A leading Caribbean executive says too many managers are obsessed with control rather than concentrating on workers’ output and productivity.
President of the Caribbean Employers’ Confederation (CEC) Wayne Chen offered this assessment during the Central Bank of Barbados’ Caribbean Economic Forum on Tuesday night, as a panel examined the future of work in a post-COVID environment.
Chen, who also heads the Jamaica Employers’ Federation, told those following the broadcast that many companies across the region had successfully transitioned their operations to remote platforms, but some managers were still stuck in the old way of doing business and were uncomfortable with employees working from home.
He said he recently received a complaint from a worker at a major organisation in Jamaica that the company had called employees back to the office when the Government lifted many of the COVID-19 restrictions, but there was no social distancing.
“I wondered why they went back to the old way when the new way was working so well. It turned out that the head of the department was not confident that those folks who were working from home were actually working. My response was a simple one: You had three months to figure it out. Why didn’t you use those few months . . . to put in place . . . measurable outputs that were being done from home?” Chen said.
“But many of our managers – and I have to be blunt – understand management as control, they want to be in control and they figure if they are not seeing workers at desks working that work is not being done,” he lamented.
The businessman added: “There are other managers who have seen the opportunities of remote work and the question now being asked is, ‘if somebody at home slips and falls in the kitchen, is that a workplace accident?’
“For the more evolved managers, the discussion has moved forward to how do we now formalise remote work and make it a part of the landscape. We still have a lot of work to do on this.”
Dr Carmen Pages-Serra of the Inter-American Development Bank said most employers should not worry about when a worker completes his tasks, but should be concerned with the quality of the work and if the output is completed within deadline.
“I don’t care where you do it, whether in your bed or from Barbados through the Barbados Welcome Stamp . . . . We need to concentrate on results and worker efficiency,” the IDB official said.
Also responding to the question of remote work and measuring productivity away from the office was Dr Rochelle Haynes, a Barbadian management specialist and human resources expert who currently operates from Britain.
She said the mindset of some managers, which was highlighted by Chen, was not unique to the Caribbean and the same challenges were being experienced in many workplaces in Europe.
Chen stressed that some managers were still concerned about measuring the productivity of people who were working from home.
However, Haynes said if employers do not have a way of measuring output from remote workers, and cannot trust their employees to get the job done from their homes, then it raises questions about the company’s culture and underlying issues that may have existed prior to the onset of COVID-19.
(IMC1)
