DIONNE WALCOTT is a seasoned human resources (HR) practitioner.
For more than 20 years, she has been the HR manager of SuperCentre Limited and its successor Massy Stores (Barbados) Limited.
So Walcott knows better than most that “your employees are your ambassadors, they are the people who will take you and who will lift you up and who will share your product”.
She readily admitted, though, that her “extremely competitive” nature and concern that her company might not “win” caused some initial hesitation when approached about taking part in the Barbados’ Best Employers (BBE) programme conceptualised and organised by Caribbean Catalyst Inc.
And while Massy Stores has never been a finalist, having participated twice in the biennial Nation-sponsored initiative, Walcott said the company has benefitted from BBE.
She gave her endorsement of the programme when the 2016 edition was officially launched recently at the Savannah Hotel.
“I was probably one of those HR managers that said ‘look, I know I don’t have everything in place, there is no way that we are going to win’, and anybody that knows me [would tell you] I am extremely competitive. So just the thought . . . of participating and not winning was enough for me to say no,” she said.
“I admit to you, though, that I went through a place where I said ‘look, it really is not about you, it is about your organisation and your people and how…you get the most out of your people and your HR practices’. So here we are, two tries later, never becoming a finalist by the way, but gaining much.”
When BBE was last held in 2014 the company, in the large category with its 1 300 employees, was called SuperCentre. But by the time the awards were held it was rebranded and renamed Massy Stores. The changes were major and Walcott said participating in BBE at such a time was beneficial and timely.
“We obviously had a lot more to gain through our participation and at that point in time it was not about winning, it was about using the most cost effective way of getting that information for us,” she said.
“The rebranding was very timely because here it is we have two cultures and those two cultures are merging and obviously for us to get a good sense of what that meant the results from the [BBE] survey would have helped quite a bit. While we suspected it, I don’t think we were really prepared for the true understanding of the impact of all those changes and what it meant for our employees.”
She added: “We . . . participated in a couple other employee engagement programmes many years ago, those programmes did not allow for benchmarking and as a matter of fact we got a rating, but what were we rating it against? Just in terms of reporting, the comprehensive report that you get out of entering the Barbados’ Best Employers award . . . it will blow your mind, there are no two ways about it.”
At the end of it all, Massy Stores was “able to come away with a true understanding of where we were at and some solid, action-packed recommendations on how to do better”
The Massy Group has its own engagement survey and so Massy Stores will not be part of BBE 2016. However, Walcott said the results of the in-house programme compared favourably with BBE, a fact that confirmed BBE’s value in her mind.
And while Massy Stores’ size meant that having 60 per cent of its employees complete the survey was challenging, the HR manager said “we were able to meet our target and we were very happy with the entire programme”.
“Overall, I would like to encourage all companies to participate . . . it really is not about the win, it is about having the information before you, it is about being able to benchmark against competing organisations, different industries, and more so because of the fact that we are looking at Barbadian companies it helps us to better understand our own dynamics,” she said.
“Lots of times you are taking a look at international companies, you are benchmarking against international companies, and I find that having a better understanding of what some of our competing companies and our colleagues and so on are going through that helped quite a bit for us.
“I also want to say to you that when this all boils down, your employees are your ambassadors. They are the people who will take you and who will lift you up and who will share your product, that is what it is about.
“But it is [also] about how do you get that buy-in from your employees, how do you get them to be the ones to sell your product and I can’t think of a better way to get all that information than through participating in this programme,” she concluded.
