The View from the Boardroom - UNDP Trinidad and Tobago

The View from the Boardroom - CEO Study on Corporate Social Responsibility in Trinidad and Tobagoof them are not financially literate we will show them howto use the ATM machine so they can access their moneyin that way. We told our staff that we are embarking onthis initiative. Don’t get me wrong: we weren’t saying that itwas an initiative that wouldn’t make money, but we weren’tmaking a lot of money on this deal. The reason we weredoing it, and we explained that to our staff, was that it wasvery important to understand that these people are citizenstoo and we must do everything we can to assist others.What happened out of that exercise? We are talking aboutthousands of people coming to bank and, of course, wehad to open up on Saturdays and Sundays and all the staffcame because they were serving a purpose. And then theysaw people’s reactions when they came in to use the ATMmachine. This is something that we take for granted but toa lot of people to come in and do something like that wascompletely new. But it goes back to the point made earlierthat when you talk about the sustainability of your businessand when you talk about profitability, you have to talk aboutthings like purpose. We understand that more and more,especially from this younger generation that says, ‘Youknow what, we are in a business. We don’t mind workingand we will work but we have to know what we are workingfor and we have to work on something that makes us feelgood’. So if anybody running an organisation now wants torun it in ways that are unethical and ways that don’t allowpeople to feel that they have something to contribute tosome greater cause, your organisation is not going to besustainable. I have lived that and I have seen the truth ofthat. More and more organisations will have to realise that.Q: You touched already on the question of corporateethics. Particularly in the wake of the 2008 financialcrisis, the issue of corporate governance has becomesomething of a ‘hot topic’. Looking at Trinidad andTobago and its boardrooms, were there changes in thismarketplace in response to mistakes made in this areaof corporate governance? Did the market react?SC: There have been changes because a lot of companiesin Trinidad and Tobago have a global reach: either theythemselves have businesses outside the country or theymust deal with people and business partners from abroad.As Europe and the U.S. become more rigid about corporategovernance it drives the process. Maybe ten years agonobody was really interested in who your directors were,what exactly their level of qualification was. Now what youfind happening is that when they come to do due diligenceon you, the corporate governance aspects of your businesssuch as how is the organisation run, what kind of board youhave in place, what kind of procedures you have, whetheryou have a code of ethics, how is it rolled out to your staff,how much ethics training do you do… all those things arenow huge and organisations are being forced into doingthem. In Trinidad and Tobago there is a real need to driveproper governance in both government and corporate life.But people have to connect the dots. You have to go to themand tell them why it is important. And government could bethe driver behind bringing in the resources to do that kindof training because it is very expensive. We do corporategovernance training for our board where we use an externalfacilitator and it’s costly. But if government started throughthe state sector first where the companies are huge, thatwould change the dynamics.Q: When you talked about education and sports asthe topical areas that you identified and when you aresaying that you have not just randomly taken a numberof issues and causes but you have your reasons for whyyou are supporting those causes, does the bank in itsselection process also take into consideration broaderdevelopment frameworks such as government policiesor even the UN’s Millennium Development Goals(MDGs)?No we really don’t. We sit and we look at society and thendetermine the kinds of needs and where we would be mosteffective. For example, at one stage poverty eradication wasa huge thing but we decided that this was not somethingthat we could get involved in. But we looked at the youth32