Aim for excellence

There has been a decline in the values that set the foundation on which this country was built, and this has had a negative impact on service delivery.

This is according to Senior Assistant, General Secretary of the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU), Orlando Scott, who delivered remarks at a church service to mark the start of a Week of Excellence yesterday at the Bethel Methodist Church, Bay Street, Bridgetown.

“There are, sadly, among us, some who seem to have negated the foundation values that have made Barbados a special place, a place known for civility – good manners, little things but important behaviours like saying ‘Good morning’, ‘Thank you’, (and) ‘Excuse me please’.”

“In fact, it is as if these concepts have almost become foreign to us now,” he said. “These traditional niceties seem to have become foreign to our way of life. Our backward steps may have been the foundation elements for the culture of violence which now pervades our society, especially among a section of our youth demographic.”

Scott said that it is in recognition of this that the Week of Excellence was birthed. “So, why would the Social Partners of Barbados make the effort to celebrate a Week of Excellence, you may ask? We started the observance of the Week of Excellence in the year, 2003. It was an exercise which harmonised with the work of the National Initiative of Service Excellence (NISE), which was a bold initiative by the Social Partners to build a culture of personal excellence and service excellence among the Barbadian workforce.”
Scott added that in a service-driven economy such as Barbados, the way that customers and clients are treated is important and all of them deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of whether they are visitors of locals.

“We did so because we all recognised that Barbados is a service economy and the planners of the initiative acknowledged then, as we acknowledge now, that in order for our economy to grow, we needed to improve the levels of our service delivery, not merely to the visitors whom we invite to these shores, either as tourists or as investors, but to our own people – the average Barbadian with whom we interact on a daily basis, in church, at work, in the shops, or on the streets. And any of us who wish to be honest with ourselves would concede that, regrettably, standards have fallen in some areas.”