By Francis
Wade
Monday, August 10, 2015.
Can workers
who have become accustomed to low standards be trained to achieve otherwise?
The debate is currently raging in Trinidad and probably will arrive before long
in Jamaica.
One of my first summer jobs involved working on a
project in a government department. As outsiders to the organization, our team
had a specific, tedious task that afforded us the opportunity to observe the
employees in the organization.
They worked in two modes. When the “boss-lady” was
around, they worked normally and the office bustled with activity. However,
when she was away, things changed. Out came cards, dominoes and radios as work
was set aside for leisurely pursuits. To prevent surprises, someone was always
posted at the window to act as surveillance, studying her parking space two
floors below for her impending arrival. Now and then, according to one lookout,
she tried to “trick them” by parking elsewhere, so they had to be “very
careful.”
Fast-forward to a raging debate underway in
Trinidad and Tobago concerning their well-known CEPEP programme. It’s an
acronym given to the country’s job programme for low-skilled workers – a
version of what we Jamaicans used to call a Crash Programme. To many citizens
in the middle class, it’s nothing more than an opportunity for the
twin-island’s least advantaged to draw a full paycheck for half a day’s work.
Whether or not it’s a worthy programme or not is debatable, but there is
widespread agreement that it has contributed to the official unemployment rate
of only 3.1%.
Trinidad is also a country where Help Wanted signs
hanging outside stores are a regular sight. You can also find permanent
billboards advertising employment opportunities. Many CEO’s I have spoken with
argue that they cannot find enough people to employ, blaming CEPEP as a
contributor to the problem.
Recently, a proposal was put forward asking the
obvious: “Why doesn’t the government take underemployed CEPEP workers and train
them for jobs that the private sector cannot fill?” Obvious, but not easy to
answer. Leading executives quickly came out to announce that the work ethic of
the average CEPEP worker was too low to be considered for the real jobs they
needed to fill. According to a business owner I spoke with, she may interview
but never hire an ex-civil servant. In other words, someone accustomed to being
overpaid to play games could not be reformed.
Here in Jamaica, the IMF has placed a requirement
on the government to reduce its wage bill, presumably by laying off civil
servants in droves. After all, in 2014 Barbados laid off 18% of its civil
service while Greece announced layoffs of 180,000.
It’s safe to say that the reluctance to hire a
civil servant is real. What should an individual training programme, such as
the six week intervention suggested in Trinidad, attempt to change? The answer
may lie in three attributes distinguished by author Daniel Pink shared in my
column from September 23rd, 2012 – Autonomy, Purpose and Mastery.
1. Experience
Most employees who lack these three attributes are likely to have them in other
parts of their lives. They can be taught to transfer the leadership roles they
play at home, in the church and in their community to the workplace. It’s one
way to affirm these skills, while empowering a worker to recognize that, often,
they do have what it takes.
2. Knowledge
Most have never been formally taught to recognize these attributes in
day-to-day work. Once they are shown how to identify them it becomes easier to
see where they are missing. That allows them to act differently of their own
volition.
3. Practice
Any intervention would have to be down to earth, and not just bunch of theory.
It must show an employee how to translate abstract principles into daily
activities that help take them one step at a time toward further autonomy,
purpose and mastery. This is critical as there are no one-size-fits-all
behaviours that suit everyone. They need to be crafted to fit the circumstances
by an employee who has the right training.
Is a 6 week stint in the classroom enough to make a
difference? All the research from behaviour training points to the fact that
what happens after training is over makes all the difference. Studies have
shown only 60% of the end-result is due to the class itself. If post-training
support is provided, maybe it might work, but it’s important to know that there
are no shortcuts.
Experience tells me that when behaviour changes are
described in vague platitudes, nothing changes. This would be damaging to both
the Jamaican economy and the ex-civil servant, who would be unable to make the
transition to more demanding employment. Picture our government asking the IMF
for one waiver after another, unable to ever reduce its wage bill. Under this
scenario, we’d all suffer.
Francis Wade is a management consultant and author
of Perfect Time-Based Productivity. To receive a Summary of Links to past columns,
or give feedback, email him at columns@fwconsulting.com