Workers need a balance between income and emotions.

Taking care of the workforce takes on a special meaning for Yamarys Márquez González, a specialist in Human Resources management at the Oil and Gas Well Drilling and Capital Repair Company, commercially known as EMPERCAP.

In a context where labor emigration is a fact in the Cuban reality, in this strategic entity options are put into practice to avoid losing essential men and women in the production of Cuban crude oil, widely used in thermoelectric plants.

If there is no EMPERCAP, there is no oil. They are the primary link, is a clear conclusion for everyone who works there. This idea is also held by Márquez González, the psychologist in charge of recruiting anyone who wants to work at EMPERCAP. «The first face they see is mine,» she says with a smile.

«For us, there is the opportunity to seek out the forces in the territorial work departments. They also come of their own free will. We have one day a week where we recruit interested parties. Depending on the requirements of the positions here, we organize the processes».

She clarifies that «they come with an idea and we reorient them according to guarantee that motivation or need to have a work link, to look for an economic improvement or to integrate into the oil world».

Still, there are always exoduses, too many exoduses, I observe. How much does it hurt? She doesn’t think twice. «It hurts a lot, but I never lose hope of guaranteeing the stability of that workforce that was initially interested in joining the organization, which I saw as having the potential to occupy positions or to continue training, to go further, and to contribute to the company and the country».

In particular, she confesses, I always try to reorganize myself. «It’s about making them fall in love with what they do from the moment they join the company, so that they come to love what they do. It’s a process in which we all have to intervene, so that the recruited personnel are not lost in the day-to-day work.

One of the things that strikes her is that recruits leave during the probationary period. «When they leave at that stage, it is a defeat, because we cannot guarantee to seduce them, to hook them…».

The specialist in Human Resources management at EMPERCAP talks about the attractiveness of the income, because they receive profits every three months, a good salary as a result of the application of Decree 53, today repealed by Decree 87.

We cannot lose sight of the fact that the scenario is different and the migration is taking place to highly competent specialists, different from the times when the instability was in the workers, he admits. «Today it becomes a little more difficult to find those at a higher level,» she pauses and smiles again. «Here we try to keep calm, not to get anxious and to redesign the strategy, in correspondence with the environment.»

For example, she announces, there are two university students inserted here, soon to be industrial engineers, and one of them is working on how to elaborate a system to recruit or attract workforce from social networks.

The psychologist insists. I don’t see staying here only as a matter of money, salary, income.

«The challenge is that what we do attracts people’s attention, and they see that it satisfies higher needs, which for me are not necessarily economic. I believe that people are looking for that balance between economic satisfaction and the emotional, the spiritual.

The important thing on this path, he says, is «to ensure that those of us who are here consolidate the sense of belonging, and pass it on to new recruits, to maintain the workforce».

What EMPERCAP dreams of, what is his ideal company? «The one that guarantees services with the right technology and maintains the balance of the workforce, which is my raison d’être. The organization where I work today was derived from the mother entity, which is the oil company, and it already came with experience….. It was born in February 2003. I arrived a few months later. It’s been 20 years now.

She is not a founder, but Yamarys Márquez González is in the group of those who are being honored in the context of the activities for July 1st, Oil Workers’ Day.

The psychologist who wanted to be a journalist, loves what she does, so she confesses it without ambiguity: «I am retiring here. I can’t see myself anywhere else.

Photo: From EMPERCAP’s Facebook

Written by Eva Luna Acosta Armiñán.