CHRO Magazine 2020, Issue 1

FOR HR EXECUTIVES 1 | 2020 | CHRO.CO.ZA

Sun International Group HR Director Verna Robson From Eldos to Sun International Aurecon Chief People Officer Dean Naidoo Lockdown lessons from Mandela Standard Bank Head: Human Capital Sharon Taylor Where personal growth meets socioeconomic development

High flyers: What to do about weed in the workplace

CHRO OF THE YEAR

MTN'S PAUL NORMAN WELLNESS AT WORK

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Welcome Uncertain times

We are well into 2020, which represents the beginning of the current decade, and the Covid-19 pandemic has challenged all that we hold true.

These times, more so than ever, represent a moment of great challenge and even greater opportunity for the continent.

The continent and our country are at a critical time in history, where change, in all its manifestations – politically, economically, environmentally and socially – is a constant. This era is characterised by rapid technological evolution, where anticipating and managing change is a prerequisite for organisational success.

Add to that the uncertainty brought about by Covid-19 and we start to understand the context in which HR leaders and their c-suite counterparts are operating. Companies are doing everything in their power to ensure that no employee – whether they were a cleaner, receptionist, line manager, or executive – has to lose their job as a result of the pandemic.

Executives are considering all options available – from ‘salary sacrifices’ to downsizing head office – not only for their organisations’ survival but for that of their employees.

They are rightly concerned about how their companies will be affected and what they have to do next. Therefore, the role of the HR function is key in partnering with the board and the executive team to identify, prioritise and unlock value-creating opportunities in the midst of complex and often competing demands.

The roles of the board, the chief executive, and the HR function are key in preserving and championing the “ethical DNA” of the organisation, and the HR will function play a key role in being the custodian of moral and ethical practices, processes and culture in organisations. This is against a backdrop of societal complexity and rapid change.

MOULA MOKHOBO-AMEGASHIE PARTNER DRAYTON GLENDOWER | CHRO AWARDS JUDGE

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48 Courage and culture shock in the Middle East Hellmann Worldwide Logistics chief people officer for Africa Marlize Kriel shares lessons from a 10-year stint in the Middle-East.

12 Where personal growth meets socioeconomic development Creating that optimal environment for people to thrive in is what gets Standard Bank human capital head Sharon Taylor up in the morning.

18 Anchored in purpose Unilever’s HR vice president for Africa Mechell Chetty believes that building a deep and authentic sense of purpose is the ultimate competitive advantage.

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From Eldoes to Sun International, Verna Robson’s determination and solution-orientedness got her to where she is page 32

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52 Dean Naidoo 62 Matete Lerutla 66 Angelique Montalto

22 CHRO Awards 36 Lockdown leadership: CHRO SA’s first online summit

Cover article

Features

26 CHRO of the Year MTN CHRO Paul Norman won the inaugural CHRO of the Year Award. He talks about how Covid-19 has refocused MTN's approach to wellness.

40 Mental wellness top of mind 44 A formula for return on experience 56 High flyers: What to do about weed in the workplace

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publishing info

CHRO SA IS SUPPORTED BY THE FOLLOWING PARTNERS Principal Partners

Media Partner

Associate Partners

Managing editor Sungula Nkabinde snkabinde@chro.co.za +27 72 741 6171 Editor in chief Georgina Guedes gguedes@cfo.co.za +27 83 651 2789 Photography Patrick Furter, Ter Hollmann Other contributors Angelique Montalto, Dean Naidoo, Matete Lerutla, Puseletso Mompei, Victoria Williams Advertising Nick Smith nsmith@chro.co.za +27 72 202 1071 Managing director JoĂŤl Roerig jroerig@chro.co.za +27 76 371 2856 Publisher CFO Enterprises (Pty) Ltd 1 Wedgewood Link | Bryanston | Johannesburg | 2191 | South Africa +27 11 083 7515 CHRO community CHRO South Africa is the organisation for HR executives in South Africa. Our goal is to connect finance professionals online and through events and this magazine in order to share knowledge, exchange interests and open up business opportunities. For more information and membership options please visit CHRO.co.za.

Design Elizabeth Ferraris Printing Novus Holdings Š 2020 CFO Enterprises (Pty) Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Everything has changed CHRO

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Oh, what trying and interesting times we are living in. The coronavirus outbreak has forced everyone – not only HR leaders but every employer and employee – to reevaluate their way of doing things. Organisations have been forced into remote working regardless of their preparedness, and ideas around the future world of work and digital transformation can no longer be shelved as plans to enact at a later date but rather, are now a reality unfolding on a daily basis. This edition of CHRO SA magazine has been quite delayed as the lockdown caused a shift in focus towards the immediate concerns and reactions of the CHRO community, which was captured in a series of online Community Conversations, lessons from which you will find in this issue of the magazine.

The Community Conversations have served as a safe space for top HR leaders to discuss the challenges, frustrations and ideas for dealing with the virus.

From ideas on how to maintain mental wellness among employees who are working from home while feeling anxious about their job security to focusing on what it means to be a ‘lockdown leader’, these forums have been a godsend for CHRO community members, many of whom say they have found it useful for coping with the impact of the lockdown both personally and professionally.

On page 12, Standard Bank group HR director Sharon Taylor tells the story of her career journey and how she came to be at the pinnacle of people strategy at one of South Africa's top banks. Sharon was also one of the top winners at the inaugural CHRO Awards, where she walked away with the Strategy & Leadership Award and the Transformation & Empowerment Award. On page 23, MTN CHRO Paul Norman, who scooped the top honours on the night, talks about his 26-year spell at MTN, and how it is that he was able to stay at the top of his game for such a long time without ever feeling the need to switch companies.

Also in this issue is a discussion about cannabis in the workplace (page 56).

The recent decriminalisation of cannabis in South Africa means that it is no longer illegal for an adult citizen to use, possess or grow cannabis in private for personal consumption. The ruling by the Constitutional Court in regards to this brings with it a new set of considerations for employers, and this article sheds some light on how to navigate those muddy waters.

SUNGULA NKABINDE SNKABINDE@CHRO.CO.ZA +27 72 741 6171

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Alice Bhebhe takes on global role at Pearson Alice Bhebhe has been appointed as the director for leadership development at Pearson Global. After four years of heading up HR for Pearson Southern Africa, one of which was spent looking after growth markets, she has now been entrusted with the learning and development of the organisation’s current and future leaders.

In her previous roles as HR executive director, trustee for the Pearson Marang Trust and board member for Pearson SA, Alice says she was fortunate to work with the diverse teams and business leaders to create an empowering culture of diversity and inclusion.

She says the organisation underwent some structural changes last year that provided her with “the opportunity to consider many things including my raison d’etre, my own growth and next role.”

When the opportunity presented itself, she got excited because learning and development have always been her passion. She has always enjoyed being in an HR leadership role and is looking forward to doing the work that she feels connects most with her purpose.

EOH Appoints Malisha Awunor as group HR director Malisha Awunor joined EOH as group HR director after five years with Barloworld Handling/BHBW. Malisha is an experienced HR professional predominantly within the mining sector. Prior to her current role, she spent five years at Barloworld Handling/BHBW as the HR director and held senior roles at AngloAmerican, Scaw Metals and Coal of Africa. She is very passionate about mentorship. In fact, when she joined AngloAmerican as a 22-year-old HR practitioner 20 years ago, her first task was to mentor first-year bursary students.

Candice Watson takes on top HR job at AECI Group

Kempinski Hotels appoints Melissa Salibi as CHRO

Explosives and speciality chemicals company AECI Group has appointed Candice Watson as the Group Executive for Human Capital.

Candice, who has extensive experience as an HR executive, has taken over the people agenda for the group’s 7,000 or so employees, all of which are spread across 15 regional and international businesses in Africa, South-East Asia, the USA, and Australia. Prior to her current role, Candice spent three years at British American Tobacco (BAT) Southern Africa where she became the HR director.

Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group Kempinski Hotels has appointed Melissa Salibi as chief human resources officer and member of the management board. Melissa, who started her career in 1999 as an HR administrator at Woolworths joined Kempinski in 2013 when she took a regional role as director of HR for the Middle East, Africa and India during the merger between Fairmont, Raffles, and Swissôtel, which then became FRHI Hotels & Resorts, overseeing 18 properties and developing the function in her region.

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Sibanye-Stillwater appoints Eric Moepeng as senior VP of HR Mining group Sibanye-Stillwater has appointed Eric Moepeng as the senior vice president and head of HR. Eric, who started in his new role on 1 February 2020, has 20 years experience in management and over ten years’ experience at an executive level. He has extensive experience in HR leadership, business consulting and transformation, stakeholder relations management, talent and succession management, and organisational change and design. He has a solid track record in optimising and enhancing human resources capabilities through designing and implementing bespoke corporate human capital solutions.

CHRO.co.za CHRO.co.za is the online hub for South African HR professionals, a daily virtual pitstop for high achievers who want to stay ahead. The content portal of CHRO South Africa is experiencing spectacular growth in readership every month and is fast becoming the leading HR website in South Africa.

Prior to his appointment, Eric was an associate director at PwC and, before that, the interim group human capital executive at Telkom. He also spent four years at Anglo American, first as the head of employee relations and later as the chief negotiator at the Modikwa Platinum Mine, which is jointly owned by African Rainbow Minerals (ARM) and Anglo Platinum and employs 2 100 people.

Eric holds a Bachelor of Technology diploma in HR Management and an MBA.

The unique offering includes: • Interviews with prominent HR executives • Exclusive guest articles from leading experts • Profiles of the CHRO Top 100 • All new appointments of HR leaders • Fresh and provocative trend articles • Information about CHRO South Africa events • Online access to CHRO Magazine

Shirley Zinn’s high profile resignations Towards the end of last year, renowned HR leader and author Shirley Zinn resigned from Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) board of director. This was reportedly motivated by the body’s treatment of journalists whose media accreditation was allegedly revoked because they had been critical of CSA. Earlier Shirley quit her role as Shoprite’s lead independent director following the re-election of chairperson Christo Wiese, despite most shareholders voting against the decision.

Khaya Ngcwembe on a sabbatical after parting ways with Lonmin Khaya Ngcwembe has vacated from his role as Lonmin's executive vice president of human resources to take a sabbatical. Having joined in May 2017, he is among a number of other executives whose departure coincides with the takeover of Lonmin by Sibanye, which was finalised in June.

"I think I need a break from people.

For now I'm more concerned about cows. I'll start thinking about putting myself on the job market around January, but I'm in no rush to find my next opportunity," says Khaya.

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• The latest and greatest HR training • A free online membership with a weekly newsletter Contribute Do you know an HR director who has great insights to share? Do you want to contribute your expertise? Do you have ideas that can help CHRO.co.za get bigger and better faster? Then contact managing editor Sungula Nkabinde today.

Sungula Nkabinde | snkabinde@ chro.co.za | +27 72 741 6171

WHERE PERSONAL GROWTH MEETS SOCIOECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Employers have an unparalleled opportunity to transform the lives of their employees. Creating that optimal environment for people to thrive in is what gets Standard Bank human capital head Sharon Taylor up in the morning.

BY VICTORIA WILLIAMS

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ast year Sharon Taylor, Head of Human Capital at Standard Bank, walked away with the Strategy & Leadership Award and the Transformation & Empowerment Award at the inaugural CHRO Awards.

These accolades are a testament to her 29-year record of introducing many of the people philosophies that define the bank today, as well as making great strides with transformation.

For Sharon, her work is possible thanks to unwavering commitment leadership: “As a services business, our success is built on the quality of our people. We have a lovely mandate to do the work that we do. I’ve never had to justify HR’s seat at the table, fight for budget or prove why our work is important.”

She is also cognisant of the positive role that banks play – both by developing economies and also helping people on their personal paths. Finance plays a part in every major life moment from studying, buying a first home or saving for a goal.

“My team worked on a compelling leadership message to describe our purpose. We decided that our primary job is to create an environment where people can give their absolute best, and by doing so we will grow Africa’s economies,” she says.

Sharon has always been attracted to commerce thanks to dinner-table discussions with her businessman father. Her role is the perfect combination of commerce (the numbers) and people (the psychology).

A diverse workforce

Sharon joined Standard Bank in 1991 and has not sought opportunity elsewhere, thanks to colleagues who energise her, various generalist and specialist roles and a career that has adapted to banking’s continued evolution. She held several head of HR positions with the group before taking on her current role in 2014. She was appointed to the group executive committee in 2018.

Sharon dispels the perception that the bank (and modern banks in general) are populated by ‘little grey men.’ Outsiders are amazed to learn how diverse Standard Bank is.

Real lives and real impact Sharon is heartened to see a groundswell of the recognition of the importance of people development.

She refers to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft since 2014, who made changing the culture his number one priority. Moving from a product-focused to a people-focused organisation has supported Microsoft’s share price in tripling over the past five years.

Sharon believes that a fulfilling experience at work has a ripple effect within families and communities. As a large employer, Standard Bank has a staff complement of 55,000, which means the bank has a massive responsibility to influence lives positively.

The bank is culturally rich. With a 156-year local history, Standard Bank is a home-grown brand. Yet, the company is the largest African banking group by market capitalisation with a presence in 20 African countries.

