Anticipating the New Human Resources Management Environment

Dear Editor,

“America’s courts are under siege from right-wing special interest. They want to rig the federal judiciary to favour large employers over workers, mega banks over small businesses…” The quote is extracted from a Project Syndicate article reproduced in Stabroek News of April 20, 2021. The authors constituted of one Senator and one Congressman. It is by no means far-fetched to conceive of this type of organisational misbehaviour being replicated outside of the United States. Not totally unrelated are murmurings of behaviours of foreign employers, whose presence is continually increasing but for whom there appears to be no coordinated induction programme for observing this country’s labour laws; nor into institutionalised procedures for physically and mentally enhanced employment (in face of the generosity of vaccinations).

But to revert to the initial quote, a more fundamental implication is one that involves leadership, the moral standards that inhere and, perhaps more importantly, the objectivity to be brought to decision-making, preferable to the justification articulately wrought to satisfy empathetic followership. Arguably, the pandemic has brought a new dispensation to the world of work. It has caused the restructuring of organisations in creative ways on the one hand; but on the other hand countries around the world have seen `lockdowns’ on employment opportunities. Thousands have lost jobs, with families of all ages being traumatised by the new ‘virtual reality’. The use of technology has become competitively pandemic-demanding new skills, while dispossessing the so-called ‘semiskilled’ and ‘other craft skilled’ categories constipated in our own Public Service, since four decades or more ago. But then the state of constipation applies to all categories of jobs published in the Annual Budgets, inclusive of ‘Contracted Employees’ in the long wilted 14 grades of salary scales.

In this connection there is no immediate indication that the 20,000 scholarship winners over the next five years would experience new organisational and accountability relationships; not to mention appropriate remuneration. The job categorisations determinedly remain as follows:

- - -

Administrative

Senior Technical

Other Technical and Craft-skilled Clerical and Office Support Semi-Skilled Operatives and Unskilled

Then there are ‘Contracted Employees’ to any grade. The confusion in grading (job evaluation) is palpable, with obvious implications for gratuitous placement and remuneration. The prospect of a new era of communications alone demands the most comprehensive review of the employment anachronisms pervading the Public Service by the very decision–makers who demand restructuring of counterpart Public Sector agencies. But no Administration has paid attention to addressing this fundamental human resources management issue, probably because each in turn very likely recognised that the technical capacity was not readily available, which in fact is true; for come 2021 the closest resemblance that exists is reflected in the following outdated positions:

Public Service Ministry

Chief Personnel Officer Principal Personnel Officer

Human Resources Officer

Senior Personnel Officer Personnel Officer 11

Other Ministries

Personnel Officer 1

- - - - -

Grade 12 11 09 09 06

05

Grades 14-05 Grades 11-06 Grades 05-02 Grades 05-01 Grades 03-01

Note that all the above fall within the category ‘Administrative’. In other words they merely comply, even in offering advice. They follow the rules, when for so long the environment has demanded significant knowledge and authority change. A glaring example is the basic matter of compensation – reflected firstly in the fourteen salary scales, none of which has been actually utilised for the last fifteen years. Compounded by the fact that no performance appraisal system exists, public servants do not earn increments based on productivity, but are solicitous towards the imperious provision of annual across-the-board increases, including ‘Contracted Employees’; few, if any, are set targets to be achieved (which makes peremptory terminations unintelligible to the informed observer). So is there not an opportunity to be grasped, in a world of new and different work, to consider payment for productively, conceivably from ‘zoomed’ locations – a situation which raises the further question of the critical role representative unions must play in the reconstruction of certain jobs and related values.

In the milieu, unlike the current absences, care should be taken to advertise both new and reconstructed jobs and their respective technical/managerial requirements so that selection and recruitment could be a more transparent process. In the final analysis however, it must be that institutions will have to reconstruct some of their work, taking account of how those with whom they interact affect them. Arguably therefore there could be a substantive case for meaningful sharing of intellectual and physical resources. If not all, many should be involved in conceptualising, redesigning and implementing work of the (predictable) future – in a carefully planned series of workshops. But then the brainstorming hardly ends there. Who will teach these new skills? A range of institutions will have to be involved, with the University of Guyana being a major player. It therefore follows that the Administration must engage the University with the highest level of respect and support in its commitment to be proactive in preparing future generations for an inevitable new world of work.

Sincerely,

E.B. John