COMMUNIQUE ISSUED BY THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT OF NIGERIA AT THE END OF ITS 39TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE FROM 24 - 26 OCTOBER, 2007 AT THE METROPOLITAN HOTEL, CALABAR

The Charetered Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria held its 39th Annual Conference on the theme Optimizing Human Capital Investment from 24-26 October, 2007 at the Metropolitan Hotel, Calabar. The conference which was attended by 1,200 human resource practitioners drawn from all sectors of the Nigeria economy, was facilitated by highly reputable experts and professionals drawn from within and outside the country. The conference featured two plenary and four technical sessions, all designed around the central theme. At the end of the proceedings, the participants resolved as follows:

1. Human resource practitioners should make better use of information technology tools for handling routine tasks, which tend to occupy a disproportionate part of their time presently. Such a move would free their time from transactional activities and leave them ample room to focus on strategic human resource management issues.


2. Human resource practitioners should seek to become business partners in their organizations. Performing that role would require that HR practitioners take active interests in business issues, adopt an approach which focus on value addition and acquire new competencies that would inspire the confidence of line managers and top management.


3. Human resource practitioners should prepare themselves to serve as internal consultants in their organization, in furtherance of their roles as business partners. Playing this role effectively would require them to study wide, and acquire the analytical, business communication and change management skills.


4. Leadership is the most critical ingredient from translating business strategies to superior performance. Human resource practitioners have a major role to play in creating the enabling environment that would encourage the emergence of committed leaders at different levels of the organization.


5. Organizations wishing to derive increased performance from their staff should seek to engage their hearts and minds. Such organizations should adopt policies, which would elicit both rational and emotional engagements from their workers. While rational engagement would gurantee low staff turnover, emotional engagement would generate superior performance from them.


6. Human resource practitioners should champion the implementation of a structure approach for engaging the hearts and minds of employees for increased productivity by developing organization cultures that foster innovation, flexibility, and healthy competition.


7. While retaining their roles as employee advocates, human resource managers should help workers to recognise the dual roles, which their employers have to play as providers employment and creators of wealth. The need to reconcile these roles at all time must be understood and appreciated by all parties.


8. To derive optimal benefit from its investment in human capital, the Federal Government of Nigeria should professionalize the human resource function in the core civil services and in all public agencies and parastatals. This would entail ensuring that only certified HR professionals are deployed to man the human resource function in the local, state and federal bureaucracies.


9. The Federal Government has the responsibility to create the right platform for integrity to thrive in the public services. This would require the adoption of international best practices in different elements of the human resource management function. While the current effort at reforming the civil service is highly commendable, greater focus is required to reform the recruitment practices, the staff compensation management practices and to introduce a crdible staff performance management system in the Nigeria public services.

35TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE  CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT OF NIGERIA HELD AT ABUJA SHERATON HOTEL & TOWERS - OCTOBER 29 - 31, 2003

The 35th Annual Conference of the Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria with theme “Professional Excellence: A Driver for Growth” was held at Abuja Sheraton Hotel and Towers between October 29th through 31st, 2003.

The theme of the Conference which progressed from the theme of last year (2002 theme: Transforming Mission To Effective Performance), seeks to explore professional excellence as a differentiating factor to achieving personal and corporate success in the Management of Human Resources.

On a general note, the Conference agreed that Human Resources Management Practitioners must exhibit a high level of professionalism, competence, diligence, integrity and high ethical standards in the discharge of their roles and responsibilities within and outside their organisations.

On the above premise, the Conference resolved to issue the following communiqué:

1. TALENT MANAGEMENT: That Excellence in Human Resources Management involves driving value creation strategy through effective Talent Management. Talent creates value and its management is a key tool in achieving excellence in HR practices by implementing Diversity and Inclusiveness in the Workplace, driving competency standards as well as the consistent motivation and development of these identified talents. Such value creation must be measurable, verifiable and expressed explicitly. Nigerian HR leaders must strive to create world class processes, practices and mindsets, promote a learning and development environment as well as establishing talent Management processes that are complete, systematic and coherent.
   

2. PEOPLE SYNERGY: That in developing a lasting legacy, HR leaders should consistently perfect their profession throughout their career by learning from successes and mistakes, informally and formally learning and studying, adding value to and learning from all those with whom we make contact. Nigerian HR Practitioners must become in-depth analyzers, should perspire and inspire, be action based, deliver value and service and develop an effective people strategy by focusing on the excellence fundamentals of doing the basics first, repetitively and meticulously. Such people synergy must promote employee values propositions with strong affiliation to the organisation.
   

