31 March 2008
Human resources departments under strain due to BEE
…skills shortage causes problems across industries…
The pressure being placed on human resources staff at major companies- especially large IT corporates - to find black empowered staff members is becoming counter-productive and is creating alarming levels of churn within many human resources departments, said Karen Geldenhuys, MD of Pretoria-based IT recruitment company, Abacus Recruitment.
Geldenhuys said the internal pressures to meet “black equity demands” are tearing companies apart. “Line managers within organizations have jobs to do. They have deadlines to meet and projects to roll out. They work on results. If posts cannot be filled they pressurize the human resources staff to find people – any people, as long as they can do the job. The human resources department, on the other hand, has to meet certain criteria and, while there are sometimes the right skills available, they are unable to employ them. This creates a great deal of conflict within companies and we are seeing a rash of resignations, especially from high-ranking staff members within human resources departments, who can simply no longer handle the pressure of being bombarded by both sides, without any way of finding a solution.”
Geldenhuys said too much lip service is being paid to the skills shortage. “If we have skilled positions to fill, and we cannot find the right people to meet the government’s black equity criteria then, as a country that wants to prosper, we should be able to fill the post with a white person, or even someone from overseas. The skills shortage, however,” she added, “is not just contained to the ICT industry.
“There has been a lot of talk about Eskom and to what extent a perceived skills shortage has caused the current power problems. Eskom, of course, vehemently denies that the problem we are facing is due, in part, to a skills crisis. Granted, Mbeki and his government have at least come out and said it is also their fault – they did not foresee a power crisis hitting SA as they were warned. But it is a known fact that part of the country’s power problem is due to underperforming power plants, or to the fact that there just aren’t enough skills within Eskom to conduct routine maintenance on many of the plants.
“The question is: how is Eskom going to solve the problem? Are they just going to invest more than R300 billion, as they plan to, to ramp up the power capacity by investing in more plants and plant capacity, or are they also going to look at their internal skills shortage. Throwing a lot of money at a crisis does not necessarily solve the problem in the long term. We have to look at the underlying problem; and part of the underlying problem with the country’s electricity crisis is the fact that Eskom did not have the wherewithal to circumvent the crisis before it became a crisis.”
Water shortages loom
Warwick Steinhobel, MD of specialist split bearing company, OE Bearings – whose bearings are also used to run water treatment plants – said the country is facing similar problems with “future water shortages”.
He said that, like with Eskom, there are similar “onerous warnings” emanating about the country’s future water problems. “Experts are saying that unless certain measures are taken now, the country will not have enough water in the next two decades. On top of that, what is threatening to exacerbate the water problem is the fact that an increasing amount of our water is becoming contaminated. But what is happening on the ground? The powers that be are running around denying that we are facing a water problem in the future. Of course the current power problem is making matters worse as water treatment plants cannot treat water properly if they are continually facing power outages.”
More Info
|
The following is a list of news articles which has been published as press releases by Abacus Recruitment.
Expand All
Contract All
|
|