‘Employers in our economy behave like mercenaries’

Victor Famuyibo, Human resource director, Nigeria Breweries plc and president of Chartered Institute of Personnel Management in this chat with KELECHI EWUZIE calls on organisations to devise strategic plans to curb the dearth of skilled manpower in the country. Excerpt:

What motivates you in life and career? 

Well, for me, motivation is remaining focused, having clear goals, not being inordinately ambitious, and being very realistic with ambition because every individual should recognise his or her limitations.

Individuals should be able to assess themselves base on experiences in life, based on what they can do, achieve, deliver. Once you have set your goals and those goals are realistic, then you must remain focused.

One thing I have also found in people that I have interacted with is that their attention span to their objective is always very short. They are easily moved off their target, and are pursuing something else. So they get easily distracted and before you know it they are pursuing something else that is unrealistic.

Leadership style

One leadership style that has worked very well for me is to be as democratic as possible whilst being very firm. I have over the years learnt to give employees their space to work, learn to delegate without abdicating responsibility all the time.

So whether in my role as Human Resources director at Nigerian Breweries or as president of CIPM, what I do is ensure that without breathing down the throat of the subordinate, I give them space, allow them to take ownership of their own area and also recognise when they need to escalate issue and when they escalate issue, challenge them to come up with option rather than wanting me to offer them all the solution.

Challenge of skills shortage in Nigeria

The issue of skills shortage is over-bloated in a way. I hear employers saying they can’t find the right skills, but I am quick to ask if they ever think of investing in people. What I find is that a number of employers in our economy behave like mercenaries; they simply want readymade talents which is different from the approach which Nigerian Breweries have adopted.

Organisations must learn to invest in people. I just query how many employers do that. How many employers have a management training scheme? How many employers invest in very young people, how many employers have the patience to grow their own people in-house?

If employers are ready to go into the labour market to look for young talents without any experience whatsoever but with the raw talent, they must be able to commit investment into training to give such talents the chance to learn and skill themselves at the employers expense in order to learn by making mistakes.

Employers must be prepared to guide, mentor and coach these talents even though it costs a lot of money. Nonetheless what I discovered is that not too many employers are prepared to invest money in people to that extent is why I think they cry to high heavens that there is a big skill shortage.

My advice is that employers should also look beyond being mercenaries and try to invest in people and grow their people in house while occasionally injecting talents at middle career levels, if employers’ emphases in bottom up approach grow your in-house talents and you will not experience shortage in talents.

Rising unemployment

Well, there is no gaining saying the fact that we are not growing jobs as rapidly as we are growing university graduates. There is complete disconnect. For me that is very unfortunate because if you look at Nigeria back in the colonial days, educational curricular at different times were handed to us and we got ourselves boxed into it.

Unfortunately, the British that handed us the curriculum have moved on, but somehow for very strange reasons, we have remained too faithful to those curricular, meaning that what we still do more than 50 years later is encouraging every child to move from one level of education to the next and expecting white collar jobs at the end of the funnel.

Our curriculum is very academic by nature; we have not paid attention to vocational skills development or even entrepreneurship because who says a university graduate must look for paid employment? If our curriculum was such that if a university graduate is already skilled to be an entrepreneur or did not see the need to go into the university but went into vocation, who says he would not make more money?

We need to tackle the curriculum issue; we need to expand more towards vocation. We need to change the orientation not only of graduating students, but also of parents because what happens now is that every parent feels like they have failed if they are unable to push their wards right through the university.

So really and truly there is a structural defect that the government has to pay attention to but it has to be done very aggressively. We are paying very little attention to agriculture.

Staff motivation

Well, in NB we have a very good employee proposition and I think that for me is key if you want to keep your employees motivated. You must have a proposition that looks at your employee from what I call cradle to grave.

Employers have to look at not only the bread and butter issue of ‘how do I keep my staff?’ but the other big issue of motivation like what is the climate within that organisation? How do you make it interesting for people? How do you create an enabling environment such that on Friday evening, your employees are a little bit sad that they are not coming to work the next day and on Monday their energy is back because they are excited to work.

There is the need to create a place where employees do their work without being in a hostile environment, where they have the freedom to act and are continuously skilled so that when there is something new, you already put them into a training programme on mentoring, coaching these are things that employees of today appreciate.

Also employers should fashion out how to create work-life balance for their employees. For me, that’s what I have been leading especially since I got back to head HR in NB. By and large, if I look at our staff turnover rate, it speaks for itself because the industry best practice would be something like 6 to 8 percent but I am running at below 2 percent meaning that people are happy to stay in NB. This is something I am very happy about.