Nigeria, May 6 -- Every year on Workers' Day, Nigerian employers reach for the same script: the appreciation post, the all-staff email, the quote graphic scheduled for 8 a.m. And then work resumes, unchanged. The problem is not that these gestures are insincere. The problem is that they cost nothing, and they change nothing. They are substitutes for the harder, quieter work of actually building a workplace that works for the people inside it.

That harder work has a name. It is called people strategy. And in Nigeria, it remains one of the most underdeveloped functions in organisational life, not because leaders do not care about their staff, but because they have not yet treated the question with the seriousness it deserves. They staff pr...