The bank is also diverse in terms of skills. There is a core of financial skills, but the bank also employs engineers, behavioural scientists and IT people.

Approximately 60 percent of the bank’s employees are women.

Collaboration and reflection

Sharon describes her working style as collaborative.

When grappling with a thorny issue, she’ll call on a colleague to be a sounding board. With her team, she actively encourages two-way feedback by ask-

Sharon Taylor Head of Human Capital, Standard Bank Work: Sharon joined Standard Bank as part of the education and training division in 1991. In 2002, she was appointed as Head of HR for business banking. She later assumed responsibility for the HR partnership in South Africa, before she was appointed as Head of Human Capital for South Africa in 2012. Sharon has served on the board of the Bankseta representing organised employers from 2012 to 2016, was appointed to the University of Pretoria Council in 2019, to serve for a four-year term, and has been nominated for appointment as nonexecutive director of Standard Bank Malawi Plc, which is currently subject to regulatory approval.

Education: B.Comm (Honors), Business Strategy and Human Resource Management (University of South Africa), B.Comm, Business Economics, HR Management, Psychology (University of KwaZulu-Natal)

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“A fulfilling experience at work has a ripple effect within families and communities.�

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ing questions like ‘how do you think that went?’

This is not always possible, as the barriers of status inhibit frank feedback feedback, she says.

“As you become more senior, people tell you what they think you want to hear, rather than what you need to hear. In a way, the more senior you become, the lonelier you get.”

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“As you become more senior, people tell you what they think you want to hear, rather than what you need to hear.”

As an executive, Sharon finds introspection or self-checking to be an important skill. In recent years, she has focussed on developing a mindfulness habit. This involves being present and reflecting on how she could have done better and what she could have done differently.

Finding time to unwind

Balancing a high-powered career and family demands is difficult, but as an introvert Sharon tries to carve out some time for herself. Reducing noise and finding the space to think is essential. Her ideal day would include a long walk on the beach picking up shells.

She's an avid reader of both fiction and non-friction.

To unwind, she likes nothing better than to curl up with a Kate Morton novel. These books ‘come to life’ in Sharon’s head, drawing her into the tangles of family, mystery, history and memory. Business favourites include Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and much of Lynda Gratton’s writing on the future of work.

Spending quality time with her husband and two children is also a priority, and she enjoys traveling with them as a family. Whenever visiting London, she treats herself to a top theatre show (she closes her eyes when paying the exorbitant prices) and is also a keen supporter of local cultural events.

In March 2019, the bank announced its plans to cut up to 1,200 jobs and close 91 branches to become more competitive. Implementing this was incredibly tough.

Customer behaviour is changing, driven by smartphone adoption, exposure to global best practice user experience (Standard Bank compare local digital experiences with the likes of Airbnb) and a desire for painless convenience. On the horizon, tech giants like Apple, Facebook and Google are making inroads into finance.

“Banks tend to obsess about the obvious competition. In time, we will compete with non-traditional competitors. While this is a challenge, it also provides significant upside opportunities to partner with fintech startups," Sharon says.

As an example of competing in a non-traditional space, Standard Bank now owns a majority stake in SnapScan, the wildly successful start-up and easy payments provider.

Sharon rejects the ‘machines are coming’ narrative.

Rather, she predicts a marriage between technology and human capabilities. While many roles are tech-enhanced, she is yet to replace a person with a bot. “People forget that the computer replaced the typewriter, but we still need personal assistants. The ATM did not replace the bank teller. These roles are different, but in some ways they are more value-adding.”

She anticipates exciting new career opportunities that come with a higher level of skill and pay. The demand for uniquely human traits (creativity, empathy and understanding context) will not disappear, she says.

The age of banking disruption

According to the criteria, the winner of the Strategy & Leadership Award has dealt with intense changes in their business environment. This is certainly true for Sharon, given that a flurry of new players has entered the market of late, looking to compete with established banks.

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While banking may be very different in five years’ time, Sharon believes that when customers have a real problem they’ll still want to talk to a real person. To succeed, organisations must recognise that life is built on relationships and not transactions. 

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Sharon’s career-building tips for new graduates Sharon is especially passionate about developing young talent. She started the Standard Bank Graduate Programme 22 years ago and since then has seen 2,000 young people’s career kick off at the bank. This is Sharon’s advice to new graduates – although much of this applies at all career stages.

1. Always be yourself It is easy to imagine that recruiters look for a certain type of person. People often pretend to be something that they’re not. It is exhausting to sustain this illusion for any long period. Reveal your authentic self in the workplace – you may be surprised how well people respond.

2. Find an environment where you fit in We spend about 75 percent of our lives at work. It’s critical that you feel like you belong at work.

Your environment should energise you and not drain you. The right environment will provide you with the opportunities to grow and develop. There are many internal opportunities within an organisation so it’s not always necessary to move in order to grow.

3. Success is personal Define what success means to you. Consider your whole life and not just your career goals.

Sharon met an accomplished global executive who spoke about his greatest regret. He had chased his business goals relentlessly, but his personal life was a wreck. He was in his third marriage. While he now had the time to spend with his children, they wanted nothing to do with him. True success is creating a life that sustains much more than your material and status needs.

4. Understand that you never ‘arrive’ Success is not a destination and in reality you are always arriving. Things change so fast. What you learnt while studying may not apply. You can never be complacent and should commit to lifelong learning. The only way to stay motivated to keep learning is to do something that you love.

5. Collect memories and not things We live in a consumerist society. When people earn more they tend to spend more. This can be such an easy trap to fall into! In the longer run, creating meaningful experiences will enhance your life in a way that ‘things’ can never accomplish.

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Anchored in purpose In an era in which attracting and retaining talent is a business imperative, Mechell Chetty believes that building a deep and authentic sense of purpose is the ultimate competitive advantage.

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BY VICTORIA WILLIAMS

echell Chetty, Unilever’s HR vice president for Africa, has developed her career at the leading FMCG player for over 21 years.

She observes that “Unilever is a difficult company to leave! I’ve worked here two decades, but I’ve had so many opportunities and milestone roles. I’m continually learning as the markets and cultures we operate in are so diverse.”

Since joining in 1999, she has had a number of specialist and generalist HR roles. She transitioned from being a national learning manager to the HR director for the company’s AMET (Africa, Middle East and Turkey) region, where she managed a large-scale reorganisation. She was also the HR director for the supply chain, which included seven factories in South Africa, and HR director for the sales team. She has worked in South Africa, Turkey and the Middle East.

Mechell’s loyalty was rewarded with the company’s response when her son experienced healthcare challenges. She had just been appointed to her first director-level role, but believing that family well-being is ‘non-negotiable’ she was convinced she had no alternative but to quit her job. She was stunned when the company proposed working around his healthcare needs. She worked from home for three months and flexibly in that year to ensure he received his medication on time. In hindsight, she says that this was a highly productive year in which she over-delivered on targets.

unsual, and that calls for an exercise in empathy, learning and adapting. We are balancing sustaining our business while keeping our employees safe every day given the essential nature of our products serving our community, says Mechell adding that all 30 Unilever employees who previously tested positive for Covid 19 had made a full recovery.

“Our factory teams have been phenomenal. Being prone to the virus as a society, we have taken the utmost care of our employees and where we have had positive cases we have taken the strictest safety measures to ensure the safety of all. We are pleased that all our office employees continue to work from home to safeguard them as far as possible. I am extremely proud of the resilience, passion and sense of community our employees and leaders have displayed during this time.”

In 2016, she was appointed as the vice president of HR for the African continent. Under her leadership, Unilever has been recognised as the number-one Top Employer in Africa for the last four consecutive years.

Business for social good In his 2019 annual letter to the leaders of companies that his asset management firm invests in, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote, “Profits are in no way inconsistent with purpose – in fact profits and purpose are inextricably linked.”

It’s exactly this kind of empathy that Mechell says is required of good leaders in these trying and uncertain times of Covid-19.

Unilever is founded on the idea that business can be a platform for positive social change. Globally, the company, which draws about two million job applicants annually, has become a talent magnet because it is considered a place of purpose.

“It’s not business as usual but rather business

The company rigorously measures its prog-

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“At Unilever, Mechell discovered and defined her purpose as ‘Unlocking dignity for Africans by mobilising our voice for change.”

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ress against ambitious goals linked to the UN Sustainable Development Goals: helping more than a billion people across the globe improve their health and well-being; halving the environmental footprint of its products; and sourcing 100 percent of its agricultural raw materials sustainably while enhancing the livelihoods of those working across its supply chain.

Africa is a big part of the firm’s growth story. In South Africa with headquarters in Umhlanga, Unilever is one of the largest FMCG companies. The company’s trusted brands include Sunlight, OMO, Lux, Knorr, Vaseline, Shield, Sunsilk and Flora.

Making purpose personal For Mechell, putting purpose at the centre of everything the corporation does is “incredibly motivating for our employees.” But buying into the organisation’s core purpose is only one part of the story.

Staff are encouraged to articulate their purpose within the company as a personal slogan. While not every Unilever employee can easily achieve this, the goal is to help them get as close to that point as possible.

At Unilever, Mechell discovered and defined her purpose as ‘Unlocking dignity for Africans by mobilising our voice for change’. It guides her every decision, as she works towards building African leaders.

Unilever’s approach to wellness Being connected to a greater purpose is part of Unilever’s broader holistic wellness approach. Wellbeing has other facets, such as mental, emotional and physical. Promoting better eating habits and fitness are two of the easier objectives to target.

Some wellness objectives are considerably more difficult due to an accelerating pace of change.

Mechell and her team have seen a rise in cases of employee anxiety: “Employees are increasingly distracted by technology and the immediacy of communication. You don’t have to respond to that email right away. In general, we focus on building trust, safe relationships and helping employees develop resilience.”

A few years back the business was not meeting financial targets. Employees knew this and felt unsettled. In most businesses, the message from management would be to ‘work harder’ and ‘spend more time in the office’. Somewhat counterintuitive, the management team decided to focus on encouraging employees to ‘look after themselves’.

Mechell believes that cracking the whip is not the solution to better performance: “Yes, they’ll stay late, but employees will simply stare at the screens because they’re too tired to do anything else. By contrast, a well, engaged and secure workforce will have the strength to bring their best selves to work.”

Talent ecosystem

Unilever runs regular workshops with a slot reserved for storytelling, where people share their personal stories.

For Mechell, language and framing are incredibly important: “How we speak about ourselves, our family and our country matters.” She rejects the oft-used term ‘war on talent’ because it implies a lack of talent and that HR professionals are competitors rather than collaborators in growing talent.

“We help people focus more on the ‘why they do’ more than the ‘what they do’. Keeping my purpose top of mind helps me get through the admin quickly so I switch to tasks where I have a real impact," says Mechell.

Mechell argues for a talent abundance mentality and the potential of a growing talent ecosystem.

That the benefits of increased transparency, partnership and sharing far outweigh the risks.

She has found that allowing people to openly talk about themselves in a safe space, where they can reflect on their successes, failures and the moments in their lives that have shaped them, enables employees to have personal hope for the future and creates value for customers and investors.

“It’s about listening to people attentively to find out where their passion, talent and strengths lie, because it is where those things meet that you will find the key to unlocking true human potential.”

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In 2019, a conference conversation kicked off a ‘skills swap’ intervention between Unilever and Dimension Data. Here, the young talent (who jumped at the opportunity) spent time in each other’s offices.

“Unilever is a marketing company in an age where how we reach consumers is changing. We need to embrace technology and agile ways to engage

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Mechell Chetty Unlivever HR VP Africa Work: Since joining Unilever in 1999, Mechell Chetty has gained experience in a broad spectrum of HR practices. She has gone from being a National Learning Manager to the HR Director for the company’s AMET (Africa, Middle East and Turkey) region, where she managed a large-scale restructuring. She was also the HR Director for the supply chain, which included factories in South Africa; and HR Director for the Sales Team.

Now the Vice President of HR for all Africa operations, she has a seasoned understanding of the fast-moving-consumer-goods industry.

Education: BA, Psychology (University of the Witwatersrand), Postgraduate in Business Management, (University of the Witwatersrand)

customers. What better way to develop a digital mindset than to spend time with a technology company?”

In this spirit of sharing and in line with Mechell’s personal purpose, Unilever developed its Youth Employability Portal and made it open to the public. Named Level Up, the platform aims to assist one million talented young Africans by equipping them with the tools that will boost their chances of being employed.

Setting a personal BHAG Mechell is a dedicated cyclist. While not a born fitness fanatic, she picked up the sport to set a positive example for her two sons. She went from cycling 5km and feeling exhausted to planning to take on the 94.7 Cycle Challenge as well as the Argus. When she completed these races she started considering her next fitness objective.

Mechell believes that most people benefit by setting a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG – pronounced bee-hag). First coined and pronounced by authors Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, a BHAG stretches and guides you as you forge ahead towards your stated ambition.

Mechell’s BHAG was climbing Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain. Approximately 30,000 people climb Kilimanjaro every year. While not a difficult technical climb, many turn back due to gruesome altitude sickness. The journey to the summit is likened to going from the equator to Antarctica.

Making her BHAG public motivated Mechell to hit the gym and schedule in regular hikes. Her team was incredibly supportive, often hiking with her. Inviting others to share in her goal was a powerful team enrichment exercise and an unexpected bonus.

