BASSEY EDET, CEO, Crest Wave Consulting Company, a health, wellness and psychological fitness company, in this interview with KELECHI EWUZIE reveals that for organisations to succeed, employees’ safety at workplace must be a priority. Excerpts:
Career path
I qualified as a doctor more than 13 years ago and I specialised in mental health more than seven years ago. I am into training and research and I have done quite a lot of things in mental health.
Motivation
Nigeria is a virgin land of opportunities. When you look at the Nigerian work space you find no niche for treating Nigerians right. A lot of organisations do not have provisions that treat workers right. In societies that truly work, treating workers right is the first step in any organisation’s or government policy.
I hear that there are some statistics about unemployment but I think if the unemployed had a safety net; it would improve the work space perception, so individuals even when they lose their jobs or are yet to be employed will have a safety net to fall back on.
My motivation for setting up this company is just to provide a short term measure to improve safety in the work place and by so doing add value to the lives of people in the work place.
Crest wave consulting
The company was registered in 2008 and we have been working with several companies and hope to take it to the next level. What we are trying to do as much as possible is to add value by supporting health and safety in the workplace and in the community, so we practically provide services in areas that border on health and safety.
Psychologically, we have been involved in many health interventions during communal clashes. Currently, the nation is under siege psychologically, and the current Nigeria frame work does not guaranty for the safety and health of the work place for the worker.
You see a situation today where organisations treat their workers as commodity not as part of the framework or an investment. Most organisations declare profit in terms of cash but don’t declare profit in terms of investment in people and we think health and wellness are strategic long term investment strategy.
If you look at studies that have defined people that have moved companies, a lot of them have moved to companies for pecuniary gains but much more have moved for the psychological contracts that they signed with the companies and the companies have kept their own part of the psychological contract.
Sometimes, employees go to companies so that they could feel like a part of the workforce, a company that delivers on its promises and makes them feel protected. If you take employees who work in International oil organisations before the mergers and the rest, they have a sense of safety because the work culture affects them, the work place protects them and they have a sense that they have a place that they can feel safe.
What we want to imbibe in the Nigerian work space is to make it safe and productive for its workforce.
We offer customised wellness programmes for organisations -big, small corporations. But, our major market is the big ones for now, big to medium scale for now because of the size. What we basically do is address and customises management issues.
Nigerians resort to a lot of spiritual resources to cope. The country is one of the most religious countries in the world and coincidentally one of the most corrupt countries as well. But religion plays a role on how we cope and that’s why we have not lost our minds.
Also we know that coping determines productivity. I would believe that if we reframe the way we can cope, the way people process things, we can be optimal in productivity and that is part of our programme on offer.
We also offer a gamut of services. We craft a programme to include mantra, to include lots of discussions on how we can improve organisations waistline along side with their bottom line. So we would help employees and employers keep fit physically and also financially.
We also do health promotion programmes. There is one we call ‘Small step giant strides’. It’s one of the unique programmes where we are using a customised speedometer, i.e. a step counter, we try to get each worker to improve his/her mobility in the work space, not just mobility career-wise but mobility within the work space. What we wanted to encourage was to allow each worker to walk a minimum of 6 miles a day. It would do a lot for your cardio-vascular functions.
For each intervention that we carry out, we do pre and post assessment on coping and inability to cope. The bulk of our training is to ensure that at least 30 percent of the workforce that works in a high pressure work space and high pressured environment like Nigeria show signs that they are coping well with their work.
We believe that one thing we could do is to skill up the people in the work space so that they can manage their outside, compartmentalise their lives but at the same time manage the interdependent compartment of their lives.
An ideal place to work
An ideal work environment is a place that employees feel that the contribution they make is adequate to improve the growth of the organisation. It is a place where staff feels happy going to work. It is a place where a worker feels he is part of the community so that his contributions to that work environment are meaningful.
Sadly, what we find here in Nigeria today is that Nigerians don’t see the connection between what they contribute to the general advancement of the company and how the company makes progress.
An ideal environment is where the staff feel that they belong to the organisation, where they are rewarded for the amount of work they put in. Also when members of staff have issues, they can be adequately protected and cared for.
If a corporate organisation in Nigeria takes care of its staff well, it will be have optima productivity. The work environment right now hasn’t got as much elaborated frame work to operate in that is why we are offering a step to eventually improving to work space.
Leadership style
My style of leadership is all-encompassing. I carry everybody along where every staff contribution is vital. I like the participatory type of leadership
In my organisation, we have a share vision, we believe in one another and we believe in adding value. With a shared vision and value addition, everybody has a sense of belonging in the company. The greatest thing you can give to any staff is to make them feel that the company also belongs to them.
Dealing with competition
We try to introduce things that are norms in other societies into our Nigerian work space by putting a framework where you can have the work space to be ideal for optimal functioning. The challenge is that the work spaces are as unregulated as you can think, but in all this, it is an opportunity for growth.
Shortage of talent in the work space
There are two angles to this shortfall, the demand and the supply. The demand is to skill up and this requires a lot of the money and it is very difficult. If a graduate or an employee wants to take a course to improve him or herself, there is no provision to borrow money. Access to fund is really an issue; there are no provisions easily available for someone to skill up talent.
The second thing is that market differentiation is not easy because when there is projection that is clearer, planning becomes easier.
As you know Nigeria market is evolving. In developed economies, they can determine in the next five years where the services of a certain field of professional say doctors can be required in a particular region so the government will set out a certain amount of money to train professionals to fill that need, but we don’t have that in Nigeria and that is a problem.
Another problem is that the motivation for people to train in a given sector is poor because a lot of people they don’t see a long term value adding proposition in certain sector of the economy and they are further discouraged by the statistics of unemployed graduates in the country.
However, what I encourage people to do is to grow themselves so that they can be relevant.
Work /life balance
It is very easy. I am there whenever I am there, it means when I am working, I am working and when I am at home, I relate with my family. I have two children and they can be very engaging.
I also balance my life by mentoring other people children. I think the greatest gift you can offer is to model the kind of society we desire by modelling children. One of the greatest transference of values is through modelling.
I feel that modelling is one of the things I do, I model to my children my values and to other people’s children. When I am there, I am their father, as spouse to my wife and a mentor to other children around me. So I am there full time.
Prospect
I see us being among the greatest players in Nigeria and within the next five years I think we should have one or two branches in the western part of the continent.
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