By Obinna Inogbo (Nigeria)
Founder, Worktainment Limited
Business is about identifying a problem and charging a price to solve it. Is there any bigger problem in Nigerian companies today than Japa? What is the cause of Japa? Poor Employee Relations!
Employee Relations is business ownership/senior management being transparent with employees within reason, giving staff a heard and considered voice as well as providing them with self-development trainings and recreation. If you own a business, your employees are your biggest ambassadors. They can advertise your business from dawn until dusk and equally ruin your business to the outside world with insults. How you treat them largely results in how they will treat your business.
The reason why MOST companies in Nigeria practice poor Employee Relations has to do with our negative seniority culture as a nation. This culture involves never showing weakness to those you’re in charge of, never apologizing to them when wrong, not caring about their personal growth but expecting maximum productivity from them.
Here’s where the Nigerian PR pro comes in! If you can convince a prospective client that you will increase their staff morale, reduce resignations, and make their company a place their staff will love coming to daily, they will pay you for Employee Relations!
Professional Colleague, what are the areas to improve upon when the client hires you? First is inclusiveness: encourage your client to intimate staff on short-term objectives and long-term goals. It will make staff feel like they are part of something; they might even make suggestions. These intimations need not be formal via a weekly or monthly meeting; a CEO can simply casually walk into her staff’s sitting area and begin to talk to them as an equal before telling them about her plans to move to a bigger Lekki office next year to be closer to their clients.
Second is vulnerability: this is what I wrote in the second paragraph regarding being transparent with staff within reason. They don’t need to know everything, but they need to know more than their roles and responsibilities. Tell the boss that if he is worried that he may get a rejection from the pitch he collectively did with his staff last month he should express this to them! It doesn’t show weakness, it shows he’s a human being and will endear him more to his staff. His employees will know that he feels the same fears they feel, and he’ll be more relatable to them!
Third and finally is engagement: an engaged employee “carries your business on their head”! How do you get a Nigerian employee to treat your business like he or she will inherit it one day? You must explain to the client that they must go beyond paying salaries! Introduce self-development trainings which you, Professional Colleague, will conduct. Train their staff on modern management styles and skills, emotional intelligence, business writing, employee personal branding, C-suite media interview techniques, business administration, speechwriting and speech delivery…the topics are plenty! Can you smell the money already? Tell the client that staff cannot give what they don’t have. Self-development trainings will return on investment massively for the business owner because these trainings will save their staff money that they would’ve spent on training themselves. Self-development trainings are also another reason for staff to not resign.
Tell your client to spend their profits on weekly, monthly, and quarterly staff treats – they can pay for a few days’ lunch weekly, take them to a movie monthly and take them on a full day out quarterly. These treats make staff interact with each other outside of their professional roles and responsibilities. They get to know each other as human beings and not just colleagues. More importantly, they get to like each other. Teamwork subconsciously builds because of their appreciation for your kindness and generosity, and they will give their all to the business!
As PR professionals, we cannot only wait for the client to give us the brief; we must give the brief to the client and Employee Relations is a lucrative area of Public Relations to do so.