Nireti Adebayo is the chief executive officer of WhyteCleon Limited, a leading human resources outsourcing and management solutions provider in the country, and chairperson of the upcoming 2019 summit on employee management and productivity. In this interview with a select journalist talked about employee engagement and total workforce optimization, performance and time management, and technology disruptions, among other HR related issues. Modestus Anaesoronye was there. Excerpt:
Amidst the uproar that greeted the “Nigerian youth are lazy/idle” controversy last year, the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported that roughly 70 million Nigerians were in productive labour in 2018. How would you reconcile the apparent contradiction or is there a general misunderstanding of the meaning of productivity?
There has to be a disconnect somewhere because from where I sit and from what we have gathered over the years, the Nigerian youths are actually very hard working, highly motivated. Despite the challenges we have had in the country over the years, our youths do wonderful things in different places. I may have to disagree with that statement. I believe in the last couple of years, we have witnessed the increase in the number of startups most of which are spearheaded by the youths with the support of the private sector. We are a highly productive society. We are not lazy people. I believe that having about 70 million Nigerian youths duly engaged gives credence to the fact that the youths are highly productive.
However, considering the unemployment rate, youths are daily devising creative ways to make ends meet through manual labour, petty trading and so on. However, I will not overlook the fact that we have miscreants in the society but all our youths should not be placed in this category. I commend our hardworking youths on a daily basis because I supervise the best set of very intelligent and highly motivated youths there is and for me, it is a clear indication of a hardworking productive generation.
Over the past three decades or so, the public service in Nigeria seems to have struggled to attract young, bright and innovative people to its ranks. Is it that Nigerian youth do not perceive the public service as an attractive career option or the public service is suffering from an image crisis?
Nigeria is a peculiar society. The civil service has not in any way encouraged vibrant youths. The reason is because of the highly bureaucratic nature of the civil service. It is also highly nepotistic in some places, not in all. I believe strongly that the civil service may have to do a surgical restructuring in a way to attract highly skilled and vibrant individuals. The civil service is very discriminatory. The public sector missed it when it began to use the quota system to employ individuals, which is devoid of selection of talents on a merit driven basis just as it was in the past. The public sector therefore will have a lot of image laundry and restructuring to do in a way that it can eliminate these issues plaguing their system and begin to attract skilled and vibrant individuals. The public service needs vibrant, competent and motivated individuals to take up roles in the sector because that is one way to build a strong nation as a people. I am not insinuating that those currently in the public sector are not brilliant, far from it, but they are demotivated because of the current structure of the civil service. A public service that is highly bureaucratic, where decision making is as difficult as squeezing water from a stone, a service that promotes mediocrity over competence effectively demotivates even the most brilliant minds.
What would you say is responsible for the perceived disparity in the productivity levels in the private and public sectors in Nigeria?
There are various reasons why this would happen. One is, do they have the necessary infrastructure to work with? It is a different thing for one to be intelligent, smart and competent, and it is another to have the requisite infrastructure or tools required to work with. These two assertions complement each other. Even though we believe the public service is funded, what does it do with the funds? It is true that they have their budget every year but what do they spend it on? Do we have a system where these budgeted funds are accounted for? So, when you have such issues in the public service, motivation is bound to suffer as people simply adopt a wait-and-see attitude. I believe the public service has a lot of work to do to ensure that the necessary resources are available for the employees. However, I also believe that the structure for accountability is deficient in the public service. If we have these budgets passed yearly, who is asking how these monies are expended. We need to check ourselves because governance is administered by people and we are the people. We owe ourselves the responsibility to do the right things. A system that lacks merit and accountability will always impact productivity negatively. These issues mentioned above are responsible for the obvious disparity in the levels of productivity between the public and private sectors.
Employee engagement is very critical to productivity and business sustainability. Engagement is at the heart of attracting and retaining the best brains. However, there appears to be a lack of engagement in many workplaces. A research by your company in 2013, which is still relevant today, showed that about 65% of employees are not rightly engaged. How do you overcome this at Whyte Cleon and what should be done to boost workplace engagement?
