Our people are important to us, and we carefully consider what drives engagement as an engaged workforce is imperative to any organisation’s success. We are committed to building a healthy organisation with a mindset of leading oneself and owning one’s growth and career as an individual. We strive to create an environment that brings out the best in our people to passionately serve our customers, deliver operational excellence, and contribute to sustainable growth.
In FY21, we commenced our journey to partner with all subsidiary leaders to build a healthy organisation focused on growth. In FY22, we built on this and aimed to create a growth mindset through our WeLead initiative that allows our subsidiaries and employees to be part of our dream to continuously pave the way to create an inclusive, growing business while ensuring that we also focus on our ESG initiatives. Our people-first approach, combined with our all-in-culture, led us to meet our objectives.
Over the past two years, we have observed roles, organisations, and our business environment change at an unprecedented rate and magnitude. Remote and hybrid work transformed from an occasional perk to a permanent and baseline expectation for employees in various roles. The drive toward a more accommodating employer-employee relationship is changing the role of managers and the way HR leaders think about employee wellbeing. At the same time, technology has become a much larger component of the employee experience in this digital work environment. New technologies have positively (or negatively) impacted how fair, stressful, or fulfilling the workplace is depending on how they are used. The need to focus on the future has never been so urgent. It has become critical to delivering our objectives for the year to retain talent and ensure our employees feel safe, empowered to overcome their vulnerabilities, and confident to engage with our customers and us as the employer.
Performing while transforming brings unique opportunities and challenges. We understand that success lies in navigating and taking our people along on the change journey while continuing to support their wellbeing. We are proud of the remarkable resilience of our team in these unpredictable times.
Research around engagement and meaningful jobs shows us the importance of creating an environment of inclusion and employee-centricity.
We have increased our focus on employee wellbeing. Our communication and wellness plan provided employees with access to information and opportunities to share their coping strategies, education on healthier choices and support in making the right decisions. We focused on the elements which achieved lower scores in our engagement survey and our repeat engagement survey confirms that this focus has resulted in an increase of 2% in employee satisfaction and their role being considered meaningful. In addition, we achieved an above-average score on the "overall engagement" and "happy at work" metrics.
Accordingly, we will in the next year, continue to focus on:
Employee retention
Measures the percentage of employees who left our employ during the year.
Turnover
(2021: 27.03%)
Voluntary turnover
(resignations)
(2021: 22.48%)
Involuntary turnover (dismissal and end of contracts)
6.89%(2021: 4.55%)
Executive turnover
(2021: 0.8%)
We have seen a decrease in headcount, of which the biggest shift was as a result of the call centre operations due to absconsions. A conscious decision was made to replace absconded employees leaving the organisation with learners under the Group learnership programme that are not considered to be permanent employees.
Measures the proportion of employees from under-represented groups
BLT is mindful of the unemployment levels in South Africa and is committed to addressing this through job creation. We have set up a learnership programme, which is managed by Blue Train, a Blue Label Telecoms associate, to enable training and employment of unskilled youth.
Under this programme, staff are employed by Group companies and paid a monthly stipend. They are given formal training in their area of work following which on-the job-training and experience is facilitated through working within the Group entity and gaining further skills and experience. This enables them to grow and create a career path for themselves within the Group. The learnership programme allows previously unemployed youth to be employed and be educated in their field of work. Previously, the Group would not be able to hire these learners as they would not be suitable candidates to be employed by the company as they lacked the necessary skills and qualifications required to enter the Blue Label workforce.
We had 3 600 learners in FY22, and should they wish to remain with the Group, they are able to be absorbed into roles for which they have gained competencies, or join the country's general workforce after having attained a skill set.
Our organisation continues to evolve rapidly and the demand for new skills and capabilities continues to grow. Our ability to meet the demand is critical to stay relevant and build a high-performance workforce.
Our new strategy incorporates innovative talent acquisition practices and the development of our employees for promotional opportunities, ensuring we focus on the following:
With our focus on equity we see an improvement of all new appointments, with 77% of all new male appointments and 82% of all female appointments being African.
Our focus for 2023 will be on gender equality.
Our equity representation success depends on our talent sustainability and the framework available to all managers with the success management tools that assist in building talent in the relevant occupations.
Board subcommittees, including the Group Social, Ethics and Transformation Committee and the Remuneration and Nomination Committee, contribute to creating and preserving value for our stakeholders while providing mandated oversight governing our employee engagement value driver.
There is no doubt that the pressure experienced over the last couple of years, namely global emergencies including the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have had a transformative impact on the employer-employee relationship making it harder to separate employees' work lives from their personal, family, and community lives. Feedback from our staff has shown that pure remote work is not the novelty it used to be.
