Human Resources

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Introduction

Human Resources is where you really hear some good stories. Unfortunately, a bad situation can do more damage to the organization than loosing a major donor.

A new staff member has up to 6 months paid sick leave the first year that he is hired.
A women was actually hired the day she gave birth to a baby. Not only was she paid a salary but the Organization also paid for all her medical fees out of the project's budget!
The Organization had never fired one single individual. A guard that was caught breaking into a desk and stealing was first since home for three months to await the outcome of the investigation. After it was determined that he was guilty, he was paid for the three months that he was at home and was in addition given over 6 month’s severance pay.

In one BNGO payroll checks are automatically deposited into the staff member’s bank account. Unless something is positively done, the checks are automatically written each month. In other words, if that person stops working and no one notifies the payroll office, that employee will continue to be paid. In fact, there is no monitoring of employees working hours at all. Many times the director could not find any of his staff. When an audit of the payroll was attempted to match names on the payroll with the faces, it was stopped.
The manager of the IT department only came in to work a few days each week. It seems that his wife was going to school and he had to baby-sit.
A plan was put together for the purchase of new computer technology. Half the budgeted amount was recommended for training. The Division Director, crossed out the training and replaced the line item with office furniture.

Recommendations:

Make Hiring Policies realistic
Make Human Resource policies realistic
Penalties for breaking the rules should be severe enough to keep people from breaking the rules
Audit Payroll closely. It sets the standards for all the staff. If payroll and time cards are not audited, very soon you may find very few staff on the job.
Training is worth more than all the equipment you can buy. Allocate more to training than the equipment purchase in any funding request.

Stories

It was recommended to one large NGO in a developing country that they install a Oracle database system on a Sun Unix system. Although the physical equipment was funded, very little money was provide for education. The budget called for several individuals to go to a foreign country (the country of the consultants, of course) at a cost of $1600 per week for a period of approximately 6 weeks.

This 6 weeks of training was not enough time to teach someone how to bring up a Oracle system much less teach them how to program in SQL or how to administrate the system.

Now these individuals came back to their country and worked very hard at trying to put together their system. What they did accomplish was very admirable. Yet they had no help and no funds were available for additional training.

These individuals were paid an average of $3,500 per year for their dedication. Very soon afterwards, these individuals were offered jobs in several other countries at the going rate of $4,000 per month. They left.

The moral to this story is that even though training is a problem in developing countries, it can be done; the shortages that occur in these countries is due to migration once their are trained. A developing country today will find it very hard to compete.

Even with as much research and funding in health economics in a country such as Bangladesh, they have no health economic programs in school. Why?

From the experiences of InHCc, funding organizations continue to under-estimate the training needed. Even if sufficient training is provide initially, very little, if any is provide for "continuing education."

In one NGO, a meeting was held with the staff to get a consensus to determine the best systems to use for a new information system to be installed.

In was soon discovered, that the NGO's staff, had very little knowledge of present day systems. In the average of the 12 years that they had been with the NGO they had not had any new training. They were still operating an old mainframe with an outdated accounting system that had been installed 12 years before. They did not know anything else.

The consensus was that they "convert" the old system.

The moral of the story is that if you do not have new ideas, then you have no choices to make other than what you already know.

Solutions

Additional education through the Internet can also be added where appropriated.

Management training: The key to any information system is not the collection of the data but rather the use of that data.

Training is one of the most important contributes we can give to developing countries. Web Technology makes possible what has never been possible before: On-line distant learning. Applications can be built that are interactive, and teach as data is entered. Executive information with graphs and trends can be produced in summary form, every day, for the local manager.

In one project, it was required that certain staff members learn how to use a computer to input data and view project indicators. These staff members had never used any type of mechanical or electronic devices previously. After many failed attempts at teaching these staff members how to use the computer, one project manager brought in a “computer game.” He taught the game to two of the staff members and very soon all the staff members in the organization knew how to play the game. It was then very easy to train these members in the use of the project’s screens (Klappe, D., Unpublished, 1998).

Feedback from the OLAP will not only give each local service level their information but also a comparison with others and tips on how to improve.

The ability to drill down their data will encourage higher-level managers to interact more frequency with their subordinates. This opportunity for two-way communicate encourages not only training but also the sharing of real knowledge.

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