3. LEARNING CURVE: Conference agreed that in transforming organisations towards achieving excellence, it is imperative to enhance the learning of individual and groups in a way that boost their ability to deliver sustainable superior performance. For sustainable organisational and personal excellence, capacity must be developed at the individual, group and systemic level, and be followed up with proper orientation and inclusion. Knowledge should be matched with skills of the individual, the needs of the organisation and an enabling emotional environment should be created for the infusion of new knowledge into the organisation.
   

4. LEADERSHIP: Conference identified Leaders, as the drivers of any of any organisational transformation and Nigerian HR practitioners, who are leaders, must ensure that capacity building initiatives promote the acquisition of new knowledge. They must be transformational in nature and consistently invest in bridging the gap between knowing and doing. This is possible by the development of organisational dynamics that promote initiatives and challenge people to learn and share knowledge. Such leaders must adopt a holistic approach, abandon functional/specialist tendencies, and continuously travel their organisations off the forgetting curve up to the learning curve.
   

5. COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE: Conference discussed and agreed that in preparing the environment for people to fit into an organisational culture and perform, there must be effective communication, proper induction and inclusion programme, properly documented policies and procedures of required cultural traits. Furthermore in sustaining a learning culture must cascade from top management. The current deficiency in the Nigerian Educational Systems today was also discussed and it was recommended that companies should implement general and job specific induction, put in place structured IT training programmes, promote social partnering with tertiary institutions, while developing a role model mentoring system that showcases exemplary leadership by both Human Resources and the organisational management.
   

6. HR VALUE PROPOSITION: Conference defined the HR value proposition as the strategic contribution to the business through product leadership, operational excellence and strong relationships with Line Management. The shift in HR roles today, makes it necessary for all HR leaders to become a relevant and embedded part of the entire business and ensure that human talents are aligned to enable the business. Also, in making a value proposition for HR, three new roles: centers of expertise, generalists and service centers were identified as critical to an organisational capacity building strategy. Organisations must identify what they need to be very good at and build the capabilities required to create sustainable business growth.
   

7. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE: Conference resolved that in view of recent corporate failures in the world associated with executive unethical practices, Corporate Governance has evolved as an integral part of all HR practitioners role to ensure that their companies build responsible practices into the fabric of their operations. In driving Corporate Governance, HR practitioners must ensure the implementation, application and interpretation of HR policies and guidelines that are consistent with corporate principles and intent. They should create a sound control environment and educate employees on the importance of controls while developing robust compensation principles that is free from external influence. In promoting Corporate Governance in our country, Government was also called upon to implement appropriate compensation for its workers.
   
   

8. WOMEN IN MANAGEMENT: Conference discussed the role of Women and agreed that they could achieve professional excellence in organisations with increased self-awareness, proper lifestyle choices and deliberate career management and aspirations. They can further fundamentally change the profile of an organisation’s workforce and surmount the various societal and self-inflicted challenges if organisations provide strong support and an enabling environment that includes mentoring programmes, flexible work arrangements with networking, training and educational opportunities.
   

9. CULTURE OF ACHIEVEMENT: Conference identified the development of a culture of achievement as a gradual, forward-moving process dependent on the ability to draw diverse peoples within an organisation onto a common platform, by harnessing their energies and talents towards the execution of a specific goal.

Six factors were further identified as drivers of a culture of achievement in an organisation, and they are: Leadership, with emphasis on the roles of the Chief Executive and HR practitioners; Direction, in line with properly defined mission and vision of an organisation The setting of Goals and Objectives, that give a voice to the vision and a map to the mission of the organisation Values, comprising of the company ethics and standards of business conduct Structure, which is enabling a robust yet responsive framework and Finally Motivation, the provision of a stimulating and learning work environment.

10. DIVERSITY AND INCLUSIVENESS: Finally, conference agreed that with the advent of Globalization, Diversity and Inclusiveness has become a major factor in achieving excellence in Human Resources Management and Development. Companies and most particularly, HR leaders worldwide must learn to manage diversity as a critical business activity and promote mutual respect and equal opportunities in the workplace. The promotion and proper management of Diversity and Inclusiveness would succeed if it is well connected to the business plans, properly understood, well communicated and fully supported by organisational leaders.

S.F. KORODE, FIPM
REGISTRAR/CEO