suffering compassion fatigue as a result of two years spent supporting struggling employees while not being adequately supported themselves.

Left unchecked, the consequences are not hard to predict – your top HR talent will start to leave, just at the point when you need them most. In fact, this may already be happening, data released by LinkedIn in June shows that the level of churn in HR roles globally was 15%, over one-third higher than the average and the highest turnover rate of any job function.

So what can you do to help keep them onboard? Here are some retention strategies to help you hang on to your HR team, and ensure that they are positive, engaged and ready to meet whatever fresh challenges the fast-changing world of work can throw at them:

Prioritise the team’s wellbeing and mental health

HR people are programmed to look after other people, it’s the nature of the job. But that shouldn’t mean that they don’t get looked after themselves. Despite the progress made since the pandemic on sharing our personal lives with colleagues, admitting to mental health worries at work can still be taboo.

So, senior leaders need to be role models, who talk openly about the issues, use the company’s mental health support services (assuming there are some – if not, then that’s the first job on your to do list) and don’t expect their teams to work themselves to a frazzle at evenings and weekends. HR managers should also be briefed to engage with their teams and encourage them to prioritise their own wellbeing – because it’s hard to help someone else when you need help yourself.

Create a joined up expression of your culture

The difference between the ‘external’ culture a company presents when it is looking to attract candidates and the ‘internal’ one that those candidates experience once they are hired can be stark. This is something that impacts HR people more than most, because they are immersed in both the external and internal view on a daily basis. If the contrast is too jarring, retention will always be an uphill struggle because disappointment will turn to demotivation and ultimately to departure.

So, try to present a joined up experience of your culture, one where attraction and retention are no longer seen as separate functions, but rather as conjoined parts of a single whole. As Personio’s Attraction Plus white paper reveals, talent attraction can benefit from internal input – such as feedback from hired candidates – just as talent retention can benefit from external input, like secondments to other organisations and peer feedback.

Give your people the work they want to do

Job satisfaction is about feeling that you’ve done something worthwhile at the end of the day, but it’s hard to get that warm glow if you’ve spent eight hours filling in a spreadsheet or processing holiday applications. Personio’s HR Study 2022 white paper identified the burden of admin as a major brake on higher value HR activities (55% of HR managers said time spent on admin was getting in the way of more strategic work, and 19% said that too much admin and process was preventing HR from supporting business success).

Smart HR tech can help automate low-value admin and process tasks, digitising workflow and freeing up your team to apply their skills and experience where they can have the biggest impact. Berlin-based NGO Kiron cut the time spent on HR admin by 30% when it adopted Personio as the central hub for all its HR processes. More rewarding work leads to greater job satisfaction and higher retention rates. It’s a win-win!

Keep on top of performance and development

A clear and well managed path for career development – and the performance support needed to follow it – has always been crucial when it comes to retaining talent. Never more so than in today’s tight market, where if you don’t manage performance and develop your people, they will vote with their feet and find an employer who will. The impact on retention is unarguable – research from LinkedIn shows that 94% of employees would stay longer at a company that invested in their development.

Nevertheless, Personio’s 2022 HR Study found that performance reviews are on the whole, neither fair nor frequent, with only 51% of employees saying their reviews were fair and a mere 39% saying they received regular performance feedback. A sobering 18% said they never received a review from their manager. Technology can help automate the review cycle, but it’s up to managers to have fair, transparent and regular performance conversations with their team, and to follow them up with tailored development plans for each individual.

With the cost of replacing a typical employee running at around £3,000 a head, improving retention makes sound commercial sense across every department. But keeping your HR team on board, engaged and productive is doubly vital – because they are the people who can help you hang on to all of your top talent, whatever department or function of the business they work in.

This article was culled from the September 2022 Edition of the People Management Insight Magazine of the CIPD, UK