IF there is one area we’re getting it all wrong, it has to be the personnel management aspect. The entire process we adopt is so wrong. I often wonder why we all complain that our workers give us the worst headaches. It is a miracle we’re not all consumed by our grave mistakes in this area.
I thought the standard procedure is to first clearly articulate what you want done and then go ahead to source for someone who can handle it. In more organized settings, it takes series of interviews and screenings to get hired. At my end, it takes two minutes to get hired and entrusted with an equipment or machine worth millions of naira.
Here is how it happens: A young man walks in and claims to be a driver, you point at a truck whose driver just disappeared and asks him if he could drive it. The man nods, gets into the van, starts it and then turns of the ignition to show he is acquainted with that type of vehicle and he is hired. The next day, he comes around to start work and drives off a truck you paid close to two million naira to acquire. Sometimes, the interview gets ‘deeper’ and you ask to see his driver’s licence and ask who he has worked for before. There is no attempt to find out if he was lying about his experience. No one mentions references.
You see, there is perennial scarcity of manpower in the informal sector. Visit a factory and you often meet a vacancy sign at the gate. In one factory I know, the vacancy announcement is written on the wall with oil paint and has been there for years. The continual stay of the sign is not for lack of paint to wipe it off but the fact that there has never been enough of that category of staff.
Forget the faulty belief that you don’t need skilled workers; the sector requires people with a lot of hard-to- acquire skills and these are hard to find. In some sections, you need muscles and that appears easy to find until you start searching. In others, you need people with enough patience and good humour to repeat a particular arm or leg movement for many hours in a day. It is equally hard to find such people. I once got my kids to try carrying out a task for some days and they threatened to run away from the house after the third day. They said they would go nuts if they continue repeating one set of movements all day for more than the three days. I once tried doing that work and they are right about the whole process making you go round the bend.
In my sub-sector, there are tasks you need to learn for at least one month to master them and work fast. Only few people can have the level of patience needed to give a full month of their lives to learning. I’ve had numerous people come around to learn only for them to disappear after four days. The pay is also often low in the informal sector and this discourages potential entrants. There are times you are so desperate you could hire anybody. You are aware you may be making a serious mistake but then your factory needs to be working so you go ahead and hire, half-knowing you will regret your action. Sometimes, you simply take anyone that comes along, determined to keep things going while you then quietly source for the right people.
The practice of hiring without following due procedure is too expensive that quite a few companies are beginning to attempt doing the right thing. Some of the stories of our mistakes sound far-fetched they could pass for fiction. I once hired three young men at once and felt lucky since I badly needed workers then. They told me they hailed from the same town and spoke the same dialect. One of them was different from the other two; he had incredible physical prowess. I often watch the boys in rough play and I knew he had the type of physical strength my townsmen will classify as ‘criminal’. He was rough and a lot of other things.
The matter got out of hand when rumours started in my factory about the young man saying he would run away with the sales proceeds. His two brothers let out the word that he was planning a hit so that ‘madam will not harass us for his actions later’. That was when I started asking serious questions and it came out he was ‘operating’ at Onitsha and had to leave in a hurry when the state government brought in a vigilante group. That was too much for even me.
I also hired a driver blindly and paid heavily. On a very bright day, he lost control of a loaded truck opposite LASPOTECH, Isolo area and was hurtling towards a crowd made up of the tertiary institution’s students and school children. Fortunately (?), it brought down only one man, ploughed into an iron gate, crashed it open and was still on rampage but for God’s grace which made it stop before clearing the people in a storage facility with many imported heavy duty trucks.
Two days later, I let the driver take out another truck; the engine knocked twenty minutes into the trip and it was towed back. Immediately, the man’s case file started coming in big bits. “Madam, that man has two bad demons in him, one of them makes him crash two vehicles wherever he goes and the other one makes the factory to close”, someone close to him whispered to me.
It turned out that the said demons were mainly responsible for the closure of two factories close to me. I let him go. Shortly, I saw the new truck he was driving where it demolished a wall along the highway and then my other drivers reported seeing him with another truck in a deep ditch. He was doing more of destruction than driving from one factory to the other.