PricewaterhouseCoopers Ghana (PwC Ghana) on Thursday launched its maiden 2012 Business Effectiveness Survey, to provide Ghanaian companies the opportunity to identify global best practices and work towards achieving them.

The Benchmarking report will enable organisations compare themselves with similar organisations, identify areas for improvement and effect changes necessary.

The survey will cover eight specific business areas such as people, business insights, process and systems.

Other areas include internal audit, governance and compliance, inventory and supply chain and corporate social responsibility.

In all, 24 companies across the banking and capital markets, insurance, mining and energy, manufacturing, media, telecommunication and automobile participated in the survey.

Presenting some key findings of the survey, Ms Serwa Atiase Dzogbenuku, Manager PwC Ghana, said results indicated that about 32 per cent of the total employee population in the organisations surveyed were women.

The highest proportion of these women are in the banking sector.

She said this was significantly lower than the international benchmark with a median of 45 per cent women representation in the overall organisational workforce.

“From this survey, at managerial levels, the rate of women participation is even lower at 30 per cent,” she said, adding that this had a limiting effect on the number of women who made it to leadership positions in future.

Ms Dzogbenuku said it was important to close the gender gap through changes in current thinking and management approaches, workforce sourcing and engagement.

The report showed that 67 per cent of the companies prepared annual budgets, which she said was good since forecasting provided businesses clear insights to support decision making and position themselves for growth.

Ms Dzogbenuku called for training of people to ensure effective planning.

The survey showed that the banks were concerned about credit risk, credit spread and quality of risk management, and made the case for businesses to show they had good internal controls.

Mr Ishmael Yamson, Chairman of Ishmael Yamson and Associates, said local businesses must stop blaming external impediments for their difficulties and look within to see if the challenges were not of their own making.

He said to be able to compete, corporate organisations must work with international standards to enable them meet the changes in the competitive global environment.

Mr Yamson urged companies to focus on doing the right things by measuring themselves against peers and adopting international best practices.

Dr Joseph Annan, Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry, lauded PwC for the initiative and called for the expansion in scope to cover both the private and public sectors.

He called for attitudinal shift in the approach that many businesses adopted, saying, that was the key to success.

Mr Felix Addo, Senior Country Partner of PwC, said the desire for the survey was to leverage the findings as a reference point to support industry, and position the findings as a measurement tool to promote learning and information sharing.

He said there were plans to conduct the survey annually and the desire was that, the findings would serve as a benchmark for improvement and sustainability in business effectiveness within the Ghanaian businesses environment.

The report was launched on the theme: “Do you Lead or Follow”.**