The Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and Employers Confederation (BCCEC) Human Resources and Labour Help desk programme has fallen off a bit since its launch last year, according to one of the chamber’s top executives.
CEO Winston Rolle, who spoke to the Bahama Journal recently, said the programme launched back in September, had initially “taken on a life of its own” but businesses had to cut back and some ended up cancelling using the chamber’s services.
“We have a number of companies that took advantage of it,” he said.
“But coming towards the end of last year, things slowed down. We will re-launch the programme soon however and will add more components to it. We need to continue to help small and medium-size businesses because many of them don’t have their own resources especially when it comes to human resources and funding.”
Mr. Rolle said the purpose of the chamber’s Human Resource and Labour Help Desk is to allow chamber members to request the assistance of a human resource consultant to assess varying aspects of their talent management business at greatly reduced rates.
Chamber Institute Manager, Ian Ferguson said that out of its 500 registered members, 75 per cent are made up of SMEs and those are the businesses they want to continue to target with this programme.
“We looked closely at our largest demographic in corporate Bahamas – the SMEs and with a small employee base, minimal capital and scarce resources, SMEs are challenged to perform on a sustained basis with a varying human resource and talent management functions,” he said.
“Our gathering is driven by three points of reality: firstly, most of our members are in the SME category and operate void of a human resource professional which is often relegated to other personnel. The second point of reality is that human resource and labour relations are extremely sensitive and require the skillful deploy of technical competencies in the business of effectively managing talent and human capital and lastly, it will address that many of the organizations are finding themselves in dire straights resulting in the alarming closure of many of these businesses.”
If any businesses are interested they can call the chamber at 322-2145 or 322-3320.
At that time a diagnostic checkup will be done of the company.
The cost for the checkup is $150.
Chamber officials added that the programme is specifically for its members but they are considering a two-tier payment system where members and non-members can access the programme.
