Speaker; John Mencias, CEO, Belize Electricity Limited (BEL)

Dr. Bertin, you and your team at CARILEC could not have chosen a more apt and fitting theme for this year’s HR, Corporate Communications, and Customer Services conference: “Aligning Purpose for Authentic Engagement and Impact”.

The English word, “authentic”, derives from the Greek word “authentikos”, which means “original” or “genuine”, and which is rooted in word, “authentēs”, which derives from autos (“self”) and hentēs (“doer, achiever”), and taken together translates into “one acting on one’s own authority” or “master”.

The implication then is that we and others experience the “genuine and real” version of ourselves only when we are acting on our own authority, that is, without someone else authorizing or directing us to do so or perhaps stopping us from doing so.

Authentic engagement is therefore driven by an intrinsic motivation to take action, to take initiative based on what we truly believe or believe in – “I act because I believe”.

The foundation of Authentic Engagement is then “the Truth”, our truth: The truth of why we are doing something.

For the Truth to cause aligned action and intended outcomes, it must be communicated openly and cogently to everyone. This ensures alignment across multiple layers of agents acting to achieve the Purpose.

Our former Governor General, Sir Colville Young, once shared with us the story of two bricklayers who were approached by a passerby as they were laying bricks. He asked the first one: “What are you doing?”. And the d-uh answer was: “As you can see, I am laying bricks!”; and back to laying bricks he went. And then he asked the second bricklayer the same question: “What are you doing?”. And the man answered, “I am building a great cathedral!”

We all understand the chasmic divide between these two responses – we can almost predict what will be the difference between the finished works of these two bricklayers: both doing the same thing, one with a purpose and a vision, the other without a purpose and without a vision. It is possible that, though these bricklayers were side by side, they each belonged to different teams, each with a different supervisor: One may have communicated the plan and purpose, while the other probably laid down only the specifics of the job at hand.

The truth, the why, establishes our Purpose. When we are grounded in our purpose, our energies can be focused on our “true north,” making it easier to enter a high-productivity state.

Our power line technicians, substation technicians, engineers, and operators know all too well the importance of grounding.

Electric utility work has three key characteristics: all related to each other.

• Firstly, electricity is In fact, electricity and power are often used interchangeably. Our PLTs often say: “We give power to the People”. Electric power is used to energize almost everything – lights, cooling, heaters, motors & equipment, appliances, trains and trams, and now electric vehicles (EVs), and we cannot forget the indispensable, ubiquitous, omnipresent, even omniscient … cell phone.

Electricity, along with written language and the wheel, is arguably the greatest invention or discovery of all time. The National Academy of Engineering ranked Electrification as the most transformative engineering achievement of the 20th century – higher than telephony, the automobile, water supply, computers, the internet, and highways, which were all in the top 20.

• And because it is so powerful, it has become ALL We in the electric utility business are not surprised. We know all too well that every millisecond of every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year, year after year, Customers expect electric utilities to keep the lights on – and if we can’t, then at least we are expected to keep all the mobile phones charged. With each passing year, the addiction to electricity, and the intolerance for losing it, becomes greater and greater as the reach of electricity stretches further and wider into everything.
• But exactly because it is so powerful, electricity is inherently and potentially harmful. Electricity possesses the intrinsic capability to cause severe harm and even death by its fundamental nature of relentlessly seeking a path to ground, making it a high-risk hazard. For this reason, Safety is THE foremost priority for every electric utility. And our Power Line Technicians, Substation Technicians, Engineers, and Operators all know that the best safety measure you can take is to STAY GROUNDED.

Maybe because Staying Grounded is so essential to safety and all we do, it permeates through all layers of electric utility work. We stay grounded not only by attaching physical conductors from equipment to earth, but we also stay grounded by Keeping It

Real; by being fully present in each moment, casting aside superficial, “check-the-box” type interactions to build meaningful, deep-rooted connections and genuine relationships. In other words, we stay grounded by Putting People First; and by People I refer to both Employees and Customers.

And when it comes to our People, what we repeatedly do for, with, and by them is what we are and what we become to them.

So, if we repeatedly treat Employees with compassion, we are compassionate. And if we repeatedly serve Customers with efficiency, we are efficient.

We are also more powerfully what we do in times of greatest vulnerability. What we do in moments like those counts much more than what we repeatedly do over much longer periods of time – because those are the times when need is 100x amplified and our actions therefore need to be 100x more in sync with that need.