This problem of engagement is multidimensional. Employee engagement is what we have been preaching for many years. We always believe that engagement is not necessarily always about monetary compensations, although monetary compensation is a big part of engagement. After all, there are employees who are highly remunerated and yet are dissatisfied with their jobs. The engagement of employees goes beyond what we pay; it can be in the form of intrinsic or extrinsic benefits. To encourage employee engagement there has to be clear value propositions from the employers to employees and vice versa. Really, engagement is supposed to encourage those discretionary or extra efforts from employees as a result of the employers’ engagement policies. Given the current economic state of the country, employers owe it a duty to have a face to the business and to ask themselves how they can bring the best out of their workers beyond compensation. Many organizations do not have a face and a soul to their businesses; they see the employees as mere assets that should bring in the necessary targets. It should go beyond this. What is the welfare package for our workers? What tools have we provided to ensure performance? Organizations still have a lot to do in these areas. Fully engaging the employees and ensuring their welfare does not in any way diminish the strength of the organization or affect the control the employer has over his business. Rather, the right engagement brings out the best in the employees and increases the productivity in such environment.
The world is now at an age when technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics and so on are disrupting work as we know it. What is your assessment of the readiness of Nigeria’s workplaces for the future of work?
We are very late in reacting to technology. I’m excited though about the influx of technology. No doubt some jobs would be lost but many others would be augmented or created as a result of technology. This is the age of technological advancement and I expect organizations to have comprehensive strategies to enable efficiency and support their businesses if they haven’t already joined the train in taking advantage of the gains technology offers. The future of work is such that it would require competent and motivated individuals, people who are ready for change, who must be willing to acquire new skills and adopt technology. We are excited about the positive disruption technology brings because it opens up new opportunities for us, broadens our horizon in terms of what can be achieved within a short time. And we need to begin to implement tools that will help either to engage the employee or to ensure that productivity is sustained. We have to build our organizations to be irrepressible no matter the disruption that technology may bring.
You are the chairperson of the Time Attendance Management System (TAMS) Summit coming up in Lagos a few days from now. What is the significance of the summit vis-à-vis productivity and employee performance in Nigeria?
Let me first commend the convener, Mr Afolabi Abiodun. He is a highly motivated and intelligent individual. I believe strongly that there is a link between what TAMS is trying to propagate and productivity in workplaces. The summit is a platform for engagement to help further the discourse on enhancing workplace and national productivity. TAMS speaks to the totality of the variables that will help to propagate growth in organizations in terms of performance management, time management, employee engagement and total workforce optimization. All of this culminates in highly tangible assets that enable organizations to grow. TAMS is a wakeup call to organizations to pay attention to those variables that impact productivity and growth.
The TAMS Nigeria Employee of the Year Award (NEYA) is set to celebrate employees who made outstanding contributions to organizational productivity. What informed this award and why such a focus and array of prizes for ordinary working people?
Awards are great because they help to recognize good performance. They help to encourage commitment and more hard work. Awards have a way of affecting the psyche of the recipient and he begins to look for ways to do more, to add value, to think outside the box, which increases self confidence. What this does for the workforce is that it fosters healthy competitions; the others are encouraged in the knowledge that management sees, recognizes and rewards great efforts and dedication.
I believe strongly we must begin to imbibe the attitude for appreciation and that is what is missing in organizations, which is a demotivating factor. Employers must be able to say we recognize your work and we appreciate your contributions rather than have a mindset that after all, the employee is paid for work done. It goes beyond salaries. So, we must begin to look at how awards and recognitions are an integral part of organizational growth and sustainability. We must recognize how important employees are. TAMS summit and the NEYA awards are helping to propagate this and reinforce its importance to productivity.
What is the link between time and productivity, if any?
There is a link between time and productivity. Before now, more time equals more productivity, but with digitization, which comes with the introduction of highly efficient tools, more can actually be achieved within a short period of time. Flexibility is the future of work. But I asked myself how can we maximize this? How can be this flexibility be impactful to businesses? What this means is that people do not have to rigidly work within a time frame or in a box – I call the workplace a box. How productive can an individual be when he has to be in a space for so long? Technology has made it so that we can work even from the comfort of our homes. The bottom line is that time management will continue to be critical to productivity even with the introduction of technology.
