homeOur region 19 September 2008
Our region’s professionals complain that the cost of telecommunication, air fares and hotel charges are serious obstacles to overcome when doing business within CARICOM. Those with foreign experiences argue that it’s easier to do business between London and New York than it is do the same between Port of Spain and Kingston.
Whether that’s true or not, the advent of recent technologies certainly makes it easier and cheaper to collaborate between countries, as demonstrated by the release of the recent CaribHRForum survey.
Unknown to many outside the profession, the region’s Human Resource community has been working hard to bring together its professionals in different ways. At first, there were the annual gatherings in various islands hosted by the local associations. Attendance from outside each country was sparse, and continues to be, given the high cost of travelling overseas, differences in currencies and lack of e-commerce.
However, those who met and formed friendships at these conferences resolved to stay in touch, and their commitment to do so led to a commitment to find ways to keep the connection alive, in spite of the expense involved. The commitment was loud, and repeated often enough that I (as an attendee at several conferences) found I could not ignore what my colleagues were asking for.
Free Mailing Lists
In the late 1990’s I joined several discussion lists (also called mailing lists) at a time back when they were a novelty. I eventually started my own and thought that it might be useful for our purposes.
The way they work is simple. A single email address acts as a hub for a group of people who use it to send email back and forth between them. Everyone receives the group emails, and anyone can send email out to the entire list without having to know anything more than the single email address. In this way, a conversation can be conducted between all the participants by email, connecting members in Trinidad with those in Suriname, Bahamas, the US and beyond.
I created our regional discussion list (which is now housed at CaribHRForum.com) with a few friends and it has grown to over 200 members in the past five years. Conversations on the forum have catalyzed several important activities, including the push for a CARICOM-wide HR organization and also larger, more inclusive region-wide conferences.
Membership is free, as are all the benefits of joining. The discussion list has allowed friendships and partnerships to develop, and led to jobs, projects and social gatherings that otherwise could not have occurred. Also, there have been several heated debates over hot topics, with everyone learning from different regional perspectives.
It’s a model that any group of professionals in the region could follow, as the only requirements are a little technical know-how and a willingness to communicate with strangers who share a passion for a single area of interest.
Conference Calls -an Impediment
The cost of telephony remains an impediment, and it’s easy to see how the group could have expanded its work with the ability to do conference calls at a reasonable price. At times we have turned to VOIP technologies such as Skype and Vonage, but only a handful of professionals have them, and they don’t allow large-scale conferencing.
Recent Innovations
Several innovations within CaribHRForum community could also be copied by other professionals. Last year, for example, we launched CaribHRNews, which pulls together all the most recent HR news from the region into a single website. A report is sent out bi-weekly, and it’s something that any group of professionals could also do to share valuable information. Also, we are about to re-launch CaribHRJobs, which is a simple list of HR jobs from around the region, filling a significant information gap that currently exists.
Within the past few weeks, CaribHRForum’s 2008 survey was launched to over HR 3000 professionals, making it one of the most far-reaching surveys of its kind. The focus of this particular effort is to improve regional Human Resource conferences, with a view to enhancing their appeal to practitioners across the region.
The cost of launching the survey was minimal due to the fact that it’s electronic, and once again, staffed by volunteers. As time goes on it’s likely that there will be even more technology that be can used, at increasingly lowed prices, to bring together professionals across the region to conduct business.
Francis Wade is a management consultant who is releasing an
e-book on Caribbean networking in June 2008 that will be free to the
public for a limited time.