Such a time happened exactly 6 years ago when the COVID-19 pandemic descended upon the world …

Like so many utilities and companies around the world, we adopted sweeping and radical measures to safeguard the health and well- being of our employees and their families, to maintain continuity of safe and reliable service to customers and the public, and to help prevent and contain the spread and the impacts of COVID-19 within Belize.

BEL moved before anyone in Belize did; so much so that we were chastised by officials at the National Emergency Management Organization for potentially instigating panic about something that, according to them, was not yet a real threat. That did not stop us from buying up all the KN95 masks in Belize and distributing Vitamin C to all our employees.

Within two months after the pandemic had been declared, we conducted a company-wide survey of employees to get their feedback on BEL’s COVID-19 response up to that point in time and their recommendations for further action. Our staff expressed worry over their health, their families, as well as the possible impacts of COVID-19 on BEL, including their job security and their ability to meet financial obligations.

We listened and we acted! We changed out all bathroom faucets, soap and paper dispensers, and toilets and urinals to touchless, installed double-swinging doors, hired a full-time nurse to assist in continually monitoring and evaluating employees’ health status, arranged with medical facilities for priority treatment of presumptively infected employees, all the time, never requiring, though continuously encouraging, taking the vaccine. Of course, any employee who could work from home was sent home with laptop, desk, and chair. Notwithstanding all we did, we still unfortunately lost two of our employees who contracted the deadly virus.

While jobs and salaries were being cut all around us, not a single BEL employee was terminated from their job as a result of the pandemic. In fact, we all received our full annual salary increases. Why? Because our Board and Management at the time understood that we are an essential service, who is called upon to “keep the lights on”, especially during the worst of times. Our country was depending on us. While we exhorted our employees to ask not what our Company could do for us, but rather what we could do for our Company, and, by extension, our country, we did everything we possibly could to take care of them.

We also did as much as we could do for Customers as we did for employees. No Customer was disconnected for non-payment throughout the entire time (and the entire time for us lasted a full 18 months). Between March and December 2020, the Company contributed close to $1.5 million BZD to Customers, individual families, community organizations, and specifically the education, health and human development sectors in support of stemming the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on health and livelihoods. Significantly,  at  the  end  of  2021,  when  our  Public  Utilities

Commission sought to increase electricity rates to recover accrued costs owing to BEL by Customers, BEL rejected the increase stating that it would carry the burden of higher-than-anticipated cost of power so long as our coffers could bear it because we felt that the economy and Customers had not sufficiently recovered from the effects of the pandemic.

COVID-19 was a powerful moment in time that enabled us to show who we were – our authentic self; it unleashed a powerful wave of change and transformation throughout our Company, redefining relationships between BEL and its Employees and its Customers, establishing a new compact, another level of trust … and those reverberations are being felt up to today.

But we did not stop there. From very early on, we had decided that we were going to take from the pandemic as much as it took from us: We would respond to the extraordinary challenges we faced with resilience, creativity, and determination.

As the nation and the world returned to life-after-Covid by going back to what used to be, we decided to use the lessons learned from our own experience and the experience of other leading corporations and adopt the changes that worked better than what existed before. Those changes formed the basis for what we now call our New BEL Workplace Policy and Program:

• “A modern workplace environment in which our employees are unleashed, enabled, and empowered to provide safe, reliable, and sustainable energy solutions to our Customers and meaningfully engage and collaborate with each other and all stakeholders from where and when it is most effective to do so”.

And based upon the following principles:

• Flexibility: Unleashing “work” from the constraints of space and time so that our people can work (from) where and how they are most effective, doing away with the misconception that sitting in an office between office hours is in and of itself an
• Performance: Focusing on outcomes and efficiency – Using allocated resources to produce high quality and timely outcomes.
• Social cohesion: Building relationships of trust and mutual respect where teams have confidence that they can rely on each member doing their part to get the job done.
• Collaboration: Working together in a way that optimizes respective individual strengths to achieve collective outcomes.
• Connectivity: Having the tools and facilities to get and stay in touch with each other and with stakeholders easily and
• Safety and security: Ensuring that the physical and virtual workspaces are free from hazards and our people and assets are

To date, we have continued to experiment with different work arrangements; but we have never gone back to the pre-COVID days of confining Employees to schedules and spaces that make no sense.

