DIRECTOR of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies, Professor Andrew Downes is recommending that The Productivity Council do more to educate companies about performance-based management systems and their implementation. He concluded in his presentation on The Legacy Of Performance-Based Management Systems In The Private Sector, at the Inaugural Regional Tripartite Productivity Conference at Hilton Barbados a week ago, that while these systems helped to improve productivity within private companies, “unfortunately what we are still finding in these organisations is a high level of top-down management”.
The two-day conference was hosted by the Productivity Council under the theme Out Of The Recession: Productivity Initiatives To Enhance Growth And Development In The Caribbean, and Downes said participatory management was scarce in private sector organisations.He quoted research done in 1998, 2004 and 2009, and other conclusions included gain-sharing schemes being simple and generally understandable within companies, lack of communication and information disclosure in organisations and recognition and use of workers’ skills being the main motivating factor towards increased productivity. “Communication seems to be almost a chronic problem in organisations. Everybody complains about lack of communication, lack of communication. But it is important if you are going to talk about performance management-based schemes that communication is at the highest order all the time.Motivating factors “Recognition and use of skills were the main motivating factors for employees much more so than the financial elements. “Therefore when you are building performance-management systems, bear in mind that you have to get to the root of what motivates persons in terms of enhancing performance. It might not necessarily be the money, but it might be other things,” Downes said. He stressed that information sharing was critical to designing systems to help organisations improve their performance and for performance-based management systems to fit the environment of each company as well as go beyond sharing in gains.
“The productivity council has to redouble its efforts in terms of education and assistance with implementation schemes. We need to enhance our research work on the effects of these schemes for promotional reasons . . . where one or two companies would say if it works for A, it would work for me, so let me try it.” (SR)