Training for Kilimanjaro was difficult with compet-

ing work and family demands. To manage, she was flexible with her training objectives. Rather than committing to specific days and times, she would fit in two training sessions during the working week and then put in significant time over the weekend, forgiving herself when life happened.

In September 2011, Mechell and her companions took five days to summit Kilimanjaro and two days to descend. The moment of reaching the summit was ‘indescribable’, but also rushed, she recalls.

She took her photo and revelled in the massive achievement, but quickly started the descent from the thin air and freezing conditions.

Aside from physical fitness, Mechell says she discovered many benefits from mountain climbing, including a sense of peace from ample reflection time on a mountain and meeting incredible people. She developed a friendship with intrepid mountaineer Saray Khumalo. The perspectives and resilience gained from climbing have influenced other aspects of her life, Mechelle says.

Keep learning and unlearning What lies ahead for Mechell? Regardless of the goal she sets for herself, she is sure to embrace it with vigour. She recognises that we never stop learning and also critically unlearning. HR is changing and the best practices from the past don’t always apply now.

From a professional perspective, she has transitioned from working in a hierarchical to a networked environment. She used to relish constructing comprehensive job descriptions, but is now more likely to throw them out the window.

Mechell, who thinks of herself as a ‘people escalator’, is most interested in investing in people. Most of all, she wants to see others living up to their potential, both in the workplace and beyond. 

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IF YOU MISSED THEM, YOU MISSED OUT The inaugural CHRO Awards made for an unforgettable evening of entertainment, networking, and celebration of HR excellence.

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BY SUNGULA NKABINDE

n a clear summer evening on 27 November, 250 HR professionals gathered to celebrate the leaders in their profession. The executives came out in their finest evening wear for a gala event at Summer Place, a suitably glamorous venue for the exceptional talent and leadership on display, rallying to the theme of the evening: “Your sky is the limit”.

Comedian Loyiso Madinga was the evening’s host, and he launched into an opening comedy routine that highlighted the employment practices of three of South Africa’s presidents to appreciative laughter from the audience. He then introduced Joël Roerig, the MD of CHRO South Africa, who gave the audience ringside insights into the CHRO Awards judging process.

“The CHRO Awards are part of our broader focus on building a CHRO community – a trusted, safe space for HR professionals. As you can see from the exceptional attendance here tonight, it’s a massive community that enjoys getting together, so we are looking forward to engaging you in many more networking and knowledge-sharing events," Joël said.

A judge's verdict...

CHRO Awards judge Jane Waters said that, although she was cynical at first, she enjoyed being a part of the process and was impressed by the calibre of candidates. She had this to say: “I am generally quite cynical of awards as I think they are driven by profit rather than award. However, I have been impressed at the quality of candidates that these awards attracted. Similarly, I had my doubts about the ability of South Africa’s HR practitioners to rise above the process and admin to understand, influence, and work with strategy."

He added that the event wouldn’t have been possible without the support of its awards sponsors, Workday, Oracle, Momentum Actuaries and Consultants, and ClarkHouse Human Capital, and thanked them for their support over the years, and at this event in particular.

“I listened to some excellent operators who seem to be very much a part of the C-suite, influencing and acting as key decision-makers on the boards of diverse organisations. Their role is to ensure their impact is not lost as the next generation comes through.”

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From Left: Matimba Mbungela (Vodacom), Verna Robson (Sun International), Paul Norman (MTN) Trishana Maharaj (G4S), Sharon Taylor (Standard Bank)

He explained that each nominee had been through a two-hour interview, which was collated into a dossier to be circulated to the nine judges. “Thank you to the nine judges who put in so much time and effort,” he said.

drive her growth.”

And finally, he shone a spotlight on the 19 nominees.

“Your dedication to building better teams and achieving better results has been noticed. You are highly inspirational to us all.”

This was followed by the Strategy & Leadership Award, handed out by George Ferreira, Senior Sales Director at Oracle, the award sponsor. This award also went to Sharon Taylor, who confessed to not having another speech. She once again mentioned her team, saying that they’d had an incredible opportunity this year to influence the purpose of the group and where it’s going strategically.

And the winners are...

Your sky’s the limit

Then it was time for the first award, the HR & Technology Award. Vukani Mngxati, Managing Director of Accenture in Africa, came to the stage to hand the award to Matimba Mbungela, Group CHRO of Vodacom. Matimba thanked his wife and his children, and also his team. “I am just a shining star for my team. The universe belongs to them – the Vodacom HR team are exceptional and this one belongs to you.”

In keeping with the theme of “Your sky’s the limit”, Loyiso then welcomed Saray Khumalo, the first black African woman to summit Mount Everest who shared with the audience how she’s raised R1.3 million towards education and literacy in Africa through mountaineering. Her lesson for the audience, having failed to reach Everest’s summit three times before finally succeeding in 2019, was, “It’s only a failure if you fail to learn from it. What I did in 2019 was because of those other summits that went before.”

Next up was the Transformation & Empowerment Award, handed out by Deborah Booth, a Director of ClarkHouse Human Capital, who sponsored the award. It went to Sharon Taylor, Head of Human Capital of Standard Bank, who said that this was an incredibly special award for the bank to win.

“With a footprint all over Africa, this is a true testament to our purpose: Africa is our home and we

She’s now completing the Grand Slam – summiting the highest mountain on each of the continents, plus visiting the North and South Pole. In doing so, she is raising money for Education for All, which is an initiative by the Regenesys Foundation to help students get a degree.

With Saray’s words of wisdom ringing in their

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years, the audience was ready to learn the winner of the Employee Value Proposition Award. This was handed out by Blessing Utete, Executive Director of Momentum Consultants and Actuaries, to the winner, Verna Robson, the Group Executive for HR of Sun International.

“I’d like to say thank you to my team. It’s a team effort to make sure our 10,000 employees know what we’re all about. It’s been a three-year journey and it’s been great, so thank you so much,” Verna said.

The Talent Management Award was next, handed out

by Moula Mokhobo-Ameghashie, awards judge and Managing Partner of Drayton Glendower & Mokhobo, and won by Paul Norman, MTN Group CHRO. “I will be very short,” Paul said. “Thank you very much. It’s a great privilege to be honoured like this among so many incredible nominees tonight.”

Paul had to return quickly to the stage to receive the Learning & Development Award, handed to him by Professor Nicola Kleyn, dean of the GIBS Business School. “I’ll be even shorter,” Paul said. “A great thank you to my team at the back. This is for them.”

A night with the stars of HR Astrophotographer Cory Schmitz then came to the stage to share a horizon-expanding message with the audience of HR professionals, while showing his remarkable night-sky photography.

The penultimate award of the evening was the Young CHRO of the Year Award. Trishana Maharaj, HR and Health and Safety Director for Africa at G4S, was declared the Young CHRO of the Year. She received her award from Xolani Mawande, CEO of the SABPP. “Thank you to CHRO South Africa for this. This is an award for the 300 HR people that I work with every day running the largest company in Africa, and the fabulous exco that I work with. Thank you!”

Trishana said.

CHRO of the year And finally, with a flourish, Loyiso introduced the award that everyone was waiting for – the CHRO of the Year Award. Handing out the award was Zuko Mdwaba, the Country Managing Director for Workday.

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“It gives me great pleasure to announce the winner of the CHRO of the Year Award, Mr Paul Norman.”

Paul is clearly a well-liked and respected member of the HR community because this announcement was met with deafening applause and a standing ovation that lasted until Paul took his place on the stage.

“I guess I have to say a few more words,” he said.

“Thank you to CHRO South Africa and the judges.

I am quite humbled by this recognition. It speaks a lot to what we need to be in South Africa. That presentation we heard about the stars and how we are all the same – I think that in many ways, we in the HR profession have a role to play in bringing that humanness into the country.”

He thanked his wife Tracy for keeping him on the straight and narrow and his “work wife”, his PA Nontutuzelo Mokoa, for doing the same at MTN, before concluding, “Thank you so much for this. It’s a great honour and I really appreciate it.”

As the evening drew to a close, it was clear from the smiling faces and sense of warm camaraderie among attendees that the aims of the evening had been achieved – top CHROs were celebrated and the awards were entrenched in the community’s hearts and minds as the highlight of the HR calendar.

Also delivering a Keynote address is Renata Schoeman, psychiatrist and associate of the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. His debut one-man show, ‘Born Free-ish’, was a four-night, sold-out success and he is currently busy with a national tour of his second stand-up show, ‘Problem Child’.

Given that he is mainly a stand-up act, Loyiso says he relishes the opportunity to interact with people at an event where he is not the main attraction. Unlike those coming to his one-man show, attendees of the HR Indaba may not necessarily be fans of Loyiso’s brand of comedy.

“Some of them may not have ever been to a stand-up comedy show at all. But I’m pretty relaxed about it. I take solace in the knowledge that none of those HR people will be able to fire me or issue me with a written warning for the things that I say. It should be great fun.”

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26 NOVEMBER 2020 THE POLO ROOM 25

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WELLNESS AT WORK Paul Norman fell into the role of head of HR at MTN almost accidentally, when the mobile telecommunications industry was only three years old, and the company only employed 400 people. Today, MTN has over 250 million subscribers and employs 19,000 people, and Paul is going strong as the Group CHRO. As the 2019 CFO of the Year, he shares his views on growth, organisational culture and how Covid-19 has created a whole new construct for what “wellness” means.

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BY GEORGINA GUEDES

wenty-three years ago, a young counselling psychologist was called in to see the management of a burgeoning telecommunications company. The psychologist, Paul Norman, had conducted assessments of potential heads of HR for the company. They had assigned the task of finding the right candidate to a headhunter, and the headhunter had sent a shortlist of four people to Paul for assessment.

When the then-CEO, Bob Chaphe received Paul’s report, he asked some questions of the headhunter, who didn’t have the answers, so the

headhunter asked Paul to come in and make a recommendation. “Out of the reports, I recommended one person, and went into the detail of why, matching their skills to the requirements of the role.” The CEO listened, then said, “You sound like you know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you take the job?’”

Very surprised, Paul went away and considered the offer. He thought, “Why not?” and accepted. “I thought I would stay for only three or four years.

I thought the business would have a relatively limited market, like car phones. But it’s been such a journey. I bought the dream, and here I am today.”

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people who are moving into a fast-paced digitised world, so all of that is transitioning. In the same light the business won’t survive if we don’t have the right culture and skills to support it.”

Today Paul is the MTN Group CHRO, and in 2019 was declared the CHRO of the Year at the inaugural CHRO Awards. He also scooped the Talent Management and Learning & Development awards.

He says that one of the things that’s kept him engaged and enthusiastic has been participating in the growth of a truly African brand. When he joined MTN in 1997, the mobile industry was only three years old. “We operated only in South Africa, with less than one million subscribers, and only 400 people working here. By contrast, today we are in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East with over 250 million subscribers, and employing roughly 19,000 people.”

The evolution of MTN The expansion into Africa takes place either by bidding for a greenfield licence in a country, and starting a mobile network from scratch, or by buying or partnering with incumbent operators. “All this activity has a lot to do with people – how you integrate the culture. A lot of mergers and acquisitions fail because the organisations involved don’t realise the synergies that were built into the business case for doing the deal.

So we do a lot of work in understanding how you bring these companies together – how you make one plus one equal three. I spend a lot of my time on that.”

In addition to expanding, the telecommunications industry has evolved while Paul has been on people duty. “At first, 100 percent of revenues came from voice calls. Then of course data started to come in, and where that has ended is with MTN basically positioning itself as a digital operator. We don’t see ourselves as a telco or purely a mobile operator; we talk about being an evolving telco on the one end, with data and voice services, and a digital operator on the other, in the sense of fintech, digital services."

While repositioning the company into these streams, Paul is contemplating and acting on the people perspective. “We have to think about organising skills in a different way, evolving our culture to be meaningful, how do we build agility to our advantage, how do we make it easy for the employee, who is our customer in this space, how can we remain future relevant? We have 19,000

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He adds that the organisation is now competing for scarce skills including data science and emerging technology specialisations against global organisations which operate in more sought-after locations, so MTN has to work on its Employer of Choice differentiators. “They can choose New York, San Francisco or London rather than Joburg or Lagos. So as a company, we have to position ourselves to be the most attractive. That’s not a pay thing purely – people want to work for companies that are purpose led or meaningful. They want to make a difference.”

To support this, two years ago, Paul and his team redesigned the HR operating model, modelled on building experiences for employees and business alike. “It’s a single view, like what happens with customers in the digital space today. If you are on Amazon, if you make a purchase, it will zoom in on who you are, recommend other books you might like. So we are using that lens on the people who are working with us – looking at what they prefer, how they could work better, and how we can help them realise their true potential. We use data analytics through an HR data analytics unit populated with data scientists finance professionals and business architects. We have a central experience unit which comprises customer experience, telco business and experience design professionals. With all of this, close to 60 percent of the department is made up of non-traditional skills – which is not to say that HR skills are not valuable, we up the game when we compliment it with a wider breadth of skills.”