Too many times, we foist policies and procedures on Employees and Customers when, in the specific situation, it makes no sense; but we all sit there conforming. What we seem not to realize is that we are also unwittingly undermining the very purpose we say we wish to promote.

We must break free! COVID 19 showed us that we could do what we couldn’t do. It tore us away from the comforting chains of the office cubicles and the 8-to-5 humdrum. It freed us from space and time.

The great German physicist, Albert Einstein, was able to discover what is arguably the most important equation in Science, E=MC2; not so much because he was so extraordinarily intelligent, but because he dared to think differently and dared to question what was held as an inevitable truth during that era – that time was absolute, that the passage of a minute of time for you was the same as the passage of a minute of time for me.

As he toiled through the depths of one of his now legendary thought experiments, Einstein reached a critical crossroads: either the speed of light varied depending on where you are relative to an event, or time varied depending on where you are relative to an event. He dared to think the latter, and, by doing so, unleashed the boundless energy that all this while had been tied up and constrained and restrained within the bounded dimensions of what we call “mass”, simply because we did not dare to venture beyond – simply because we failed to question what is, and accepted what is as what should be or must be.

Today the ability to see that “mass” as a super-concentrated form of energy has given us or helped to enhance technologies such as nuclear power, particle accelerators used in cancer treatment, GPS, MRI, magnetic data storage, and semiconductors.

Authentic Engagement requires us to break free of untenable paradigms and think big and bold and beyond, to THINK BIG and BOLD and Beyond what is convenient and comfortable and innovate solutions in an ever-changing landscape. We often believe that thinking big means that each individual must themselves think big. But thinking big is often better achieved by listening big – the “bigness” comes not from an individual effort to think beyond but from a collective effort to listen beyond our own thoughts.

Authentic Engagement requires us to BREAK FREE FROM OUR OLD WAYS, from outdated approaches, and challenge “the way things have always been done”, and to UNLEASH OUR POTENTIAL individually and collectively, using courage and cooperation to deliver bold outcomes.

Too many times, we blame an employee’s lack of action on their lack of motivation, failing to see the hurdles that we ourselves put in the way. Employees already know what to do. We need to move our rules and even ourselves out of the way. We must, as Michelangelo the great sculptor described it, ‘free the figure already within the marble’.

Authentic Engagement also means that we must rein back our tendency to seek conformity to what exists and to recruit and select for promotion who we think best fits within our existing company culture. We see those who buck our company culture as rebels. And our first reaction towards a rebel is to force them to conform, to suppress their ideas, even to repress them. But our first action should be to seek to UNDERSTAND them.

She may be a rebel to you, but, from her vantage point, she is a creator. The Indian philosopher Osho, also known as Rajneesh, and well known for his rejection of mainstream institutional religions, described a true rebel as one who acts to create a new, more beautiful world, rather than just reacting against the old.

IF WE WANT TO CREATE A NEW WORLD WE MUST DARE TO THINK DIFFERENTLY AND THEN ACT DIFFERENTLY.

That power lies well within us as Caribbean people and people of the Americas. The power lies within us to create a fairer and more equitable workplace for our Employees, a place where there are no sacred cows, a place that does not look like the workspaces we inherited and imported from the European Industrial revolution, that encourages positive change, that is not afraid of change, that is not afraid to change, that is sensitive and responsive to our Employees and our Cultures, that puts our People first, where we work together as one, for and with each other, where we do what we love and love what we do …

No matter how cliche it may sound, there is no one else in the world exactly like us. No one can imitate us, no matter how hard they try.

There is no need to dumb down our workplaces to conform to theory borne in lands full of gray skies and gales far away from our lands and islands of endless sunshine and an occasional hurricane.

We are mix-up and mash-up. We don’t try to be different and unique. But we are!

We are boil up and oil down, cou cou and conch soup. We are rice and beans and roti, sere and salt fish. We are burritos and bollos, caldo and callaloo. We are fungi and flying fish, pepper pot and pelau.

We are punta and paranda, pan and parang. We are sambai and samba, soca and salsa. We are brukdown and bram, bachata and bele. We are marimba and mariachi, merengue and mambo. We are reggae and ringbang, ranchera and reggaeton. We are bolero and bossa nova, kaiso and cumbia. We are jab jab and jankanoo, jouvert and jing ping.

To sum it all up: We are everything. SO, LET US BE WHO WE ARE!

Thank you.