HUMAN?RESOURCE?CONSULTANT Dr Hensley Sobers has warned that there could be several far-reaching consequences for the development of Barbados if some workplace issues relating to human resources (HR) were not tackled.
Delivering the feature address during a one-day workshop at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre last Friday, Sobers told a roomful of HR personnel that too often operation managers sought to refer “every issue which involved dealing with their people to the HR”.
He said stress and stigma were perhaps two of the major issues affecting HR professionals.
“HR management must be recognised as both a special professional discipline and the shared responsibility of persons who have been appointed to delegate, monitor, coach, counsel, coordinate and account for the employees who report to them.
“Let’s remove this idea that HR is a department. . . . Every individual and manager in the organisation must be an HR [person],” he said.
At the workshop Re-inventing HR and the Power of Internal Marketing: Making HR’s Presence Felt Within Your Organisation, Sobers said Barbados’ quest to become a developed society must be “two-tiered”.
One, he said, was revamping the educational system by putting mechanisms in place to “re-examine and reform the value and standards”.
“But more importantly, we need to revolutionise the way we manage the talents of our people in the workforce. My contention is that Barbados will be hard pressed to achieve the strategic vision, especially if our Government departments, private sector organisations and NGOs did not place people at the centre of their plans and development efforts,” argued Sobers.
He said in some workplaces it was “very disturbing” when the majority of people who had the legitimate authority and power to influence the optimisation of people’s potential neglected to do so.
“In fact it is almost scandalous, on the evidence of empirical study as well as observation by many social commentators . . . that a large number of leaders in this country fail in their duties to inspire the hearts, challenge the heads, guide the hands and instil habits in the people who report to them so that our desire as a nation to become globally competitive and prosperous could be realised,” he said.
