In February 2020, our first Employee Representative will be taking his seat as a member of the company’s Board of Directors. Fair Trade Outsourcing welcomes Nikko Robleza to its Board after the company held its first election from December 12 to 14, 2019.

Nikko has been a valued floor manager for one of our long-term accounts since 2019. He started as an OJT agent (project-based), but was absorbed into the company not long after. Pretty soon, it was obvious to the management that he’s worthy of being promoted to a leadership role.

In college, he was part of the student council for three years. He started as a board member, then was voted to Vice Governor, and finally as Chairman of their Department. At the same time, he was the student representative to the university-wide student council.

One of his greatest achievements is to build up the confidence of his fellow students in their department. They started as the department that nobody heard of to the department that everyone knew because of the activities they participated in. The other students were able to join competitions and perform well because they trusted their student leaders to support them.

Now that he’s a member of Fair Trade Outsourcing’s Board of Directors, he wants to uphold the Agent Bill of Rights, especially in terms of job security and compensation.

He says that being part of an account that has the most erratic projections and changes, he has to cope with it. Fortunately, he also feels that “at the end of the day, FTO still has our back and ABOR is still being upholded [sic].”

He wants to spread that same feeling to every other employee working at Fair Trade Outsourcing. He wants them to feel the same security he feels while working at FTO.

As an employee representative, he also wants to share with top management the employees’ perception of the company, may it be good or bad. Concerns like compensation and work security will be addressed first, because those are the biggest motivations for employees when they join a company.

When asked what he feels right now, knowing that he’ll be joining the Board of Directors, he answered, “Nervous, anxious, excited, and happy. The most intense feeling I have is the feeling that I matter. That is what I would like each employee in FTO to feel: That they matter.”