In this HR empire, Paul says he operates like he’s the CEO, thinking of it as a business with a balance sheet statement, focusing on how they can grow their assets and improve profitability. “I have a single view of how I create and make us profitable. We produce products and services that help our employees to do their jobs better. If you are a customer of MTN, we run studies quarterly looking at several dimensions around the network, the product and our pricing, and you can vote on whether you think MTN is better than other operators. That’s how we understand our customers.

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Paul Norman Group CHRO, MTN Work: Paul Norman has been with MTN for 23 years of its 23-year history. He is a qualified psychologist and an MBA graduate with corporate experience spanning more than two decades. Paul oversees people strategy, reputation management, media and stakeholder management and sustainability. He is also a member of the Group Executive Committee and an active steering committee member of key projects, such as moving the company from a mobile operator to a digital services company, centralising the back-office functions of HR, finance and supply chain, and designing a future-fit company through new operating and business-model initiatives.

Education: EMBA, Business Administration and Management (General, IMD Business School), MA, Psychology (Rhodes University)

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I do that internally with our employees. I measure the detractors and promoter experiences, because we want our people to recommend this as a place where people want to work.”

gender balanced leadership programmes and other such initiatives, which are underway.

Self-reflection Because Paul didn’t anticipate staying at MTN for the long haul, he requested that his contract state he be allowed to continue to practise privately as a psychologist. He acknowledges that he can’t consider himself a psychologist anymore. However, he has found application for his early profession at MTN. “In many ways, a lot of those principles apply to organisations and so my learnings haven’t gone to waste. HR has evolved so that it’s much more integral to the business, and central to ensuring that the business succeeds. At the moment, it’s the most exciting time for the HR people who get this new agenda.”

One aspect of this is understanding how HR operates in the digital space, with all the issues of displacement that the Fourth Industrial Revolution and more recently the new social norms of work that the Covid-19 global pandemic brings. Paul says he is focusing on how to create people who are relevant for tomorrow, with increasing competition and customer sophistication. MTN, he says, also has a part to play in the digital evolution of the countries in which it operates, and in the transformation of South Africa.

“HR professionals have a role to play in bringing humaneness into work. If you can get diversity and inclusion right – addressing race and gender in South Africa – we will be extremely relevant. We just have to do it. That’s why I am saying it’s an exciting time. I can’t think of a better time for HR, but we have to own that space.” At MTN, the Diversity and Inclusion agenda sits within the gamut of Paul’s portfolio. As a custodian, he has instituted a comprehensive framework coupled with a strong philosophy that establishes the company’s D&I agenda. Through this, a host of initiatives have been put in place across the HR value chain ranging from a network of Inclusion-Champions in the markets for cultural focus, bias-free mechanisms in the recruitment and performance lifecycles, unconscious bias learning curriculums for professionals,

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Paul is clearly focused on and enriched by his work, but he does find time for personal pursuits. He says he likes people, food, good wine, art and culture, and travel. “I don’t think I’ve understood a city or a place if I haven’t been to its art galleries and listened to its music. And I must go to restaurants. I travel for food. If there’s a restaurant in a country of the calibre of having gained Michelin Stars, I will always go if I have the time. But I will also hit the bistros and buy the street food. I also love architecture and design – so I appreciate all of that in my leisure time, but then I bring all of that back into how I work.”

He says his kitchen at home has been designed especially for him, supporting his love of sharing good food. His signature dishes are curries and French cuisine. “I love slow cooking. I do a lamb dish that takes 12 hours in a slow-roasting oven. You don’t have to carve it. It just falls apart.”

He says that his wife Tracy creates a beautiful table and that he’s happiest sitting with friends, over good food and wine, with great conversation. This causes him to reflect on work once more, saying that the one thing that he doesn’t tolerate in his job is insincerity. “I have to make a lot of hard calls and I don’t sugar-coat things. I tell it as it is, and then see how I can help you from there.”

With further personal insight, he says that he is restless and suffers from 'FOMO', which is what keeps him going. “I love knowledge and always want to know more. I never feel like I have arrived. The team says, ‘let’s take 10 minutes to celebrate what we did,’ but I am always thinking, ‘what’s next?’

That’s what drives me."

He says that in his later life, he would like to one day be able to watch the CNN weather report and tick off all the cities that he’s been to without missing any. “I love Paris, London, New York and Bangkok.

I always say that Africa is amazing. I have a real heart for Africa – I’m an Afro-optimist. I think that ‘Africa rising’ is still coming. I think that we will be a place that people look to in the future. A lot of innovation is going to come out of this continent. MTN is driving a lot of that, and it’s a story that’s still going to be written.” 

“I measure the detractors and promoter experiences, because we want our people to recommend this as a place where people want to work.”

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Covid calling Although telecommunications are an essential service, when Covid-19 struck, MTN re-organised its working structures to protect its employees. Paul explains that MTN has grouped employees based on various criteria for readiness to return to the work environment. Employees who were at risk would not be required to come into work even after the lockdown is lifted.

“This is in addition to everything we are already doing to adhere to and at times even go beyond the mandated requirements for hygiene, sanitisation and social distancing. We also instituted an incident response people-care toolkit for our own HR, risk and medical teams so that we have an early estimate of the outbreak and know exactly what is going to happen at all levels of the organisation, in the event of an employee testing positive for the virus.”

With a large portion of the workforce now working from home, Paul has consciously shifted the definition of professional interaction. “The one thing that we did very quickly – because you are basically in people's homes now – is that we welcome your home, life and loved ones into our virtual work space.

Our philosophy is simple: your life at home, whether it’s your children, pets or family members, are a part of what makes each individual who they are. They are more than welcome to go about their normal day around you, while we continue on with work. This concept completely changes the rhetoric and helps people ease themselves from the psychological stress of being disturbed or even having to ‘hide’ their home realities. This is, after all, what the new normal is about.” “For instance, we told our people from the onset, that 'if your kids come by during the meeting, introduce them to us and involve them in our conversation. Tell them what we're working on and let us talk to them about how home school is going,’” says Paul.

Covid-19 has also renewed the spotlight on wellness, another key dimension that Paul has been actively driving within the organisation. He believes that the need for a more expansive strategy around wellness is essential, given the sudden paradigm shift in work styles. “Until Covid-19, our strategies around wellness operated on the premise of ‘work as usual’. The new reality has created a whole new construct for what wellness means in light of the many changes we are experiencing the world over today. The implications of health anxiety from the pandemic, stress and coping pressures from the work-life convergence, emotional disconnection due to remote working, anxiety from being overwhelmed by technology and communication are beyond what we comprehended in the past. The effects can have a long-term impact on the well-being of our people. This is a problem that keeps me up at night. To this end, one of the most important things we did was to realise that our engagement and experience strategies need to be centered around mental, emotional, physical and social wellness.”

Paul says that this quick adaptive response strategy changed the way HR showed up for MTN employees, in a short span of six weeks across MTN’s 21 markets. Whether this is the way HR manages and cares for the emotional needs of people who are experiencing a volley of transformational societal and workspace changes in such a short span, is where HRs truly differentiates itself. “Whether it’s with daily global health monitor surveys, specialised-care interventions for potentially affected employees, work-from-home support groups, global ‘time-out’ hour, flexible working, leadership and managerial toolkits for empathy and crisis management or fun-with-wellness live broadcast shows, we have taken a holistic and inclusive approach to wellness in everything we do across our markets.”

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Eldos girl goes

(SUN) INTERNATIONAL HR boss Verna Robson’s determination and solutionoriented approach to life got her to where she is.

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BY PUSELETSO MOMPEI oming from a tough neighbourhood like Eldorado Park in the South of Johannesburg, where the streets can be rough and crime is a daily concern, can either crush you or sharpen your wits. Fortunately for Sun International group HR director Verna Robson, it was the latter. Growing up in this cut-throat environment honed her drive to succeed. It created in her a tenacity that, over time, became her ticket to success.

“I had to be streetwise, confident, and fearless.

These traits have served me very well. I often get asked whether anything scares me and my answer is always that I never think about fear. I concentrate on the solution and how I am going to achieve it," says Verna. It was this confidence and boldness that led her to be the head of HR at a major hotel group with a diverse profile of assets including world-class five-star hotels, casinos and resorts.

Verna started her career in a general legal environment working for Rand Water directly after finishing her final exams for her legal degree, even prior to receiving her results. “As a graduate, I was privileged, through hard work and determination, to be the CE management representative on many forums.”

In a serendipitous instance of being in the right place at the right time, her maiden career opportunity presented itself just after 1994, when the new Employment Equity Act and other legislation came into effect. She says, “I suppose the fact that I studied in the field of law was a great advantage. In my

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first year of work, I was part of the team tasked with amending the parastatal’s shift schedule and was first exposed to negotiating with the unions.”

This came at a time when South Africa was undergoing massive political transition and the system where the exploitation of workers had been in place for decades had to be overturned.

Lover of the law “My passion for labour law and fair processes developed when I began handling the legal aspects for the core business, being engineering and construction. This stretched from the labour matters to normal legal matters.”

She joined Sun International as group HR manager of employee relations in 2011. She was and still is, the lead negotiator for the company on all matters pertaining to the labour workforce and involving the unions in everything from wages and benefits to business model changes. If it impacts employees, Verna gets involved directly.

Her foray into leadership started at a very early age. “I was very much a tomboy in my youth and loved to play in the streets with all the neighbourhood kids until late at night,” she says. Being the eldest daughter in the family meant she became accountable for her younger siblings’ safety, a responsibility which taught and prepared her for leadership so well, she could already cook dinner when she was in Grade Four and had household chores from as early as Grade One. “Both my parents worked to support the family and I recall

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“In my first year of work, I was part of the team tasked with amending the parastatal’s shift schedule and was first exposed to negotiating with the unions.”

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when I started Grade One, my mom tied the house key around my neck so that I did not lose it and to ensure that I was able to unlock the door and enter the house after school."

and she admits that she isn't quite able to maintain a work-life balance due to the love for her job and commitment to ensuring that every challenging project is a success.

Working at Sun International, with its reach and scope, has allowed Verna to take up her place as a leader. For instance, when Sun International reported that it would sell off a portion of its interests in its African assets to a foreign subsidiary, Verna was part of the team that handled the change of business model, a move that impacted all of the properties across South Africa. At the time, the company directly employed over 10,000 people with over 50,000 indirect jobs and Verna managed the labour part of the project. “It has been, and still is, an exciting journey,” she says.

"As a result," she says, "I create this imbalance, which is evident by the late-night work. I want to be more disciplined in my personal life to health and wellness as I am no longer as young as my mind may make me believe.”

Supportive partners make all the difference Her most meaningful relationships are with her spouse and sons. “I consider the one with my spouse as being particularly significant because he has created the environment for me to succeed. He takes on many of the domestic chores and attends to the boys and makes sure they are seen to. As a determined female in the world of work, this is critical if you want to succeed in your career. I think one only realises the significance of this relationship when you reflect on it. He is a treasure to me and my strongest support to achieving and succeeding.”

Award-winning focus For Verna, choosing to show up powerfully while being constructive, honest and fair has resulted in her being regarded as a trusted manager, leader and credible communicator. This is evidenced by how keen stakeholders, as well as individual employees, are to have her take on various issues.

Verna has been recognised by her peers for her impact and expertise, having won the CHRO Employee Value Proposition Award in 2019 and landing on the Employee Engagement Awards 2019 list. During her tenure, Sun International's reputation for employee wellness has soared, with a programme that gives employees free access to social workers, debt counsellors, financial advisors, lawyers, nurses, dieticians and biokineticists.

Her go-getting attitude informs her approach to challenges. “I don’t like it when a situation or project takes too long. The reason being that there are so many other challenges to attend to and if one is left too long it has a chain reaction and your entire work situation becomes extremely challenging.

When I have developed a solution, I pursue it. The hard part is when it takes too long to reach that solution as I am a quick reactor and quick action kind of person," Verna says.

However, being driven comes with its drawbacks

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She acknowledges that while she is passionate about her family, her busy weekday schedule might give them a different viewpoint.

“I ensure that I spend weekends with them, take leave when they are around and do the simple things, like just going to movies or driving around for that unique T-shirt and pair of takkies.”

Her faith is also an important pillar in her life.

Many people who perceive her tough, determined, and firm in her decisions, would be surprised to hear she teaches the importance of receiving first holy confirmation to kids aged 11 and upwards within the Anglican denomination. She says, "I have been doing it for about five years. This requires patience and understanding and I love doing it.”

Success follows when you add value Verna’s definition of success is being able to create value for others – no matter who they may be or the size of the value-add to them. “It's possible that this is the reason why I chose law as my field of

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“This country is bleeding jobs and we as HR must assist in helping employees to further strengthen their core skills and gain in-demand skills related to their roles."

Verna Robson Group HR Director, Sun International Work: Verna Robson has been an HR executive since 2008 when she became the HR business partner at Absa Wealth. She was the employee relations manager at Sun international for six-and-a-half years before taking on her current role in 2015.

Education: B.Proc, Law, University of the Witwatersrand

study and later transitioned into human resources.”

Verna is passionate about transformation and empowerment and has assisted in driving Sun International to a Level 1 B-BBEE for the past three years. She has worked to digitise the HR processes with the IT department and is currently introducing an e-learning platform.