As human resource (HR) roles evolve, we know we need to have a new perspective and require different capabilities to transition to a work culture beyond the pandemic. We structure the function on a partnership model with a strong Group support structure in the areas of governance, control and learning and development. Through this and the shift in how we operate post-Covid, we learned that the organisation and HR required new capabilities. The culture of the organisation to attract and retain staff has become increasingly important. We understand that we would need to build on an existing strong culture to ensure it remains a key competitive advantage that keeps us growing. We have shifted our thinking and spend time on building capabilities needed to cope with the new ways of working. More than 36% of all terminations in 2022 were due to a desire for a more flexible work-life balance. This is considerably higher than the year before. There is an increased demand by prospective employees for a healthier company culture and better work-life balance over compensation packages. We believe that a culture of trust is part of a new employee's value proposition and the value of workplace-related support considering the traumatic events brought about by the pandemic must not be discounted.
We understand that any significant change requires clear communication and change support. As such, emphasis was placed on garnering excitement and energy for the journey. We continued with our existing communication strategy from our leaders, supported by our learning platform, to ensure our leaders have the confidence and competencies to provide appropriate and relevant support. Our managers are passionate about fostering leadership as well as the right work environment. We understand the importance of managers upskilling their teams, giving them greater autonomy over their work, and taking further steps to empower them.
At Blue Label our culture has been built over many years and we have learned that fostering the right culture is a vital factor in driving long-term employee engagement and identifying needs to be solved through experimentation as we contemplate future models of working. It became clear that some activities were best done face-to-face and in collaboration, as one of our values, is at the core of our business. We designed multiple models and decided to experiment with a hybrid working model to determine if employees should work at the company premises on a full-time basis or have a balance of time in the office and time at home. These new work models and the human employment concept will strengthen our value as an employer, satisfying, employees' desire to work for organisations that reflect their own values and to do meaningful work with a positive impact on the world around them.
Research guides our thinking and employees feel their work is more meaningful when organisations show that they are:
Shared purpose is challenging to achieve and prospective employees who want to work for organisations with robust environmental and social commitments will continue to grow. It is not a "tick-box" for us, caring for a better future is central to our code. We have worked on a range of initiatives and introduced a shared approach to our social responsibilities with our employees, positioning us as an employer of choice.
Future focus areas will be driving employee engagement in a volatile world by actively investing in:
Now we imagine a world where we deliver through people by creating a mindset of growth that allows #teamblu to be part of our dream to continuously pave the way to create an inclusive business with and for the base of the pyramid communities.
We want to attract, develop, retain, and award people who are innovative, resilient, and drive high performance. Our people strategy includes building a growth mindset and a learning culture, being deliberate about our talent acquisition and retention efforts, and ensuring a highly engaged and committed workforce. Our leaders are passionate about empowering our people to have long and meaningful careers with us.
Driving a growth mindset
The key focus for FY2022 was the development of competency-based learning, ensuring alignment between learning opportunities available at work, the role that the employee is currently in, and preparation for future roles.
We continue to invest in leadership development programmes through Duke CE to build strategic capability in our leaders across the business, which include training on the competencies below:
We have seen an uptake of learning this year as people are excited to make a difference:
We will continue to source and develop content to maintain this trajectory.
* Training spend includes stipends for learners, training spend on learnership programmes, and all other training courses
** Learners on learnership: These are BluTrain unemployed learnerships.
In our quest to continue to drive and build a future skills pipeline, we have focused on young talent development initiatives and unemployed learnerships:
Focus on retaining and attracting critical skills:
During the past two years Blue Label has launched and embedded our WeLead programme, with the aim to create awareness on the importance of everyone displaying leadership behaviours across the business and understanding the values we stand for. Our BLT culture requires us, as employees, to be resilient, agile, entrepreneurial, innovative, achievement-driven, and to have a winning mindset.
Along the WeLead journey - still maintaining focus on our value and leadership behaviours - we launched WeLead with Purpose.
This addition focused on our social responsibility. WeLead with Purpose linked our licence to operate (our business mission) and our responsibility to build sustainability through our people, our community, our customer, and ultimately our environment. We fully understand that we are responsive to the needs of the community around us, while remaining a profitable business. "Profit with Purpose."
In recent years, in the implementation of initiatives to establish an intimate list of flagship beneficiaries that fit our purpose, we have registered the Trust Blu Foundation and established relationships that enable individuals to assume permanent roles and we continue to upskill them to become the pipeline for future leaders.
Our commitment to sustainable economic development is REAL; it is not just an add-on, it is our code, part of our DNA! We want to assist in establishing a society where our legacy will continue far beyond the end of doing business, and this is why we are moving into Caring for A Better Future!
