The Sunday Mail
Memory Nguwi
Recently we carried out a survey to find out how human resources (HR) professionals are represented on company boards. Our research shows that finance professionals are the most represented professionals on company boards.
You rarely find any company board that does not have finance professionals. The other professionals are represented in smaller numbers. The situation in Zimbabwe is, however, changing when you compare it to five years ago.
Board diversity has been found to increase the performance of the board. This is why shareholders and other stakeholders have been calling for improved board diversity. Zimbabwe has been lagging on all diversity indices.
One hundred and thirteen (113) companies from eighteen (18) sectors participated in the survey. The key findings from that research are shown below:
– 57 percent of participating organisations do not have an HR professional on their boards.
– An HR professional is not chairing 73 percent of the participating organisations’ HR committees.
– An HR professional is chairing only 27 percent of the participating organisations’ HR committees.
– Generally, all boards for participating entities, have more male members when compared to females.
We analysed the board structure according to gender, and the general finding was that males are represented more on boards than females. On average, males outnumber females by three for each sector board.
On average, as can be seen, female board members are less than 30 percent for Zimbabwean organisations. There is still a long way for Zimbabwean organisations to achieve gender parity in executive roles and board representation. Activists in these areas need to push the agenda for gender parity on company boards.
Number of Male Board Members
– 25 percent of the boards have four males or lower on their boards
– 50 percent of the boards have five males or lower on their boards
– 75 percent of the boards have seven males or lower on their boards
Number of Female Board Members
– 25 percent of the participating companies have one female or less on their boards
– 50 percent of the participating companies have two females or less on their boards
– 75 percent of the participating companies have three females or less on their boards
When participants were asked if they had any HR professionals on the board, the results were as follows:
A Harvard Business Review article looked at the board’s skills mix, and the graph below shows their findings. As you can see, the results for HR skills in this are the same as the results we found locally in Zimbabwe.
Conclusion
The study on Zimbabwean boards shows that most of the participants in this survey have no HR professional representative on their boards. In line with this, most of the boards’ HR committees are also not chaired by an HR professional. The implications of this kind of distribution are not known. Are the boards happy and fulfilling their mandate well without an HR professional on the board? What does this say about the contribution of HR professionals to the business? Does it mean that anyone with enough business knowledge can handle human resources issues?
*Memory Nguwi is an occupational psychologist, data scientist, speaker and managing consultant of Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and human resources consulting firm. https://www.thehumancapitalhub.com email: [email protected] or visit our website at www.ipcconsultants.com