She explains that as the workplace continues to evolve with new technologies and new innovations, “I aspire to ensure our workforce keeps up with the rapid changes, by creating an environment that ensures our people have the skills needed for the future of work. This country is bleeding jobs and we

as HR must assist in helping employees to further strengthen their core skills and gain in-demand skills related to their roles, along with connecting them with opportunities to build their leadership skills.”

For Verna, it’s not always about big gestures, but making a difference where you are. “I believe that any little change is a big change in the world. Many little changes eventually add up to big changes. I also challenge myself to be understanding to people and find solutions that improve the lives of others positively. I apply this both professionally and personally," she says. 

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CHRO South Africa hosts first online summit With national lockdown preventing public gathering, the CHRO SA community came together online for a discussion on lockdown leadership in times of social isolation.

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BY SUNGULA NKABINDE

ith Covid-19 having South African businesses on high alert, CHRO SA hosted an online summit in which more than 50 CHROs and HRDs from across the country came together to engage in dialogue around the impact of Covid-19 on both business and the socio-economic landscape.

fact that ongoing business performance remained paramount.

It was clear from the onset that concerns around the virus are very real, with each individual providing a glimpse into the actions that they were taking both within their families and their organisations.

The most important thing, he said, was to be mindful that the eyes of the country are on every organisation. He said consumers, employees, and society at large are watching how businesses are responding to the crisis and that their response will shape the way those organisations are perceived going forward.

Ian Russell, speaker, author, independent freelance business advisor and professional non-executive director, delivered the keynote address for the historic digital gathering in which he highlighted a number of issues that business leaders in general, and HR executives in particular, are having to grapple with.

“Authenticity and integrity in the way we lead and make decisions are what will be remembered.”

The principal partner for the event was Workday and associate partners for the summit and future events were Skillogical, SAP Concur, Sanlam, ClarkHouse Human Capital, Momentum Consultants and Actuaries and Compliance Online.

The common thread throughout the engagement was that HR had to take the lead as the voice of reason. While business leaders worry about the impact on their business and employees worry about their health and job security, the HR leaders felt responsible for responding to the pandemic with empathy while also being mindful of the

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“Authenticity and integrity in the way we lead and make decisions are what will be remembered, and these outweigh certainty. People will remember how you behaved and not necessarily what you did,” said Ian. “In the UK, there were two businesses that were singled out for irresponsible comments, one of which was pub chain J D Wetherspoon, whose CEO stated publicly that he didn’t understand why people couldn’t go out drinking anymore. That business will now be associated with those irresponsible comments for a long time.”

CHRO interview CHRO categorie

“Consumers, employees, and society at large are watching how businesses are responding to the crisis and that their response will shape the way those organisations are perceived going forward.�

Ian Russell, author and independent business advisor

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Ian said that this was not the time to be thinking about profitability. If anything, companies should focus exclusively on survival during this period. To do that, they should establish what their priorities are. Priorities in times of war may differ from those in times of peace but the fact is, Ian said, “there’s no doubt that we are currently at war.”

He added: “In these times, your first priority must be your employees. Your second is your consumers.

Third, are your shareholders. And, unfortunately, suppliers come after that…You need to pay as many people as you can for as long as possible. But that doesn’t mean paying them the same amount or even paying them in the same way.”

BC & AC Ian pointed out to attendees that the world as they knew it has changed for good. Covid-19 has accelerated the need to adapt and companies no longer have the luxury of pondering how best to engage in the age of disruption, or how to effect a digital transformation strategy. The time for strategy is gone. Businesses will die if they do not act now.

There is no turning back.

“Just as the business will change, so will your customers. This is the same for consumers of your products and services just as it is for HR’s customers – your employees will change too.”

meant for them. They each spoke about how the lockdown was impacting their businesses and employees.

Beiersdorf HR director Russell Coleman said they were ramping up their Employee Assistance Programme to help employees whose mental health was undoubtedly being tested by the forced isolation period.

In response to how leaders could help employees manage worries around job security and financial distress, Ian said it would be helpful to give employees something meaningful and important to do for the business because “you tend to worry less when you are busy.”

There is also the matter of what companies are going to do when this is all over, because, as Ian said, there is no chance of things going back to normal. Life after Covid-19 is bound to come with its own surprises and companies need to be prepared for that. Ian presented those in attendance with some harsh realities and challenged them to find solutions for these – some of which will involve collaboration with other businesses and even competitors.

HR managers spoke about how they were preparing for that uncertain future, with Royal Bafokeng Platinum HR executive Vicky Thlabanelo saying they had already set up teams to put together a post-Covid-19 HR strategy to be implemented once everyone was back at work.

Ian said the world will now be separated into ‘BC’ and ‘AC’ to signify the difference between challenges faced before and after the coronavirus.

As an example, he referred to the business performance of the company behind Zoom, which incidentally was the platform that was used for the online summit.

“Zoom’s market capitalisation has doubled in a couple of months to $40 billion. Meanwhile, the combined market cap of the top three airlines in the US has dropped from $80 billion to $43 billion.

Which means Zoom almost has the same market cap as that of the top three airlines in the US,” he said, adding, even though markets would eventually correct when the crisis was over, things would never go back to normal.

Lockdown leadership

Redefine Properties group HR manager Renske Coetzee had the perfect analogy for the situation, saying the lockdown was like being stuck in the rapid while white-water rafting: “Don’t look up – look down, work hard, focus and get out.”

Among all attendees, there was clear conviction that many of the lessons and resulting changes from this “war” would be positive. The hosting of an online summit for more than 50 HR executives is a case in point. Such a thing would not have taken place without Covid-19 making it necessary, and yet, once it was in motion, the learning, sharing and support offered to the community was valuable, and hugely significant during this challenging time faced by all.

CHRO South Africa MD Joël Roerig moderated the session, explaining that these were indeed trying times, particularly for a business whose purpose it is to bring people together. That said, he added that if there was ever a time that the executive commu-

Following Ian’s presentation, HR leaders went into breakout ‘rooms’ in which they shared their ideas around ‘lockdown leadership’ and what that term

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“Life after Covid-19 is bound to come with its own surprises and companies need to be prepared for that.”

nity needed to come together to share ideas and lessons for overcoming challenges, this was it.

“Never has the community been more important than in this time of social distancing, fear and uncertainty. The CFO South Africa and CHRO South Africa communities are stepping up in the coming weeks and months to be there in times that connections, support, perspective, consolation and fresh ideas are needed most,” Joël said.

“As long as the Covid-19 restrictions are in place, we will host online CFO and CHRO sessions every week. We will try out various formats and invite the community to participate and grow together. Some of the rescheduled events will also take place on the initial date: online, with participation from the originally scheduled speakers and panelists and including focused online breakaway sessions.”

Just as scientists are getting together to create an agile approach to developing the vaccine for the virus, it was clear from the summit that the HR community needs to continue sharing expertise and experiences in doing what is right, not just for the organisations they represent but also for society. 

Vicky Thlabanelo, Royal Bafokeng Platinum HR executive

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MENTAL WELLNESS

TOP OF MIND HR leaders are acutely aware of the potential impact of the national lockdown on mental wellness and come together to discuss their respective interventions during a CHRO Community Conversation.

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BY SUNGULA NKABINDE

ith already-existing cases of employers facing severe financial constraints to the point of struggling to pay employees’ salaries, South Africa’s HR leaders are discussing wellness and mental health in the context of a working population that is understandably feeling a little overwhelmed by the current level of uncertainty.

Whether it is with regard to their health or job security, employees are anxious about the future.

They are now also having to contend with working in this new working environment – their homes – which deliver a new variety of mental pressures and triggers.

Executives are doing a number of things to not only take care of themselves but to also put measures in place to ensure the mental well-being of employees.

Dimension Data’s chief HR executive Michaela Voller says they have indeed had concerns over how employees were coping emotionally due to the lockdown, “which drove us to start thinking about being more proactive about our approach to wellness, which is difficult to do because so much of the tools and systems that companies traditionally have in place are reactionary in nature.”

Engage, engage, engage To boost employee engagement, Michaela says that, at Dimension Data, they have created a social 40

networking app, which she describes as a corporate enterprise version of Facebook, through which employees can interact and participate in various wellness activities.

Vodacom CHRO Matimba Mbungela says they are running pulse surveys, which go out to all employees and can be completed in less than five minutes.

“We ask three or four simple questions…‘How are you feeling about the lockdown? What kinds of challenges are you dealing with? How can we improve your work-from-home experience?’…that kind of thing,” says Matimba.

The pulse surveys have been a resounding success, achieving a 57 percent response rate the first time they were sent out to employees and 80 percent the second time. In fact, their success has led to Vodacom creating the ‘Take Your Chair Home’ campaign after a number of employees said the chairs they had at home were not comfortable to sit on for hours at a time. Vodacom employees are now able to fetch their chairs from the office and take them home.

Self-care Another thing that executives are focusing on is exercise. EOH HR director Malisha Awunor says the company has started online group exercise sessions, which take place at 6am and are led by one of the group executive team members. Malisha says she has also enlisted the ‘services’ of her daughter, who is now her self-appointed personal trainer and

CHRO

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Tantaswa Fubu, Barloworld group human capital executive

ensures that Malisha is getting all the exercise she needs. “And she is very strict about time as well, so I’m definitely staying active.”

Most HR leaders agree that self-care is paramount because, “If you are not taking care of your own mental health, it becomes difficult to worry about others,” according to Altron HR director Dolores Mashishi.

“It’s also about giving yourself a break when work is not happening as efficiently as you would like.

The fact is, people are unable to work right now and sometimes one has to be a bit more relaxed in their approach to matters of productivity. Take it easy on yourself and take it easy on others," she adds.

Workday business development director Kiveshen Moodley puts it best: “Self-care is very important.

It’s like when you fly on an airplane, and the flight attendant instructs you to ‘put your oxygen mask on first’ before helping others... Because, if you run out of oxygen yourself, you can't help anyone else. Let’s all make sure we have our oxygen masks on first.”

“Empathy is also required when it comes to the manner in which we speak to and treat ourselves,”

says Marshalls World of Sport strategy and transformation executive Sameera Ahmed, who has learnt to let go of the things she cannot control. Every day, she writes down the things that frustrate but are outside her locus of control.

“I write it down so that I can let it out. What that does for me psychologically is that it releases me from constantly pondering about it because I have made a concerted effort to remind myself that it is not in my control and that I need to let it go. This also enables me to be more empathetic when my team members face similar uncontrollable circumstances that prevent them from delivering what they were supposed to deliver.”

To maintain a positive outlook, Sameera also writes a list of three things she was able to accomplish at the end of every day. These are three things that she was most proud to be able to execute on that day.

She thereafter writes three more things that would elicit the same feeling if completed the following day.

Offering support HR leaders are doing everything they can to ensure employees have the support they need, with com41

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Michaela Voller, Dimension Data chief HR executive

panies offering access to a comprehensive range of preventative care and counselling services through ICAS. At Altron, they are also offering access to more coaching sessions for executives and employees than they ordinarily do.

At Barloworld, mental health has been an area of focus for a year now and, in addition to the ICAS services available to employees, they have psychologists on the premises to assist employees in dealing with whatever mental challenges they may be facing.

“Tomorrow, I am meeting with my wellness team to try to be more proactive about what we can do to ensure our people are taken care of as they return to work next week,” says Barloworld group human capital executive Tantaswa Fubu.

Sameera says the coronavirus lockdown has called for leadership with heart and empathy, saying that the importance of emotional intelligence has never been more pronounced than it is now.

That is why, whenever she has her check-in meeting with her team every morning, the first thing they discuss is how everybody is feeling, how each mem-

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ber is coping emotionally and generally reflecting on “where we all are as human beings before we even start to discuss work.”

Sameera says that alone is something that has not only brought her closer to her team members but has also allowed them to feel more vulnerable and safe to discuss whatever challenges they may be facing.

“We have to understand that it’s not just business as usual and that there is no longer such a thing as office hours so you can't expect responses as quickly as you would if everyone was in the office. You have to understand that some people work better in the early mornings or in the evenings when their children are asleep,” says Sameera, adding that leaders have to take all this into consideration when setting deliverables and timelines for executing them.

“It's important for employees to feel that they have a safe space in which they can raise issues about the challenges they're facing and whatever else may be hindering them from executing the tasks they've been given. So there is a huge need for flexibility and agility in terms of the structure and the process for delivering the work that is required," she says.

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Matimba Mbungela, Vodacom CHRO

Diary management Lastly, diary management has been the key to managing one’s own wellness. With everyone working from home, it can be easy to forget to take a break and not feel guilty about stepping away from the laptop, but Stanlib HR executive Nuncy Green says it is important to set time in her diary to remind herself to take a break and allow her mind to recharge.

“Sometimes you can have back-to-back meetings and, because you also want to get some work done, you end up not taking any breaks in between, which can be extremely draining, especially when you still have to be with your children when you step away from that machine,” says Nuncy, who is so specific when scheduling her downtime that she writes down the activities she plans on doing with the kids and exactly how she plans to rest and relax.

Lori Milner, the founder of Beyond the Dress, says the key to successful diary management is setting boundaries. This means setting a starting time and a quitting time and making a commitment to switch off whether the work is done or not – because the work is never really done. “If you don’t set that boundary you will start experiencing burnout,” she says.

