Adapt and Be Ready to Thrive

Adapt and Be Ready to Thrive

April 3, 2020

The Jamaica Manufacturers and Exporters Association (JMEA) focused on the subject of productivity for its Friday April 3 edition of the IG Live feature “The Productive Sector Speaks”.

The message from featured speaker, Jamaica Productivity Centre (JPC), Chief Technical Director (Acting) Tamar Nelson, was that this was a time for leaders who will demonstrate how the businesses can adapt and be ready to thrive beyond the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Nelson said that the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has estimated that as a region, GDP will contract by -1.8%. Nelson said that the JPC 2018 summary report said that Jamaica experienced 1.9% growth, noting that should the ECLAC forecast be realized, Jamaica can expect that will negatively affect productivity in 2020.

In February, 2020 The Planning Institute of Jamaica reported on GDP performance of 2019 compared to 2018. The PIOJ noted that the manufacturing sector had grown by 1.8% over 2018, due to improvements at Petrojam; Agriculture grew by 0.4% over 2018. In the services sector, each of the eight broad categories of services had experienced growth over the previous calendar year.

The Report on the Jamaica Survey of Establishments 2018 published by the PIOJ and authored by STATIN show that 91% of establishments in Jamaica have a market orientation and therefore will need to attract and maintain clients and customers.

Nelson said, “Work as we know it is not going to be the same after this and we track what they are doing and the effect that it has on business productivity and what they can do going forward post COVID.”

Using alliteration, Nelson put forward seven points that companies should be using at this time to stay productive.

1.      Strategy – create a team that uses a participatory approach to focused on what is happening and to ensure that the communication around it is transparent so that it can be accepted as factual and understandable;

2.      Systems – Simple and effective to minimize threats, including waste; do not build processes around exceptions to the normal operations;

3.      Structure adaptations to the current environment should be documented;

4.      Sanitisation to protect the people in the environment in which they work;

5.      Synergies within communities should be strengthened for mutual support;

6.      Services should be available to customers at an acceptable quality, persons will remember how they are treated during this time;

7.      Support through leadership and management should be ready to enable, engage and energise communities to have a positive attitude and keep moving forward.

Highlighting the importance of innovation at this time, Nelson said, “This is the time to listen to the crazies, the ones with the way out ideas, what have you got to lose?”

Areas where the news media has reported local innovations and synergies during the past month of actions taken to militate against COVID-19 are:

• Acceleration of use of final year students in health disciplines to be put on care duties;
• Arrangements with Cuba for deployment of 140 specialist health care workers to Jamaica;
• Inclusion of Andrews Memorial Hospital for for referrals from the Kingston Public Hospital;
• Car pooling at private enterprises to help staff who have to take public transportation;
• Youth scientist Rayvon Stewart’s innovation XERMOSOL, an ultraviolent light technology which has been named by Commonwealth Secretary General Baroness Patricia Scotland as a possible key weapon in the fight to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19);
• Innovators from Pree Labs Yeniki Wallen-Bryan and Bluedot Larren Peart create prototype ventilator and medical face masks;
• Delivery of education from K-13 through collaborations between the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information and private companies Flow, RJR Gleaner Group, Edu Focal and One-On-One Educational Services Ltd.

Jamaica’s System of National Accounts (SNA) defines production as “The process whereby labour, materials, accumulated capital assets and technical knowledge (factors of production) are applied to the task of making valuable goods and services.” The system has a boundary that does not include services used and consumed by the same establishment during an accounting period; unpaid domestic and industrial work; and also illegal activities that are not captured by accounting systems.

The Jamaica Productivity Centre is a department of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security.

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