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Nigerian businesses
seeking to attract foreign investors must begin to pay attention to how
it treats its employees. According to studies conducted by Corporate
Initiatives Group (CIG), an affiliate of the Great Place to Work
Institute based in the United States, the way companies take care of
employees is indicative of how well an organisation is run.

“Making your
organisation a great workplace increases your bottomline. These are the
things that foreign investors will look out for,” said Kunle Malomo,
managing partner of CIG. He said his firm is partnering with the Great
Place to Work Institute to evaluate companies to determine Nigeria’s
top companies to work for from the perspective of the employees.

“The ‘Great Place
to Work’ model is based on the key relationship between employees and
management and with other employees and their job.” According to him,
creating a good work environment for employees reduces employee
turnover and cost of training new hands and results in increased
customer loyalty and profitability.

Corporate structure

“A lot of
organisations are looking for foreign investors and one of the
dimensions that foreign investors look at is corporate structure. How
well managed your organisation is and when there is no data it becomes
very difficult for them to make investment decisions. This becomes one
very crucial point to look at in evaluating what an organisation is
doing.” He said the venture will enable Nigerian businesses benchmark
with other world class companies using the same criteria, since a
similar survey is done annually to determine the 100 best companies to
work in the US and 31 other countries.

“How well do you
make your employees productive? We are linking great places to work to
productivity and so it should be one of the things organisations should
look at in evaluating corporate governance.” Mr. Malomo said
participating companies in the survey would be drawn from about 300
companies listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange and would not
necessarily consider their financial base. “We are going to gather data
first hand. So there will be category of publicly traded companies.
Then there will be another category of multinationals. Then we will
look at the category of small and medium scale companies and category
of government and quasi-government agencies. The important thing is
that it is a self nominating process. The companies will indicate that
they want to participate.”

Micheal Burchell,
vice president for global business development for Great Place to Work
Institute said to evaluate companies to determine how they fare in the
survey will be from the employee perspective and the management
perspective. “We look at the employee perspective. What people who work
for participating companies say about their workplaces. The five common
themes that we explore are credibility, respect, fairness, pride and
camaraderie.” From the management perspective, he said the culture of
the company is the principal focus.