When it comes to tasks, Lori says to focus specifically on finishing one or two things that you thought about either a day or a week prior, “because when you write a to-do list, the things that are at the top are often not the most important but rather just the tasks that first came to mind”.

Once a key task has been identified, Lori says to beware of distractions because they often derail people from the tasks they prioritised because the first thing they do in the morning is open their email inbox, which immediately takes them away from what they had initially planned to do.

She says emails are urgent for other people but often not very urgent for you, so be sure to do the things that give you peace of mind and relief, sooner.

“Be careful of self-interrupting. Every time your phone rings with someone sending you a meme or a funny joke, that is time away from your schedule.”

She also says to design your work environment as conducive to being as productive as possible – even if it means having a snack and water in the room you work in so that you don’t have to leave to get a quick bite or drink. 

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TRACKING THE RETURN ON EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

HR practitioners and employee experience and people analytics experts are pondering the passage from thinking about ROI to a ROX mindset.

BY SUNGULA NKABINDE

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“Remote working has gone from something that was a nice-to-have option in companies’ employee value propositions to a reality that every single organisation has had to adjust to whether they were prepared for it or not.”

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he concept of return on investment is widely understood. It’s simply a matter of bang for your buck. However, as HR leaders who need to implement various solutions to improve the employee experience, you may find it is often a complicated endeavour to explain the financial return on expenditure towards something so intangible. A better metric to consider is the Return on Experience (ROX). That is the extent to which improvements in the customer and employee experience will drive profits and revenues.

“But what are those correlations that make a meaningful difference which, when multiplied, provide exponential value,” asks PwC South Africa’s leader for HR Technology and Culture, Barry Vorster. He, together with PwC South Africa People Analytics leader Bernice Wessels, Microsoft SA Business Applications lead, Natassia Katopodis, and PwC senior manager Robert Sutherland, have pulled together their thinking on ‘employee experience’ in an effort to elicit dialogue that results in a widely accepted, community-built, robust technique for measuring the ROX.

Measuring this kind of metric is tricky as it requires a fundamental mindset shift, from thinking about products and services to customer experiences; and from company processes and benefits to employee experiences, none of which can be easily measured because there are many inter-linking and interdependent elements .

Natassia says that, with Covid-19 changing the world of work “as we know it, employee experience has become the most important element of managing people, who are now detached from a centralised place of work. We need to hit refresh and transform the employee value chain and rethink assumptions about what was previously viewed as best practise to provide an exceptional employee experience.”

ROX provides a way to holistically look at all parts of the business that impacts experience, productivity and effectiveness.

“Remote working has gone from something that was a nice-to-have option in companies’ employee value propositions to a reality that every single

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emotionally, for instance, miss more days of work and are less productive when they are working.

Chronic stress, too, could lead to an employee losing an average of 10 days’ productivity a year due to absenteeism and an additional 12 days a year due to presenteeism. These are the touchpoints to look for when evaluating an organisational culture.

Says Barry: “It’s about being able to measure either an organisation’s cultural health or just depict the cultural situation as good and bad. This is a delicate area and we would suggest the use of an index or a percentage change from a base index as the unit of measure – effectively benchmarking against yourself. Because you cannot copy a culture. Each organisation should find and leverage its own cultural strength.

Bernice Wessels

organisation has had to adjust to whether they were prepared for it or not,” says Natassia, adding that mandatory remote working has brought with it a new set of challenges with regard to the employee experience.

There is also a link between employee engagement and wellbeing with low engagement often correlating highly with taking more unhealthy days, depression, high blood pressure, and so forth, while employees with high engagement tend to fall sick less often. A new and emerging factor that has started to affect employee experience is substance dependence, as this profoundly affects availability, productivity and engagement.

Show people you care

Natassia says it is now more important than ever for companies to be able to have real-time information and updates on how their employees are performing, feeling and engaging with the company.

By having a seamless platform to engage, Natassia says it becomes a lot easier to take action that will enhance the employee experience before a problem arises.

“And to do that, companies need data from across the enterprise including a 360-degree view of the employee to create new and enhanced employee experiences,” she says.

Culture is the key Barry says the organisational culture speaks to the ability to mobilise emotional and rational forces within an organisation to reinforce new behaviour patterns required to underpin lasting change. The trick is often to uncover the causal and mutually reinforcing loops between the two and to show how shifts in one affect the others.

Employees who are suffering physically, mentally or

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“For example, we can see now that with people working from home, productivity levels have gone through the roof. People are working harder than they have ever done. The downside of that employees are not switching off and there is a much higher risk of burnout and stress-related illness,’ says Natassia, adding that having a dashboard where companies can monitor the activity or employees and run quick pulse surveys to learn about their wellness, can make the process of managing that risk far easier.

That is where it becomes important to incorporate tools, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources, which is an HR solution that helps take

better care of your teams. This system offers an array of ways to foster employee connections and empower managers to influence the key drivers of the ROX. Expanding this toolkit, Workplace Analytics, which taps into data from everyday work, identifies collaboration patterns that impact productivity, workforce effectiveness, and employee engagement. Having such a unified view and the toolkit to take action, helps speed transformation.

“Dynamics 365 has AI-driven insights and realtime dashboards that allow managers to monitor performance metrics for overall employee satisfaction scores and benefit from real-time insights based on customisable variables,” says Natassia adding that the platform also makes it possible to gauge how the employee experience is affected by the physical workplace and environment, unbalanced workforce numbers, inefficient processes, and so forth.

Measuring employee experience Bernice says that an increase in employee experience suggests an increase in productivity that leads to an increase in the effectiveness of processes, innovation and the customer experience, which ultimately leads to an increase in shareholder value. But what is the employee experience exactly?

Without simplifying matters, but for the sake of a succinct and practical formula, the PwC teams suggests that Employee Experience = Positive Culture (PC) x People Wellbeing (PW) x Learning Agility (LA), with each element in the equation serving as a multiplier in affecting employee experience This formula, however, only represents a heuristic with which to firstly appraise your organisation and to set an ‘Ex’ baseline. It doesn’t provide a complete answer, but rather attempts to cover the key aspects that require attention should you want to create an organisation that creates an environment and a technique to measure the employee experience. “it would also perhaps be wise to create a healthy culture index for your organisation, based on your cultural traits and aspirations. What is important

Natassia Katopodis

is to triangulate culture and engagement data and supplement quantitative insights with qualitative dialogue,” says Bernice.

Improving employee experience Rob says that, ultimately, ROX is an amplifier rather than a self-standing approach. At the core of the approach is to find a holistic (as opposed to an individualistic) perspective that has both quantitative and qualitative value. Knowing this as a value, an organisation can pull levers to drive performance, productivity and creativity. A company cannot manage what it does not measure, and measure regularly. It requires that organisations set clear, ambitious targets for all the aforementioned elements of the employee experience and couple that with learning expenditure.

“But you have to monitor your targets regularly.

Expenditure on learning is not enough. The environment and space within which to learn are crucial. Multiplying the expenditure on learning by the opportunity to learn on-the-job provides our measurement for organisational learning agility,” he says. 

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COURAGE & CULTURE SHOCK

IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Hellman Worldwide Logistics Chief People Officer for Africa Marlize Kriel shares lessons from a 10-year stint in the Middle East where she navigated a volatile working environment and complex cultural norms.

BY SUNGULA NKABINDE

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“When people start experiencing the signs of change without any engagement, it can create an undercurrent of anxiety and fear of being unemployed, fear to risk and make mistakes and may have an adverse effect on performance."

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ellmann Worldwide Logistics Chief People Officer for Africa, Marlize Kriel meticulously carved out an adventurous and calculated local and international HR career. She spent 10 years in the Middle East and describes it as an experience that changed her entire approach towards people and life in general.

Her journey in that part of the world began with an unexpected call from the United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York in April 2005, after she was referred by an ex-South African colleague who was working for UNOPS, which is primarily a service provider, technical advisor and overall operations arm for the UN. Its mission is to help people build better lives and help countries to achieve peace and sustainable development. Their services extended to infrastructure rehabilitation, project management, procurement, financial management and human resources.

Marlize was offered a unique opportunity with UNOPS in Afghanistan, which had been left in ruins after the 2001 US and Allied invasion, in retaliation for the Al Qaeda 9/11 attacks on the United States.

The culture shock was severe, to say the least, but Marlize describes the local Afghan people as humble, kind and respectful, with a sense of sincere hospitality.

She says: “I was gripped by the unimaginable human resilience of the most vulnerable among us, woman in burqas walking in small groups, tribal segregation and extremism that drew a virtual line through every

geography and social engagement, political tension at a constant boiling point, and an overwhelming international military presence visible wherever you go, sincere humility like I have never experienced before, endearing hospitality that left me searching for words.”

Marlize says her HR role was peculiar in that it required substantial emotional resilience, the ability to mitigate risk, think on her feet and make decisions quickly. She had a team of 14 colleagues consisting of a blend of international, regional and local staff to support the general management and administration of the HR function.

The scale and magnitude of the projects were significant and, because the environment was so volatile, every foreign deployment came with a heightened risk component. The vast blend of foreign cultures in the team very quickly proved to be a fertile territory for miscommunication, misinterpretation and conflict.

“I learnt very quickly to calibrate my approach to suit this unique environment and did my best to influence my international colleagues to do the same.

The local staff were particularly withdrawn and very reserved. At first, it was very difficult to distinguish whether they were being uncooperative or simply did not understand me.”

Navigating complex cultural barriers Afghanistan has a history of volatile attempts of occupation, civil wars and brutal rule of the Taliban

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interview

and Al-Qaeda. Marlize would often travel to work and back in a convoy led by armoured vehicles.

Depending on where she had to travel to, she would occasionally have to wear a bulletproof vest and helmet as part of her work attire.

would stay with an Afghan family in Dubai that was already employed by the UN. They would be transported to work and back by a UN driver as long as they conformed to all cultural and religious practices,” says Marlize.

The local staff would make use of taxis to get to work, and in some instances, the young female colleagues had to be accompanied by a male relative into the compound, and walked to their office to ensure they did not transgress on cultural values.

One of the ladies moved into an HR operations role in Sudan as an assistant HR manager, while another is working for the UN in Canada. All three of them now have successful careers and have taken up further studies.”

For instance, sitting in close proximity to any male colleague and engaging in discussions with men on their way to work could get female colleagues into trouble as it is seen as extremely inappropriate, bringing shame to the woman's family name and father.

After Marlize’s UN HR experience in Afghanistan, she worked for Microsoft Dubai as the HR manager for the Gulf Region on a one-year maternity relief contract. During this time, she was offered an HR management role by ES-KO, an engineering and catering service provider for the UN and NATO in the Middle East and Central Africa. With their HR regional office in Dubai and headquarters in Monaco, Marlize worked for ES-KO until 2014 and during this time completed her master’s degree in Strategic Human Resource Management at Wollongong University in Dubai. Marlize and her family then moved to Thailand for 10 months and finally returned to South Africa in 2015.

“This would result in the young lady being forced to stop working immediately, and possibly being punished for her transgression. In some instances, a male relative had to be hired on a small income to oversee the female relative’s conduct during working hours.

The most challenging part was by far the complexity of the cultural barriers,” says Marlize, adding how critically important it was to be constantly mindful of cultural protocol, conduct and customs, and to not allow her own ignorance to jeopardise anyone’s well-being.

Saving child brides A number of women in Marlize’s UN Office were borderline illiterate because young girls were prohibited from getting an education or engaging in formal employment. Under Taliban rule, women were only allowed to work in the family home and were not allowed to leave their homes unaccompanied by a male relative. If they did they were punished.

The most heart-warming experience of Marlize’s entire career came at the end of her two-and-a-halfyear contract when she and the country director of UNOPS negotiated a six-month work contract in Dubai for three Afghan women who had to be hidden in dungeons under their homes so that they wouldn’t be married off as “child brides” to the Taliban. Today they can now work and earn an income as UN contract workers.

“They were denied an education and could hardly read or write but it was arranged that the ladies

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A mindful approach to change and people Throughout her career, Marlize has never taken her role as a people leader lightly. Her motto over the past 20 years has been to ‘add value, make a difference and leave a legacy.’

“HR is all about people. So if you get into it, you have to get involved, change people’s perception of their own limitations, seek fulfilment and personal growth for people, and put them in the driver's seat of their own success,” she says.

In her current role at Hellmann Worldwide Logistics, she has focused on improving engagement because there is so much change happening in every work environment and hers is no different. It is why she is very cautious and mindful of having a rigid approach to HR unless the merit warrants her to do so.

“But, when people start experiencing the signs of change without any engagement, it can create an undercurrent of anxiety and fear of being unemployed, fear to risk and make mistakes and may have an adverse effect on performance,” she says. “That’s why I’m so focused on early engagement, frequent

CHRO

interview

“At first, it was very difficult to distinguish whether they were uncooperative or simply did not understand me.”

Marlize Kriel Chief People Officer, Hellman Worldwide Logistics Africa Work: Marlize joined Hellman Worldwide Logistics in January 2016, almost a year after a 10-year stint in the Middle East where she worked with the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), Microsoft Dubai and ES-KO, an engineering and catering service provider for the UN and NATO in the Middle East and Central Africa.

