Pay attention to workers’ welfare - Agyepong
A five-day leadership conference for management staff of the Zoomlion and the Jospong Group of companies is underway at Gomoa Fetteh in the Central Region. Addressing participants at the opening of the conference last Monday, the Executive Chairman of the Zoomlion and the Jospong Group of companies, Mr Joseph Siaw Agyepong called on people in leadership positions to show concern for the welfare of the staff working under them and also invest in them.
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He urged management staff to focus on addressing workers’ concerns timeously and appropriately to bring about the excellent service delivery that they all yearned for.
Describing the workers as stakeholders of the companies, he said, “It is with the stakeholder in mind that we continue to promote excellent service delivery and standards through various initiatives.”
Also referring to the staff as the companies’ internal customers, Mr Agyepong called for development and training programmes to ensure that the workers were adequately equipped to effectively play the roles for which they had been employed.
One of the highlights of the opening of the conference was a video recording of some workers sharing their concerns about inappropriate or broken-down equipment which stalled their work and performance. After cautioning the management staff not to victimise the junior staff who had expressed their concerns, Mr Agyepong charged them to get to the level of the staff under them so as to speedily solve any problems that might arise.
Leadership conference
The fifth of such annual conferences to be held for management staff of companies under the Jospong and Zoomlion Groups was on the theme, “Creating an Excellent Service Delivery Culture: The
Service Leader’s Role,” and attracted about 1,000 management staff from all 47 Zoomlion and Jospong Group subsidiaries in eight countries.
Guest speakers who addressed the staff included Dr Mario Denton, an Industrial Psychologist and an international teacher; Mr Kweku Bedu-Addo, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Standard
Chartered Bank, Rev. Samuel Adeyemi, an international conference speaker; Mr Daniel Asiedu, the CEO of Zenith Bank, and Bishop James Saah, the Administrative Bishop of Action Chapel International (ACI).
Others were DCOP Kofi Boakye, the Ashanti Regional Police Commander; Ms Esther Numaba Cobbah, the CEO of Strategic Communications Africa Ltd (Stratcomm Africa), Apostle Dr Opoku Onyina, the
Chairman of the Church of Pentecost, Dr Joseph Osafo, the National Secretary of the Ghana Psychological Association, and Prof. Adukwei I. F. Hesse, a Senior Consultant Physician.
Topics discussed by the about 20 speakers included: “Building a high performance team”, “Customer-focused leadership”, “Authentic leadership”, “Leadership – the critical factor in organisations”, “The psychology of customer satisfaction”; and “Serving your internal customer for better teamwork.”
New approaches
Mr Agyepong told the management staff not to do things the old way as they would not work, drawing an analogy from a parable in the Bible about new wine in old wine skins.
“We have come to a point in our corporate journey where we cannot afford to put fresh ideas into old wine skins. Henceforth all new ideas must be stored in new wine skins and bottles. We must do things differently in order to remain relevant and competitive,” he charged the participants.
Human capital development
In an interview later with the media, Mr Agyepong said for the year 2016, the Zoomlion and the Jospong Group of companies would focus on developing their human capital to certain levels so as to be able to serve the country better.
“Over the years that I have established companies by God’s grace, what I have recognised and studies have shown is that what we have to focus on in Ghana is human capital, developing your own people to the level for them to be able to have the company at heart, work within the atmosphere of passion, belongingness, and be able to work very well,” he said.
He indicated that the purpose of the leadership conference was to think about ways to deal with their shortcomings as an organisation, instil in the leaders the culture of having their customers at heart and seeing the service to them as a privilege in order to enhance it in the coming years.
“You can have technology, you can have equipment and every infrastructure but if they don’t bring improvement and a kind of encouragement to develop the organisation and the people are not being developed, they will never work.”
“This country needs leaders and leaders are developed. Leaders are trained and once we do that, a time will come that we will have good people that we want to lead us,” he said.