Voluntary separation packages (VSEPs) for employees at Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) are underway and according to CEO Garfield Sinclair, he hopes to have them finalized by the beginning of September, as the company is giving employees time to take advantage of it.
Mr. Sinclair was tight lipped, however, on how many persons applied for the VSEPs thus far, but said wide consultation was done before introducing the package.
“So we believe that what we have on the table are packages that colleagues will find compelling if they are minded to move on to some other phase of their lives. It’s completely voluntary, so it’s up to colleagues to accept or reject,” he said.
“We’re going through the consultation process now. We have provided counseling obviously, on building work skills to get people to understand what life could be like outside of BTC, financial advice. We have engaged in that kind of counseling already and there’s much more to come.”
BTC began offering VSEPs last Friday, however this is not the first time the tech giant conducted such an exercise.
In 2015, just fewer than 100 BTC employees were separated from the company.
Another was conducted in 2011 just before the company was privatized where some 500 employees were separated.
Mr. Sinclair said the VSEPs will not affect BTC moving forward.
“We’re moving the company forward as we speak and I just want to put that into context as we are still the biggest mobile provider in The Bahamas,” Mr. Sinclair said.
“We still have near 70 percent of the value share, so we are the standard and bigger mobile provider in the business.
“We have been around the longest. We have trained all of Telecom’s technical capacity, so we are the standard of communications in the region.
“What we have to work on now is maintaining that standard in a competitive environment and we’re doing that.
“We are, like I said, getting in agreements with our union partners. We’re coalescing around a vision for where we want to take this business transformation process.
“We’re not fixed on any particular number of colleagues that we want to get in or out if this VSEP. We’re focused on building the best operator in the region.”
