Barbados could be losing $1.6 billion a year to disengagement and lost productivity in the workplace.
That is the “conservative” estimate of new research by Dr Shindale Seale, an international organisational strategist based in the United States, who presented her findings at the Central Bank of Barbados’ recent 46th Annual Review Seminar.
In an interview while in Barbados, the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of SEADE Coaching & Consulting said she believes that organisations in Barbados were virtually paying what was tantamount to a “productivity tax” because they were not measuring the cost of “cultural misalignment”.
Seale, who is a Barbadian, launched the Cultural Excellence & Economic Development Strategy (CEEDS
) Framework here in April, which she is calling “the first methodology purpose built to quantify what cultural misalignment is costing your organisation in real dollars”.
With research from American analytics and advisory company Gallup concluding that there is approximately 70 per cent disengagement among workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, Seale said she initiated a survey involving companies which participated in the CEEDS Framework launch to determine the extent of their disengagement/productivity tax.
“The range in their productivity tax was astronomical. We had an MSME losing like $560 a year, to a banking outfit losing like $12 million a year, and everywhere in between. So it was too salient to ignore,” she shared.
With that as her base, Seale took her research further by estimating the losses at a country level, including using information on Barbados’ workforce and salary figures.
“So we’re looking at 70 per cent of Latin American Caribbean workforce is either not engaged or actively disengaged. When you apply that to the Barbadian organisations and what they’re paying their people, the productivity loss estimate base is around $1.6 billion annually,” she said.
“And [this] is conservative because it’s . . . telling you kind of where we’re at around ballpark, what we call the order of magnitude of what we’re losing. So it’s significant enough that we really need to measure it properly. And this is where I’m looking at that further study,” Seale added, while welcoming the expert feedback she received at the seminar on her research paper Measuring The Hidden Productivity Tax: Quantifying Cultural Impact On Economic Competitiveness In Small Island Developing States.
Three pillars
She said her expanded research would “help me to refine it in a way that would allow it to be a much more longitudinal study”.
Stressing that “this is not consulting theory, these are active client results”, the CEO explained the CEEDS Framework was built on more than 30 years of organisational development expertise, doctoral-level research and was vetted through research across 200-plus organisations in 15 industries.
CEEDS is built on three pillars – cultural transformation, economic impact and community resilience.
“First is the cultural transformation pillar . . . that we align with [your] disengagement tax,” Seale said.
“Our next one is Pillar 2, which is our income impact which is aligned with our innovation gap. That’s a really, really important piece that I think in Barbados . . . it’s not really as prioritised.
“The third pillar is called the the community resilience pillar and we attribute that to the reputational capital at risk.”
She added: “It’s an economic framework with cultural inputs and financial outputs, essentially. It’s like a systems framework where we start with deriving the organisation’s number, and that number is basically what your general productivity tax is that you’re paying,” she noted.
“What that basically means is we calculate your disengagement, your innovation gap and your reputational capital at risk.
“Once we have that number, then we know what your starting point is, and from your starting point, then we can determine what behaviours are going on in your organisation that are exposing you to financial risks or financial loss.” (SC)
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