It is an analogy you might have heard before. Two hunters in the woods are confronted by a bear neither of them wants to tackle. In fact, they fear this fearsome and uncompromising animal will tear them to shreds if they don’t react quickly and wisely.
Now, visualise one of them speedily tying his shoelaces with the eventually announced intention to outrun – not the bear on whose territory he has conspired to encroach on – but his fellow hunter.
That’s how Blueprint Creative Inc.’s managing director Ron Johnson summed up the importance of the Barbados’ Best Employers (BBE) programme, an initiative whose two previous editions his company participated in, emerging the small category winner the last time it did so in 2012.
Applications for the BBE 2014 are now in hand and organiser Caribbean Catalyst Inc.
will be intensifying its work, including conducting staff surveys and other important analyses, to determine who are the best employers in Barbados this time around.
With the process now set to enter this critical phase, Johnson was in no doubt that in the current circumstances it was those companies that were willing to do the things to become more competitive which had the best opportunity to survive “the bear”.
In other words, these were the businesses which “have a much stronger chance of not just surviving in this economy, but thriving”. He used his own company as an example.
And for us the process of going through the BBE was part of our tightening our shoelaces process. The reason that I say that is [because] the process of having a very professional HR firm come into our business and to take surveys and to give us some sort of empirical evidence by which you could actually start to grow was greatly invaluable,” he said.
“We were able then to benefit from having the process, the consultants coming in and really showing us what we were doing right, and what we thought we were doing right but we weren’t in retrospect.”
To illustrate his view that the BBE was more about the cake (the benefits of participation) more so than the icing (being named a winner), Johnson pointed out that Blueprint Creative entered the first BBE in 2010 in the small category and did not “break the top 10”, but “we were able to go back and see ‘well here is what we did right, here is what we could improve on’, and the second time around [in 2012] we were quite surprised when we heard we broke into the top 10 and even more surprised when they called our name at the event”.
“The process was very very important. Having a win is really the icing on the cake. For us the BBE was a sort of litmus paper for us to test where we were because, as most business professionals will tell you, you cannot improve on what you can’t measure, and if you are not measuring how do you expect to know exactly where to improve,” he asked?
“Because of entering BBE. . . I can say we really really have a really great team, a very very productive team, a team that we don’t have to ask to go the extra mile. Actually, the morning that we came to the [BBE presentation] ceremony, we pulled an all-nighter, it was a major pitch for us and all of our team members worked extra time, we didn’t have to ask any of them to work extra time, they just knew that they had to be there.
“Some of us left [at] five o’clock in the morning, all we had time to do was to go home, shower, change, go back to the pitch pretending to be bright eyed, bushy tailed and pitch, then go straight to the BBE awards zombie-eyed.”
While noting that there were many things that large and small companies could do in their attempt to outsmart “the bear”, Johnson said the expertise offered within the BBE programme was invaluable as it afforded companies to ensure their vital human resource component was fully focused and functioning efficiently and effectively.
“People always say that people are your best assets, [but] that’s not really true; it is the right people that are your best assets. And if going through this BBE can help you to develop the right people, [and] have recruitment structures that are on point so you don’t let the wrong people even close, it is really worth it,” he observed.
“Don’t come in with a focus to try to win but focus on the actual process of understanding where you are so you can get better because at the end of the day the economy, the bear, is going to take some people with it, you just have to make sure it’s not us. And the more people that can become even ten per cent more effective [or] 15 per cent less effective, the bear will have less of an impact.”