This article was first written and posted in my LinkedIn account. It was published on June 11, 2014 at LinkedIn
It has been more than two years since I transferred from the corporate sector to the cooperative. It was a fulfilling journey because I finally found an organization where you actually work with the people and for the people.
Cooperatives are owned by its members and at the end of the year, a successful financial cooperative benefits not only a few but the majority of its members. Now, the challenges of cooperatives though is that when they grow, the demands for efficiency increases to serve its members well. Quality service needs improvement as well as the products and services offered by the financial cooperative. When you say product, I refer to the time deposits and savings to name a few.
Another thing that must be given much consideration is the values taught by the cooperative to its members. When coops are small, it is quite easy to transfer the values that embodies the organization. However, when they grow, the senior members find difficulty transferring the culture that their founders have established the organization with. So the question of succession planning comes into light.
Looking at the cooperatives in Quebec, succession programs or plans are not an issue. Because the confederation and primary cooperatives in this province of Canada has a massive source of manpower pool and human resource pool. If there is enough sources of capable management sources, succession program is not so essential. The culture of the Filipinos though differentiate the requirement for succession programs. In our cooperatives, we want the future leaders be taken from internal pool of the organization so as to ensure that the values of the cooperative is sustained.
Another challenge for HR in the coop sector is the organizational structure. In our consultancy, we introduce the centralization of functions by creating a head office where most of the decisions (for operations) would be coming from the head office. This would result to specialization and providing more time for the branches to serve their members more. More time for members, equates to better service. However, most of the cooperatives are not yet in that stage and would still have to transition to this setup. Thus, there are lots of work opportunities for HR practitioners, handling or managing changes, as well as developing processes in performance management.
These are just few of the HR requirements in the cooperative sector in our country. I am happy to have this opportunity to work for a dynamic organization like this. It is about time for our new HRM graduates to consider working for the cooperative sector and not just be limited with the opportunities offered in the corporations. Learning is abundant in cooperatives.
