WorldCity Business Magazine

Keeping the Troops Happy

by WC

The old beef “you cant get the staff” may have a successor: “When you can get the staff, you cant always keep them.”

That seems to have been the consensus among four executives who oversee corporate operations in the Americas when they exchanged ideas at our February CEO Roundtable breakfast held at the Azul restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental Miami.

Re-branding strategies and exchange rates, alongside perennial concerns about Venezuelas future, also dogged the panel.

Marjorie Kean, herself a recent recruit at Chicago- based Edward W. Kelley & Partners a company formed last year with global headquarters in London, weighed in on how this generation showed less loyalty to employers than the previous one.

Managing director Kean, practicing in Latin American and the U.S. Hispanic markets, acknowledged that employers were, in part, to blame.

“People do not show loyalty to their companies,” she said. “People are working for five or eight companies over the course of 20 years. You ask the question: where is the consistency in their track records? Then you reflect on 9/11 and the dot-com burst when companies also didnt show loyalty.”

Nurturing staff is paramount to ensuring retention chimed in Ben Mansoor, Wendy’s regional vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean.

“My advice would be to find out the interests of people. Pepsi did a fantastic job of that,” said Mansoor who worked for the beverage giant as a Pizza Hut division vice president when the food chain fell under the brand’s umbrella. Born in Bangladesh, he has lived in Argentina, Brazil and Puerto Rico among other places. “The company always took the time to introduce new
employees to a new locale, say, through the Argentina Club or its equivalent.”

The company’s reputation resonated with Kean who said that, with the exception of Pepsi and Procter & Gamble, companies rarely developed talent internally, adopting the principle that it is better to buy than make.

“Some companies forget about the work environment,” said Mansoor. “Most of us spend 70 percent of our day there, after all. Wendy’s has been going through changes over the past two years. During the transition, we need to keep middle management happy.”

Kean proposed that executive search companies devote as much time to helping companies in retaining staff as recruiting them.

“Part of our fee should be allocated to managing and maintaining staff,” she shared, “not just finding them. It really depends upon a company’s willingness to listen to us. They really need to listen to us for the whole year after we have placed the staff.”

The revolving door presents problems for the typical recruitment consultant. Firstly, when there is a shortage of talent, and Kean cited Venezuela as an example of a country experiencing a brain drain, the market is conducive to solicitations and job-hopping. In order to avoid conflicts between clients, Edward W. Kelley will be keeping its roster to a minimum focusing on one client per sector, she said.

On the other end, Kean said she felt an ethical obligation to provide full and frank disclosure to good candidates, many of whom ask her how long other executives have been with a particular company.

“The hopefuls will then say: ‘I’m considering a move,’” she said. “They continue: ‘Are you asking me to consider a move to a place staffed by all new people?’Obviously, that isn’t a very attractive proposition.”

Kean identified some of the idiosyncrasies within South America comparing academic superiority in one country with linguistic supremacy in another.

“On one hand, there is Colombia where the people are very good and very well educated,” she said, “but they are very isolated and not well traveled. That translates to fewer bilinguals in the marketplace than, say, a country such as Venezuela where the oil market has spawned a bilingual culture with many of those individuals educated in the United States. Many of them are taking their families out and there is little chance of their returning. Still, those they leave behind typically lag behind the Colombians in educational terms.”

The two other panelists, representing French and German interests, argued that loyalty remained part of the European sensibility.

That was the view of Cedric Gobilliard, who has been president and CEO of Club MedNorth America for just eight months and of Felipe Aja Espil, vice president and general manager of the Latin America and Caribbean region for Volkswagen Group since 2005.

“European companies are different,” insisted Aja Espil, a sentiment echoed by Gobilliard.

“Europeans dont have that mentality,” said Gobilliard whose employer, Club Med, employs 10,000 people, half of them French, in 80 countries, “and Asians are even more loyal.”

If lack of talent is proving a drain on the recruitment sector, then a lack of education is holding back the region’s growth, panelists agreed.

“Some people are asking: ‘Why aren’t Central America and South America growing as fast as the Asian tigers?’” Mansoor posited. “It’s a question of education across the region which far lags behind Asia. Some countries are upping investment in education by as much as 12 percent. That and infrastructure are the largest handicaps to development in Latin America.”

Colombia, Cuba and Venezuela

Companies doing business in Latin America are not only required to consider cultural differences as far as they affect the needs and abilities of employees, but how business practices in particular countries can impact their operations.

One example of this is recent legislation in Venezuela which reduced the time for reporting injuries at restaurants from 10 days to an hour a practice which may be troublesome for Wendys which has 80 percent of its South American operations based in the country.

Then there is Colombia, which while a trade hub, is still suffering a certain degree of image rebound from its reputation as the world’s narcotics capital, said Espil.

“We’re optimistic about the market but it can be something of a ghost,” he said. “Sometimes insurance does not cover people attending workshops, say in Bogota,” he said. “There is still a stigma about the country.”

Prospects for business in Cuba remained question-able, panelists agreed, although the island republic records the second highest GDP growth in the Caribbean, after Puerto Rico.

For political reasons, Club Med would handle business there from Germany though the company remained skeptical about the opportunities, Gobilliard said.

“It’s very mass market there and that doesn’t sit well with our new brand image,” he said, expanding on larger concerns about rightful title to property. “The biggest challenge in Cuba is determining who owns the land. We don’t know because of how the Communist government has appropriated it and we would be unlikely to put ourselves in a position where we were open to litigation of that nature.” WC