Communication – its trustworthiness

Sep 08, 2022 Letters

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Dear Editor,

There was a time when organisations invested faithfully in the concept and behaviour of “Communication”. One experience derives from perhaps the most multicultural organisation in Guyana, and possibly the Caribbean – our sugar industry – earlier managed by a combination of expatriate Bookers Sugar Estates and Demerara Company. The former owned the following estates: Skeldon, Albion/Port Mourant, Rose Hall, Blairmont located in Berbice; Enmore,

LBI/Ogle, Wales, Uitvlugt located in Demerara, along with Diamond and Leonora Estates owned by Demerara Company.

It was not as if these expatriate owners were known for any significant degree of empathy. Quite the opposite. Indeed it took the investigation of the Venn Commission and its consequential recommendations to learn, however painfully, to communicate (an unused and mis-understood process) with workers they could hardly have identified at the time.

The Venn Commission was appointed by the Colonial Office in 1938 ‘to inquire into the conditions’ of sugar workers throughout the West Indies. Its recommendations could not be implemented however, until after the end of World War II (1939 – 1945); actually beginning in 1947. In British Guiana, they had to do primarily with the relocation of workers from estate ‘logies’ to housing in what were established as ‘Extra Nuclear Areas’, which were eventually absorbed – from 1969 – into the Local Government structure following the passage of the Municipal and District Councils Act of that year.

One related development was the establishment of the Sugar Industry Labour Welfare Fund which contributed, via levy on sugar exported, to the construction of estate communities containing no less than 11,000 house lots eventually sold for to the employee owner at $1.00 each. (Employees in villages were excluded from any of these arrangements).

Following this infrastructural development exercise, it became logical for thoughtful minds to create a more productive human policy of Community Development. Its actual implementation involved the construction of Community Centres for Males and Girls Clubs, managed by elected neighbours, who were guided by highly trained male and female Welfare Officers first sent to be trained overseas.

Created was a comprehensive programme of organised sports, along with the innovation of drama, which allowed Girls Clubs to participate in an exciting social experience coordinated by specially recruited social developers from the Caribbean. The emergence of athletics, cricket, football, table tennis and theatre champions, nationally and internationally, brought a new dimension to social cohesion, as well as self-respect, among the various levels of the industry. It was “Communication’ in action.

The action escalated when Bookers Sugar Estates appointed a new Chairman, Edgar Readwin, who was already British Guiana’s Lawn Tennis Champion until overtaken by BSE’s Company Secretary, Ian McDonald. As a general sports enthusiast, Readwin soon insisted on encouraging the formation of Head Office Sports Teams in which he would participate, so as to visit estates on available weekends – from Skeldon right across the coast to Uitvlugt. Care was taken to include secretaries in the Head Office teams that would participate in the evening indoor games. The males would also exercise in the daytime cricket and football games. Complementarily estate senior staff were encouraged to engage one another similarly as proximity allowed. The outcome was a rewarding experience of personal and organisational contact.

Not illogically, the extension of this process – intended to expose Bookers in a more positive light to a larger society – included the publication of a daily newspaper called the ‘Guyana Graphic’ headed by an experienced local editor.

Internally also there was the fortnightly publication called ‘Booker News’ for circulation not only throughout the sugar industry, but critically in the other companies – Booker Stores, Shipping, Pharmaceuticals, Rum, Lithographic, BG Balata.

Came 1976 and the nationalisation of the Booker Group of Companies. Each one pursued independent communication strategies. In the Guyana Sugar Corporation of some 28,000 employees, a pioneering ‘Communication Department’ was created to circulate information to and from employees about their achievements, and of course those of the organisation. In the process an impressive array of fledgling writers was discovered.

Then by 1981 there was conceptualised, a most fundamental communication process that provided for statutory levels of communication throughout the Corporation, more specifically between managers and managed on every estate – an arrangement distinct from the customary industrial relations encounters; but instead one which earned the decision – making authority of partners in agreement. It was called ‘Workers Participation’ whose Constitution included quite sophisticated electoral provisions. It proved to be a highly motivational experience, as managers and managed sat around discussion tables as equals, in deliberately arranged alternative seating, rather than as opposites. The Chairmanship was also rotated – respectively in Field, Factory and Administrative Departments, then climaxing to an Estate level interaction. Agreed recommendations, carefully recorded, were, more often than not, approved up to the level of the Corporate Board. Inherent was the critical ingredient of persons of various levels in the job hierarchy engaging one another respectfully as human beings.

It is not known where existed a comparable communication component in other public or private sector organisations. So that it is possible that since then, those who have survived the positive experiences must pause to wonder about the status of relationships between manager and managed in current organisational structures – private and moreso public; for the playing field has changed dramatically over recent years, resulting in less human contact. The latter has become distanced by technology through which an unidentified manager can ‘zoom’ downwards to indifferent subordinates, not to mention ‘valued customers’ with but too little provision for equally indifferent feedback. In the Public Service, for example, the instructive environment which obtains leaves but little room for responsive engagement. There is the over-arching authority of the Department of Public Information, who also performs under directions.

The ‘Staff Meeting’ seems a scarce, unheard format these days. One therefore searches to find what relevant organisational arrangements exist for ‘feedback’ – whether to agree or complain; left with the choice of the press as an indifferent commentator, if not a complainant.

The distance between the decision-making messenger and the distanced receiver is palpable. For the message takes little or no account of varying levels of comprehension and indeed interpretation of the same words. There is left therefore but the instinctive, if not cultivated, reaction to the image of the messenger or the platform to which the latter is related.

One is left to monitor, review and evaluate whether the morality of ‘communication’ has at all been maintained, and to contemplate the extent to which technological change has been beneficial – taking into account the tremendous accommodation allowed for misinformation, facts/fake news and other miscreations- euphemistically acknowledged as ‘social media’; and to all of which the current operations of decision-makers, their viewers, listeners, readers are most accustomed.

But old-timers (though disregarded) keep enquiring about the available platforms for listening to those who have substantive issues to discuss, more so on equal terms. Implicitly the point they make is quite basic, i.e. ‘as voters we are entitled to more accountability, and should not be made to feel discounted’.

One recalls Jim Collins’ bestseller ‘Good to Great’ resulting from research of hundreds of successful businessmen in the USA. What he observed is relevant to any type of leadership ‘at the top of the five level leadership hierarchy whose leaders embodied a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will’.

The author went on to observe: ‘But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There is a huge difference between the opportunity to ‘have your say’ and the opportunity ‘to be heard’. ‘Good to great leaders created a culture wherein people had tremendous opportunity to be heard and ultimately for truth to be told’. In this regard, one connects with the observation made by Stephen Covey in his bestseller ‘The Speed of Trust’ – ‘if developed and leveraged, one thing that has the potential to create unparalleled success and prosperity… yet is the least understood, most neglected and most underestimated… is trust’.

But who was it that said ‘I cannot hear what you are saying for who you are, deafens me’. In the Public Service for instance there are five categories of employees established in 1992 and never since reviewed to ascertain how many categories of human beings they have now become.

The above is put to the vote.

 

E.B. John

 

 

 

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