GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Un­like TSTT, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider Flow has no in­ten­tion of re­trench­ing any of its em­ploy­ees.

Rather, Flow plans to im­prove on its ef­fi­cien­cy, said Si­mone Mar­tin-Sul­gan, Flow TT’s vice pres­i­dent who was speak­ing to mem­bers of the me­dia fol­low­ing an In­ter­na­tion­al Women’s Day func­tion held at Flow’s Box Of­fice at the Oval, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.

She said pri­or to the pan­dem­ic, Flow made a com­mit­ment to its “en­tire em­ploy­ee pop­u­la­tion,” that it will not send any­one home.

“And we have been able to do ex­act­ly that. What it does for us as a com­pa­ny is to now find ways to op­er­ate more ef­fi­cient­ly and ef­fec­tive­ly rather than go­ing for lay­ing off em­ploy­ers and so far we have been suc­cess­ful in do­ing that,” Mar­tin-Sul­gan said.

More than 450 work­ers are ex­pect­ed to be re­trenched from ma­jor­i­ty State-owned provider TSTT.

In a state­ment on Jan­u­ary 17, TSTT said for its fi­nan­cial year which end­ed on the March 31, 2021, its rev­enue fell by $453 mil­lion—18 per cent less than the pri­or year.

On Flow’s goals for 2022 Mar­tin-Sul­gan ex­plained that it is to en­sure con­nec­tiv­i­ty at all lev­els across the coun­try.

Say­ing that “Flow’s con­nec­tiv­i­ty,” must com­plete every home, Mar­tin-Sul­gan added, “We un­der­stand the im­por­tance of con­nec­tiv­i­ty and one of the things the pan­dem­ic has taught us is that it’s a (con­nec­tiv­i­ty) re­al­ly pow­er­ful tool. It al­lows us to not on­ly to help bridge the di­vide that has hap­pened be­cause we have had to stay at home but it’s al­so very im­por­tant to con­nect us as a na­tion; things like ed­u­ca­tion etc.”

She said the com­pa­ny al­so in­tends to not on­ly so­lic­it feed­back from cus­tomers more of­ten but to take “com­plete own­er­ship,” of such com­ments and to im­prove up­on them.

“When things fail we let our cus­tomers know first and fore­most and then try to make up for it, whether it be by giv­ing cus­tomers ad­di­tion­al speed to cater to out­ages or even re­bates etc,” Mar­tin-Sul­gan.

Mar­tin-Sul­gan, who is the first fe­male ex­ec­u­tive to run the com­pa­ny al­so not­ed that women pro­vide a fresh per­spec­tive to any or­gan­i­sa­tion, adding that they may al­so be able to po­si­tion prod­ucts and ser­vices which are more re­lat­able to cus­tomers.

And while work­place ha­rass­ment re­mains prob­lem­at­ic for many women, Mar­tin-Sul­gan ad­vised them to feel em­bold­en to speak up.

“Chances are you are not the on­ly per­son ex­pe­ri­enc­ing it and there’s some­thing about strength in num­bers so be­ing able to share your ex­pe­ri­ences is some­thing I would def­i­nite­ly en­dorse,” Mar­tin-Sul­gan added.

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