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MEETING OF THE STAFF
COMMITTEE AND THE CHIEF OF STAFF
OF THE SECRETARY GENERAL
(Held on August 1, 2003)
A meeting was held on Friday, August 1,
between the members of the 2003-2004 Staff Committee and Mr. Fernando
Jaramillo, Chief of Staff of the Secretary General, in the Secretary
General’s offices. Taking part in this first meeting were the following
members of the Staff Committee: René L. Gutiérrez (President), Miguel A.
Merino (Vice President), Gladys Berly, Juan Carlos García, Carlos Humud,
Raúl Plata, Lucrecia Zea-Yonker and Ana María Lemos, and Aída M. Rothe
(alternate members).
First, the President of the Staff
Committee thanked the Chief of Staff for agreeing to the meeting and for
the letter the Secretary General sent to congratulate the President and the
new Committee on their recent election. The Chief of Staff thanked the
Committee for coming and said he had enjoyed the relationship that had been
established with the previous Staff Committee and trusted that it would
continue with the new one. In that way, he added, the present
administration would be able to pass on those good relations to the next
administration.
The President of the Committee told the
Chief of Staff that, as announced at the staff assembly of July 23, OAS
staff members were concerned about three issues that deserved the special
attention of the General Secretariat, namely: performance evaluations,
continuous contracts, and harassment in the workplace.
The first topic dealt with was the
evaluation system. The President said this exercise was not widely
conducted in the General Secretariat and the practice had declined each
year since it was introduced. An Evaluations Subcommittee has been formed
to gauge staff feelings on this matter. The President reiterated the need
to take stock of the evaluation system, four years after it was introduced.
The survey was designed in such a way as to have both supervisors and the
supervised express their views on the system. It is to be hoped that the
results of the questionnaire serve as a tool to measure staff sentiment
with respect to evaluations and to enable the General Secretariat, if
necessary, to make the proposed changes.
The Chief of Staff said this was a new
system and, as such, subject to imperfections. He added that he liked the
idea of the survey.
The President underscored the usefulness
of the survey for breathing new life into the evaluation system, but that
staff needed a bit more training in how to use it.
The President then moved on to the
Harassment in the Workplace topic. He said the Harassment Subcommittee was
currently scrutinizing all the material on the subject in other
international organizations, and had watched a video by Spanish Professor
Iñaki Piñuel y Zabala. In light of situations that have occurred in some
areas, a few suggestions were passed on to the Chief of Staff, one of which
referred to the need to provide supervisors with proper training in
management techniques. The President said that talks might begin with the
delegation of Canada to request funds for training General Secretariat
staff in this respect. A similar approach had been taken with the gender
mainstreaming courses. The main function of the Subcommittee is to prepare
a draft text that could help to define a policy in this area, such as that
pursued in some international organizations.
The President said there was a link
between harassment and evaluation issues, so that the survey on evaluations
should prove a useful tool in this area also.
The Chief of Staff said he was aware of a
few specific cases. He said they had been dealt with on a case-by-case
basis and that in some of them doubts persist. In some cases, supervisors
don’t rate a staff member highly because they are looking for people with
the skills needed to comply with mandates and therefore seek to alter
employees’ job profiles. Evaluations are carried out to send warning signs,
so that a person can improve. The Chief of Staff admitted, however, that
the subject needed looking into, with a view to making changes. There are,
for instance, cases in which a supervisor has too many staff to supervise,
which makes the process more difficult. In short, the Chief of Staff said,
it was necessary to take an optimistic view of evaluations and that he was
all in favor of drawing up a harassment policy. However, he warned that it
needed to be looked at very carefully.
The other issue raised was Continuous
Contracts. The President said he had been told that the language exams
entailed an unnecessary expense and suggested using the same system as the
Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). PAHO works with a local
university, where staff can, on two occasions in the year, have their
language skills assessed on the basis of a United Nations system. The
results are kept in each staff member’s personal file. The OAS could also
adopt this practice, so that whenever a continuous contract competition is
held language skill scores are already available in the personal files. The
Chief of Staff said he thought it was an excellent idea to test language
skills before a person joins the Organization. That way, there would be no
need to repeat the process for continuous contracts.
On the subject of continuous contracts,
there were a number of staff members, with more than five years of service
in the General Secretariat, who were not recommended by their respective
supervisors. The Staff Committee proposed eliminating the possibility of a
supervisor vetoing candidates for continuous contracts.
The President told the Chief of Staff
about the arrangements being made with the Secretariat for Management
regarding the use of the Organization’s logo on products that will be on
sale in the new Gift Shop.
The Chief of Staff was then informed that
the Committee wished to take advantage of Dr. Leo S. Rowe’s birthday on
September 17 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Staff Association. A
reference was made to the fact that five years ago, the 50th anniversary of
the Organization had been marked by a picnic, sponsored by the Staff
Association, in the gardens of the Main Building and that this celebration
could be repeated. The Committee requested that the staff be given leave
that afternoon.
The Chief of Staff said he agreed with the
idea of organizing a picnic and that the staff should have the afternoon
off. He then thanked the Committee for its visit and said the doors to his
office would always be open for the Staff Association
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