Education: B.Tech Degree, HR Management (University of South Africa), Masters degree Strategic HR Management (University of Wollongong)

communication on anticipated change, total transparency on the impact of the anticipated change, and a clearly defined strategy that leads to change.”

Hellman’s performance improvement plan Marlize introduced an open platform where managers and employees can iron out discrepancies and performance concerns. Within Hellmann, they call it an – “offline” approach, in the form of a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), which is an eight-week process of correcting performance discrepancies, changing a work process, or working on skill enhancement. The most valuable parts of this are the people engagement, talking things through, and the impact this approach has on people’s morale.

This process ensures weekly “check-ins” and has a structured framework, so “critical matters” are identified and “action points” and timelines agreed.

This is a highly engaging and interactive process between manager and employee. This is not a disciplinary process, but rather a remedial and engagement process. It is well structured, has clearly identifiable action points and a timeline. The frequent engagement and focus on changed behaviours and skills have made this a very successful process at Hellmann.

“We have an increased focus on ownership and accountability that supports the successful outcome of our PIP process," says Marlize. 

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insights

LOCKDOWN LESSONS FROM MANDELA Aurecon chief people officer Dean Naidoo reflects on five lessons to be learnt from ‘lockdown’ in the context of former president Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment.

BY DEAN NAIDOO

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“Collaboration does not show weakness or vulnerability, it shows confidence in your own skin to work jointly with others.�

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“Mandela did a great job of adapting to the environment he found himself in.”

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Dean Naidoo

n 5 August 1962, the South African Police captured Nelson Mandela outside Howick, KwaZulu-Natal.

He was later remanded in Johannesburg's Marshall Square prison awaiting trial. The trial became known as the infamous Rivonia Trial. Eight of the accused were sentenced to life imprisonment at the ‘Palace of Justice,’ in Pretoria.

Mandela was sentenced to 27 years in prison, or as inmates called it, ‘lockdown’.

I have been reflecting on this word ‘lockdown’ and what it really means. The Mariam Webster dictionary describes lockdown as “an emergency measure or condition in which people are temporarily prevented from entering or leaving a restricted area or building during a threat of danger". Another stronger version is “the confinement of prisoners to their cells for all or most of the day as a temporary security measure”.

Although some of us might currently feel confined or restricted, I think it is safe to say that we are not stuck in a dark cell for years under prison conditions.

The latter definition got me thinking about how lockdown would have influenced Mandela’s humanness, ideologies, leadership style and general outlook on

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life, after having spent between 1962 and 1990 away from the world as it was then.

I think Mandela knew all about social distancing before it became fashionable, yet despite his incarceration, he was instrumental in liberating a nation from within the confines of his prison cell under extreme conditions. History will remember him as the person who overcame adversity and continues to inspire the world.

When I reflect on Mandela’s journey I realise that there are a few things that we can learn from his time during his confinement as we find ourselves in a 'lockdown' of our own.

Here are five learnings I've been reflecting on, which I think will be quite helpful to my fellow human capital practitioners.

1

Human centeredness

Interestingly, Mandela discovered and demonstrated the uniqueness of connecting with people at a “heart level” despite his circumstances. He was known as a caring, compassionate and highly emotionally intelligent individual. Now is a great time to demonstrate this

CHRO

level of care and reach out to that someone in need.

People who are not necessarily resilient during these times are depending on us. Research shows that acts of kindness can release hormones that contribute to your attitude and your overall emotional and physical well-being. Reaching out or just checking in with a mate, a colleague or someone in your world to see how they are holding up might do you and them a world of good. Mandela’s ability to reach out to people from different backgrounds earned him admiration and respect – even from those who oppressed him.

2

Collaboration

This is a great excuse to collaborate. This is a time for you to call on the resources and the capabilities of others beyond your sphere of engagement or influence. That wicked problem that we did not have the time to focus on when we were in the office, now perhaps calls for a reason to reach out to someone who has that skills set that we can leverage off. Collaboration does not show weakness or vulnerability, it shows confidence in your own skin to work jointly with others – coming together of diverse thinking, skills and experiences to solve that which may have challenged you on your own. Mandela found the need not only to collaborate with his own inner circle, but the broader world, and even with his prison wardens and oppressors. I think his collaboration paid off.

3

Don’t lose sight of the goal

This I think was one of Mandela’s greatest attributes as a human being. He was super focused and always kept his eye on the goal. He was determined and ensured that those around him were also aligned to his goal of making a difference. As an employee or leader, do you know what your goal is? Do you know your purpose? As an employee or leader, we are all stepping into a new era. I said recently that there might be no greater opportunity for us to build a refreshed culture that we speak about, while we are in lockdown.

If one of Mandela’s main goals was to liberate a nation, I think one of our goals can be to make a difference and shape the cultural architecture of our businesses. We don’t have to wait until after lockdown. Will we be known for our innovation, resilience, superior performance, care for each other and our communities and clients? We have an opportunity to write our script and create our own narrative

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starting today. Knowing what your goal is, staying the course no matter what, helps with the 'why' of things. Mandela did not forget his goal and pursued this relentlessly.

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Resilience

We will all experience twists and turns, from daily challenges to traumatic events, to global pandemics. Disruption impacts people differently, bringing a unique flood of thoughts, strong emotions and uncertainty.

Psychologists tell us that people generally adapt well over time to life-changing and stressful situations – in part thanks to resilience. Psychologists also define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress. In this time of lockdown, a deeper degree of resilience is required to get us through this season. We can start by changing the narrative, choosing our responses, thinking and speaking words of hope, exercising and releasing some chemicals in the brain, finding a purpose (bigger than ourselves), fostering wellness, connecting with people, praying, meditating... I am sure that there were days when Mandela thought that he could not make it, but he had to dig deep, stay focused, draw strength from other people, pick himself up and continue in his pursuit.

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Adapt

Mandela did a great job of adapting to the environment he found himself in. While he was imprisoned, he also prepared himself mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually for the future. He knew the day would come when he would be free. He never stopped believing and this fueled him to broaden his knowledge as he knew that his day would come and he would need to adapt to the outside. He stepped into a different world when he left the Victor Verster Prison on a sunny day in February 1990 and our world, as we knew it, changed forever. You and I are finding creative ways to adapt. We are social creatures and not designed to live in lockdown but, as we have no choice, let's improve ourselves in the areas we believe we need to and let's prepare ourselves to step into a “different” world.

If Mandela can come out better than before after 27 years, I am sure that we too can learn some great lessons during our season in lockdown. 

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HIGH FLYERS What to do about weed in the workplace

South Africa’s decriminalisation of cannabis use and possession is a sign that local legislation is catching up to other parts of the world. But what does it mean for employers?

BY PUSELETSO MOMPEI

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“Cannabis is potentially a huge problem at the workplace and on the roads as the relevant legislation is not yet complete.”

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he decriminalisation of cannabis in South Africa, driven by the recent ruling by the Constitutional Court that it is not a criminal offence for an adult citizen to use, possess or grow cannabis in private for personal consumption, follows a growing trend after countries like Canada, Uruguay and Thailand did the same.

But does this ruling mean the door has been opened for employees to start going to work high?

According to Nicol Myburgh, head of the HR business unit at CRS Technologies, the workplace is not considered private property. Therefore, consuming cannabis there falls outside of the gamut of the ruling. He stresses that, “People generally understand that consuming any mind or mood-altering substances while at the job is not allowed.

Common sense in regard to cannabis should also prevail.”

This relaxation of laws has ushered in a new era and Nicol says that employers need to proactively adjust their substance control policies and explicitly outline the rules around the use of cannabis.

The policy changes need to be as comprehensive as possible and include context. Nicol explains, “The changes should consider the nature of the business, the employee’s role and responsibilities, compliance of testing for cannabis in line with

Section 7 of the Employment Equity Act, and action commensurate with the level of impairment to the employee’s ability. An important step is to take the policy further than paper by educating the workforce on what exactly the new law means, what the company’s position is, set acceptable limits and state these explicitly. Policy should also state that a person suspected of using cannabis can be approached and questioned accordingly.”

Nicol emphasises that companies need to initiate the conversation, arguing that “organisations should clearly outline their position on the use of cannabis and communicate what the consequences of coming to work high are and what steps they may take to determine if any work is affected by the use of cannabis.”

NCT Durban Wood Chips case There haven’t been many cases brought forward by employers or employees, but Jose Jorge, director in the employment practice at Cliffe Dekker Hoffmeyr points to the recent case, Mthembu and others v NCT Durban Wood Chips as a precursor to the type of issue employers may have to increasingly grapple with.

In this case, a company in the wood and chip industry dismissed several employees for being under the influence of an intoxicating substance after testing positive for cannabis during working

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“An employer suspecting an employee of showing up at work after using cannabis is a sensitive situation.” of the inherently dangerous working environment.

The employees’ dismissals were thus found to be fair.

Does weed impair performance?

According to a study by America’s National Institute of Drug Abuse, employees who tested positive for marijuana on a pre-employment urine drug test had 55 percent more industrial accidents, 85 percent more injuries, and 75 percent greater absenteeism compared with those who tested negative for marijuana use.

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hours. The applicants were found guilty under the charge of being “under the influence of intoxicating substance whilst on duty” and were subsequently dismissed. The applicants challenged the fairness of their dismissal at the CCMA. The commissioner held that similar to instances where alcohol is involved, an employer is entitled to discipline employees who use cannabis or are under its influence during working hours, where there is an indication that the consumption of cannabis could impair the employee’s ability to work to the standard and care reasonably required by an employer.

The employer’s zero-tolerance approach to substance abuse was aligned with the high degree of danger posed at the workplace in which heavy machinery and dangerous equipment was being operated. In this case, the Commissioner determined that it would be reasonable for the employer to expect its employees not to be under the influence of cannabis when reporting for duty because

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Given the dangers, if an employee is found to be under the influence of cannabis, do they stand to be summarily dismissed? According to Nicol, this depends on the implications of working while impaired. For instance, where employees are operating in an environment where they could be a danger to themselves and others, possibly facing more serious consequences. “However, if the employee does not put anyone or the company at risk, then perhaps a warning or disciplinary action should suffice. If it is determined that there may be something deeper at play, such as an issue with addiction, the employer may be obliged to help them overcome it.”

Not so cut-and-dry in an office environment Dr Richard Malkin, managing director of Workforce Healthcare, says that an employer suspecting an employee of showing up at work after using cannabis is a sensitive situation. “The steps an employer should take if they suspect an employee will be motivated by the level of risk in the situation.”

In a low-risk environment, such as an ordinary

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“According to a study, employees who tested positive for marijuana on a pre-employment urine drug test had 55 percent more industrial accidents, 85 percent more injuries, and 75 percent greater absenteeism.” office setting where no machinery is being operated or dangerous substances are in use, the employee should be approached in a non-threatening, dignified manner. “If there are strong grounds, such as the employee behaving out of the norm, the person should be called into a meeting with a senior manager plus a witness," Richard says.

“First, HR should inform the employee that there is a concern, that as per policy they are being referred to the employee assistance programme. The intention of the programme is to provide support and assistance to employees with problems of addiction, not confrontational.”

In a high-risk situation, a more urgent approach is required as lives can be at stake. Richard states that it is important the employer is mindful of the responsibility to protect other employees or the public as per the Occupational Health and Safety Act. The suspected employee should be removed from operating the machinery or equipment counselled about being tested as per policy.

Richard points out that cannabis testing is very complex. “There isn’t a legal limit defined by law and a lot of policies are written by non-experts who don’t understand the changes to the law, nor the metabolic activity of cannabis and the impact on testing. Hence one should get a confirmation test

Jose Jorge

done, which is expensive and may take 48 hours for a result.”

Cannabis testing Cannabis testing kits are easily accessible and are not expensive for screening, however, their accuracy depends on the type of test.

Richard explains that, “the urine test is not accurate, it measures the breakdown product of cannabis, this could be in the system for 10 days or more. Saliva tests are more sensitive. The active ingredient in cannabis lasts for up to four hours in the average person’s system after consumption, unlike alcohol which is dose dependant and is metabolised at the rate of one tot per hour, so if one has six tots it will be in the system for six hours, active cannabis is gone in four hours. Secondly, a breathalyser only tests the active ingredient in alcohol.”

Cannabis breathalyser testing equipment is in the final phases of testing in the USA and Canada

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“There is cannabis breathalyser testing equipment, that is in the final phases of testing in the USA and Canada…” quality of work produced is declining, the speed of delivery is disappointing, deadlines are being missed and overall productivity is compromised.” If objectively determinable deliverables are not being met, then the employer has the right to investigate.

Fans of cannabis have claimed that it frees their imagination, and Apple founder Steve Jobs was once quoted as saying that “marijuana and hashish… make me relaxed and creative.” But this assertion stands unproven. Richard says he is not aware that cannabis necessarily improves creativity, but points out that even if it does, the complications may outweigh the benefits.

Dr Richard Malkin

and should be available later this year, which will enable a legally admissible rapid non-invasive test that will solve this problem.

The results are legally admissible only if a confirmation test is conducted, Richard says. “I also believe there is a strong case for legal admissibility for saliva testing. Again, the policy must be well written and based on facts, as a poor policy and procedure can ruin the legal process.”

