BY BHEKILIZWE BERNARD NDLOVU When you first come to South Africa as a manager, you are confronted by the uncomfortable realisation that there is a disturbing work ethic issue.
You are immediately culture shocked by the nonchalant attitude towards such important things as the attitude towards attendance, punctuality, promptness, expeditious delivery and respect for timelines and deadlines, leave management and many other performance issues.
I recall my very first job for a social marketing organisation in South Africa when I had an altercation with my immediate supervisor. We were doing behavioural change for three prisons in South Africa that are technically called correctional centres and we were scheduled to start at 10 o’clock.
The company vehicle had arrived and as a team, quite a number of us were there except the boss.
I was getting worked already when he arrived because we were running late. This was made worse by his attitude towards the whole ‘running late’ issue. I thought he would apologise and explain to the team why he was late but he never did. I seemed to be the odd one out regarding my disappointment with his behaviour because everyone else seemed fine with it.
I just lost it and made him aware that it was unfair to the inmates that we would not keep our promise regarding time keeping. He looked at me and seemed surprised that I cared, much to my chagrin. An altercation ensued and I was disappointed that I seemed to have lost favour with some of the members of the team because I had challenged the boss who had done ‘nothing wrong’ as far as they were concerned. I had just been disrespectful, they said.
This was to be the beginning of a lot of other workplace ‘culture shock’ events and occurrences in South Africa. I had worked for a number of blue-chip organisations in Zimbabwe where the work ethic was a matter of pride. So, when I got to South Africa, I thought it followed without say that an employee had to work within clear instructions and that indeed, punctuality is the politeness of man. My first job in Zimbabwe was in a big manufacturing company with a staff complement of more than seven hundred. It was big but extremely organised that we even got to the extent of being ISO accredited in the areas of safety, healthy and environment and in quality. An employee knew they had to be careful about their process because ISO is about clear work instructions, documents and records. Leave was managed and taken at the convenience of the employer and deadlines were strict with the aim to please the customer.
I remember in human resources having to deal with an employee who had left the previous day before meeting a deadline given to him by the boss. He was charged with ‘wilful disobedience to a lawful instruction’ because he had been given a clear instruction via email to meet that deadline by end of day. An employee knew they came to the workplace to work and contribute to the success of the organisation and there was an element of pride that came with that. You just didn’t leave your work station because attendance had to be taken seriously. It was not as if we were primary school children needing to ask for permission to go to the toilet, no, but just a culture of accountability and transparency.
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I later became operations manager at this South African social marketing organisation I worked for and experienced a lot more difficult but educative issues. One of our employees continuously came late to work and his reason was that the train broke down most of the time. As far as he was concerned there was absolutely nothing, he could do about it because it was not his fault. I guess the train had to behave. That was not the crux of the matter for me though but what was more shocking was the way the manager dealt with the matter. She deducted the salary equivalent of the number of hours he was not present because of late coming. That for me was the bigger shock. The employee took the train because it was the cheapest mode of transport and the boss made his situation worse by reducing his ability to even take the train. Needless to say, the employee eventually lost his job.
I had the difficult experience of handling an alcoholic. At first, I thought he had genuine issues of having his kids and himself falling sick and that made him fail to come to work but it slowly became clear to me that his sickness hit him only on Mondays and that his week started on Tuesdays. When he did come to work on Tuesdays, he would be very moody especially when I began to question his ‘illness.’
I also had a case of a subordinate who was absent from work because her boyfriend was not feeling well. If you come from a serious work culture you might be beginning to think that I am writing fiction today but I assure you these are real life stories and you are getting them from the horse’s mouth.
It is not what I experienced in South Africa that causes my discomfort but what I have experienced here, having come back and had stints here and there with some organisations. It would seem that Zimbabwe’s work ethic and culture has plummeted to an all time low.
We seem to be battling with focus, performance and work behaviour. I had a chat with an acquaintance recently when I raised my concerns about how work behaviour seems to have changed and his opinion was the economic problems have hit us hard. People look for jobs to survive and this has led to that organised work attitude suffering a huge knock. Employees can now just leave their work station and attend to family issues even outside the confines of compassionate and family leave. Extraneous work has become the order of the day because employees seem to believe that because they do not earn enough at work, they can hustle to make ends meet.
A country is kept on her knees by the work that the workplace does and when this critical institutions’ fortunes seem to be waning, we all need to begin to do something about it. Shall we wait for the situation to get better? I don’t think so because then how does the economy begin to do better if productivity is not fixed?
We need to work even under these circumstances because these circumstances need us to do our best for the situation to get better or we are doomed. Last week I wrote about Paul Mukondo and other performers of note in the workplace and called upon this beautiful country, Zimbabwe to look back and remember that we used to thrive in the workplace and we can do so even now.
- Bhekilizwe Bernard Ndlovu’s training is in human resources training, development and transformation, behavioural change, applied drama, personal mastery and mental fitness. He works for a South African organization as a Learning & Development Specialist, while also doing a PhD with Wits University where he looks at violent strikes in the South African workplace as a researcher. Ndlovu worked as a human resources manager for several blue-chip companies in Zimbabwe and still takes keen interest in the affairs of people and performance management in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted on [email protected]
