THERE ARE A number of words that fall from the lips of seasoned human resource practitioner Rosalind Jackson when she is speaking about her company’s brainchild Barbados’ Best Employers (BBE) programme.
But more than any other is her consistent and persistent mantra that “BBE is not a beauty contest”.
For the managing director of Caribbean Catalyst Inc. being named an awardee or finalist is simply the “icing” on the much bigger “cake” that the biennial initiative represents.
With the 2016 edition of BBE having recently been launched, Jackson is again singing that same tune loudly.
“It is not a beauty contest. We are not looking for the most beautiful and dumping the rest. How I like to describe BBE [is] being a finalist is the icing on the cake but if you had to choose one, the icing or the cake, I would want the cake, that’s the substance. So participation is the cake, finalist and winning is the icing on the cake,” she said.
Started by Caribbean Catalyst in 2010, and sponsored by THE NATION from then until now, BBE “seeks to publicly acknowledge employers who provide work environments which are conducive to high productivity and who support positive employer/employee relations”.
Jackson said the programme which is being held for a fourth time, “was always about building a stronger Barbados, having real pride and industry.
“BBE is a real call to action for this generation of leaders and business people. What we are doing here is part of fulfilling our own mission and our mission is to be a catalyst for meaningful change, helping our clients achieve through their people and…we don’t restrict our clients to Barbados but I would think our home base is really what we serve first.
“So we are about building sustainability and helping people to take their leaps and get out of the comfort zone,” she said.
“Everything we do we try to make sure there is professionalism. Some of my clients will say to me ‘one thing about you, you don’t tell us what we want to hear you tell us what we need to hear, and sometimes you do it fairly bluntly’. But they come back for more usually so to me that’s the crux of professionalism.
“We also do this with confidentiality so when we survey your staff, when we interview, that information is obviously shared with the review panel but then only with your organisation.”
Elaborating on how the process worked, Jackson said, “You enter to start the process going, HR professionals come and interview management, we then do the staff surveys, there is a lot of field work, and we have two people trained with us so they go out and a company, to go to the next level of consideration, must have at least 60 per cent staff participation in the survey.
“After the survey, we do the analysis, and the review panel actually brainstorm and use their collective wisdom in a day-long process that is very insightful and then, of course, we come to the awards.”
When the BBE was held for the second time in 2012, Caribbean Catalyst enhanced it, something Jackson and her team are again planning to do this year.
“In 2012 we introduced an engagement index…In 2014, influenced by John Spencer’s work, we added some more elements to the survey, and there is a little bit of overlap as you can imagine, about effective leadership because engagement comes from leadership, if we are honest with ourselves,” she said.
“If I have strong leadership, [and] good engagement, there is going to be productivity, but we actually researched again some elements that indicate a high level of productivity that we may not have had. So you are going to get three indicators in this report so you can see how they are tied together.”
She added, “And one of the things that we are also going to do is ask companies who enter that if they have absenteeism records, [that] they share two or three years with us because…I think we need to start getting to the root cause of it and stop flaunting the numbers without doing anything meaningful.”
This year the BBE programme is aiming to get 40 companies to participate.
Jackson said this was important because “the more robust the participation is then the more informative the analysis and results are for our country”.
“So if we have to gear up and get 60 companies participating I might just make it to June 21, but I would be delighted. So…just do it, there is only one way to find out what it’s like and what the benefits are,” she advised. (SC)