Impact of flexible working As the popularity of more flexible models of working, such as freelancing and remote work continue to grow, how does the application of rules related to cannabis apply? According to Jose, the same principles applied to onsite work apply when working remotely. “However in these cases, since the employer is not able to physically interact with the employee, then the issue of substance abuse may arise because the output is not up to the required standard. Alarm bells can start to go off if the

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Looking ahead, Richard believes that cannabis is potentially a huge problem in the workplace and on the roads as the relevant legislation is not yet complete. He adds: "There is no legal limit defined for driving under the influence. I am also concerned about the micro or domestic impact on our country, as well as how it manifests on the macro level.”

This view is valid because now that the door has been opened, proponents have started to push for even more leniency. The South African market for cannabis and associated products could be worth R27 billion per year by 2023 according to a report

by Prohibition Partners. The 2019 Cannabis Expo gathered delegates ready to explore its medicinal, agricultural, financial and lifestyle aspects, demonstrating the herb’s vast commercial potential.

Recently, Minister of Finance Tito Mboweni ruminated on the possible tax revenue that could be generated by fully legalising cannabis.

If the government was to pursue this avenue, the workplace and broader society would be forced to quickly create clarity around parameters and the potential wider impact. 

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Note that on Policy Passport, employees are tested whilst having access to the information – essentially it is an “open book” test. Despite this, only 14% of the employees who read the client’s instructions on how often a mask must be replaced, got the answer right. And only 36% knew how the virus is spread.

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partner

The key to enabling holistic employee well-being While the physiological and psychological interventions are necessary, they do not foster holistic well-being when applied in isolation, says Sanlam Corporate HR executive Matete Lerutla.

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BY MATETE LERUTLA

mployee assistance programmes or wellness programmes have become prominent among South African employers.

Diseases such as diabetes, pulmonary conditions, heart disease and psychological stresses are on the rise in younger people, with much of this being attributed to modifiable behaviour such as inactivity, smoking, poor nutrition, alcohol consumption and stressful life demands.

The impacts of these lifestyle diseases on individuals are material and include a decreased quality of life, disablement and premature death. As employers, we experience the financial overheads of increased

“Our research indicates that there are compelling returns on investment in total wellness ranging up to R6 for every rand spent.�

absenteeism and presenteeism. Furthermore, costs of healthcare and group insurance are correlated with the increased prevalence of such illnesses. This places strain on the long-term affordability of insurance cover for employees.

There are two general approaches to implementing wellness initiatives, namely primary prevention and secondary prevention. Primary prevention is aimed at preventing the onset of the disease by impacting health-related behaviours and risk factors. Secondary prevention attempts to diagnose and treat diseases at early stages before the onset of complications. The logic of wellness interventions is therefore based on influencing the behaviour of individuals to positively impact on their health, which has a range of mutually beneficial outcomes. A winwin-win for our employees, employers, and the wider economy.

Programmes typically consist of screening protocols, evaluations and proposals of preventative steps.

Such steps may include the introduction of on-site clinics, diet and exercise plans, access to smoking cessation programmes, alcohol rehabilitation programmes, and so on. The key challenge is that the use of such programmes are limited, with fewer than 50 percent of employees participating on average.

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“Employees with debt have shown to experience a higher prevalence of illnesses such as: fatigue, high blood pressure, heart disease, restlessness, anxiety, depression, ulcers and helplessness, among others.�

Of those identified for preventative interventions, fewer than 20 percent actually utilise the services offered. That said, the positive impact of wellness interventions is widely recognised.

Holistic well-being requires more effort Studies have shown clinically meaningful and statistically significant changes in behaviours such as frequency of exercise, reduction in smoking and changes in diet as a direct result of wellness interventions. When converted into actual Rand returns, a return in cost savings from 2 to 6 times the investment made, was noted.

While the physiological and psychological interventions are necessary, they do not foster holistic well-being when applied in isolation. To this end,

there is a need to broaden the scope of traditional wellness programmes to include financial resilience if we aim to unlock the full potential of a mature ecosystem of interventions. The American Psychological Association recognises financial stress as the leading cause of smoking, weight gain, alcohol and drug abuse among employees in the USA. Forty-five percent of employees polled by PwC in the USA indicated that financial matters are their leading cause of stress – more than jobs, relationships and health combined. The Sanlam Benchmark research showed that 73 percent of respondents experienced financial stress, with more than half admitting that it negatively affects them at the workplace. Unsurprisingly, debt was identified as the key contributor to financial stress.

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Debt is a lifestyle disease This is of particular concern as debt has been shown to negatively affect both physical and mental health. Employees with debt have shown to experience a higher prevalence of illnesses such as fatigue, high blood pressure, heart disease, restlessness, anxiety, depression, ulcers and helplessness, among others.

Evidently, debt is a lifestyle disease and so programmes aiming to deliver a holistic well-being must address debt in order to have a material impact through both primary and secondary preventative measures.

While health screening is fairly routine, screening for debt can be more difficult as it doesn’t always easily present itself. To this end, we have to consider various ways in order to identify in a sensitive manner, who within an employer is presenting risk factors that could indicate potential problems.

interventions is relatively low; interventions have to compete for employees’ share of attention and time; there are stigmas attached to mental health issues and debt and the initial funding costs of such interventions may not be budgeted for.

Given financial constraints to delivering holistic wellness, HR interventions need to have a distinct impact on financial outcomes over time, and our research indicates that there are compelling returns on investment in total wellness ranging up to R6 for every rand spent. In the case study shared, it is anticipated that the employer would experience an annual saving of up to R20 million in the first year post implementation of a successful intervention based on our insights. In addition, there are providers, Sanlam included, that are able to fully fund such interventions at their own cost depending on the package of services sourced from the provider, due to the demonstrable positive impact that such interventions have on mortality, morbidity and health experience.

“There is a need to broaden the scope of traditional wellness programmes to include financial resilience.”

In a recent case study, Sanlam was approached by one of South Africa’s largest employers to combine actuarial, health and consulting expertise to identify the key health and financial correlations impacting absenteeism at the employer. The study identified correlations between financial circumstances, mental wellness, physical wellness and absenteeism. The insights shared helped the employer to identify potential risk factors that are indicative of an employee who is in debt and the extent to which financial indebtedness correlated to the issues of absenteeism, mental health and physical health at this specific employer.

The long-term return on investment When seeking to deliver total wellness outcomes, there are a few challenges to implementing successful interventions. These are that the utilisation of

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In closing, holistic wellness for companies should go beyond addressing physical and psychological factors. We need to consider a person and their behaviour in totality. Debt is a lifestyle disease brought about by behaviour patterns, it is the leading cause of financial stress in SA, it is prevalent at epidemic levels among employees across socio-economic, education and demographic bands, and it contributes significantly to physical and mental health problems. If we want to help our employees to take control of their physical and mental well-being, we have to first empower them to move towards better financial behaviours. And this takes dealing intelligently with the big issue of debt. Looking at individuals through the lenses of physical, mental and financial wellness allows employers to provide integrated and holistic measures to improve total wellness outcomes. 

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People Development Simplified

Simplified Talent Management Solutions that work the way you do

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www.skillogical.com

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IMAGINE HOW YOUR EMPLOYEES FEEL SAP Concur’s regional sales director Angelique Montalto explains why organisations’ duty of care is elevated during times of crisis.

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BY ANGELIQUE MONTALTO

e are all experiencing and embracing new challenges as we navigate the current climate of social and economic uncertainty. Globally, one and all we need to adapt to the new accepted norm of remote working and in more severe instances, a total lockdown of business as usual.

Organisations owe it to their employees to keep them safe either while working remotely or travelling on official company business.

In times of major disruption or heightened risk, companies need to take all necessary measures to ensure they can meet the necessary duty-of-care obligations and keep their employees informed and away from harm while they are operating on behalf of the organisation.

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What is duty of care?

Duty of care refers to a company’s moral and legal responsibility to care for the well-being of its employees during the course of business. This has clear implications for things like workplace culture, employee well-being, company benefits and other aspects guiding employee safety during the performance of their work duties – whether at the office, working remotely or travelling.

In South Africa, employer duty-of-care obligations are guided by statutory requirements mainly under the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA).

In terms of the OHSA, the CEO of every employer is liable for contraventions of the OHSA, and can be fined or criminally convicted if found negligent.

Importantly, while the OHSA refers specifically to ‘the workplace’, that workplace can be anywhere

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where official work duties are performed, including working from home or travelling abroad.

This puts pressure on organisations to meet their duty-of-care obligations. Companies should know where their people are, whether far away or close to the office, and must be able to alert employees during a crisis, provide them with any assistance they may need, and keep open lines of communication until everyone is safe.

Challenges with keeping mobile employees safe In one study, 77 percent of finance leaders said they were not confident they could quickly and accurately locate employees during an emergency. Considering the growth in business travel and remote working, this is alarming: over the past 15 years travel spend has doubled to more than $1.2 trillion, with employee-initiated spend the second-largest expense in a growing number of organisations.

regardless of the situation. By using a single tool to monitor employee location, companies also gain intelligence on country-specific travel disruptions and risk events, and can proactively alert employees no matter the time of day.

Active Monitoring is an additional service designed in collaboration with risk management experts to simplify an organisation’s duty-of-care responsibilities. The service is integrated to SAP Concur and offers a full operations centre powered by HX Global, which specialises in tracking, alerting and assisting business travellers around the world 24/7/365.

Companies gain access to multiple channels for communicating with at-risk employees during times of emergency or crisis. They are also able to facilitate the sharing of information and advice to ensure they get their employees to safety as quickly as possible.

An additional complication is a growing behaviour of employees booking business travel trips independently, outside the company booking tool or preferred travel management company. Without access to accurate and timeous data for each employee, companies simply can’t track their movement or get in touch during a time of emergency.

For most companies, manually tracking their employees is impractical or downright impossible.

And their employees notice: in one study, 41 percent of employees who were near a natural disaster said they were not contacted by their company at all.

This is where technology offers some vital tools to assist in the effort to keep employees safe and meet their duty-of-care obligations.

Tools to monitor and track employees’ well-being The Active Monitoring and Locate services within SAP Concur provides companies with a powerful tool for capturing and accessing location data about employees in real-time.

Through Locate, companies provide assessments and alert pre-trip to warn of potential dangers involved with the employee’s itinerary, and can reliably communicate directly with employees

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SAP Active Monitoring and Locate are both available through the SAP Concur travel and expense management platform.

For more information, visit: www.concur.co.za www.supplychainpartner.com www.scania.com Or scan the QR code:

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Brigitte Da Gama, McDonald's SA

Phila Zondeki, Wesbank

Non-performance: A thing of the past?

HR leaders say an overwhelming majority of employees have pulled up their socks to ensure their organisations remain sustainable despite the impact of the Covid-19 notional lockdown on revenues.

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BY SUNGULA NKABINDE

ith a lot of the focus regarding Covid-19 and its impact on employees leaning to towards the need to be more sympathetic to employees working from home, one of the recent CHRO Community Conversations turned to the subject of how to manage employees who are not collaborative, not productive or not coping and don't "get with the programme" during these unprecedented times.

do you balance empathy with the need for the company to survive in a sustainable way?�

The participants were asked: "Surely some employees may not collaborate as well as you would expect to during this time of lockdown and restrictions. How

“That said, not coping and not being productive can be two different things. One of the reasons for someone not being able to work productively can very well

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Barloworld group HR director Tantaswa Fubu said that her team had not experienced any slacking by their people during the lockdown. In fact, it was quite the opposite. She said people at Barloworld were working even harder during this time and that this could partly be because people are concerned about losing their jobs and want to prove their worth more than ever before.

Ruth Wotela, Silverbridge

be be cause their lockdown environment is not conducive to being productive. It is then imperative for the line manager to understand what is happening in that employee’s life before labelling the employee as being unproductive or non-performing,” she said.

She added: “For those who are not pulling their weight, I don’t believe Covid-19 and the lockdown means we should throw our performance management processes out of the window. In fact, I think with lockdown it is much easier to tell when someone is not delivering. People who have been able to hide behind smooth-talking, looking busy and getting others to do their work are now getting exposed. It is now about showing results instead of showing face.”

Line managers to share the blame The conversation also saw focus turned towards line managers, who may also be struggling to manage people effectively in this new way of working.

Zuko Mdwaba, Workday

“One of the reasons for someone not being able to work productively can very well be because their lockdown environment is not conducive to being productive. ” in cases where there is a vast difference in performance before and after lockdown.“ Silverbridge people wellness executive Ruth Wotela agreed, saying that has been their exact approach, explaining to managers that they need to adopt an

"It’s easy to point the finger at employees but we must also remember that the manager has to share a lot of that responsibility. Managers who are accustomed to managing people in an office environment also have to adjust their management style and those who do not do so cannot simply point the finger at employees whose performance begins to drop during the lockdown,” said Workday country manager for South Africa, Zuko Mdwaba.

“As managers, it is absolutely imperative that we understand that not all people need to be managed in the same way. We need to tweak our approach to be able to get the best of every individual, especially

individualistic approach when managing and leading their teams because this allows them to understand and raise performance issues proactively, and deal with those issues appropriately.

This article is based on insights and contributions from CHRO South Africa's weekly Community Conversations. To get involved in the online discussions, please get in touch with CHRO SA MD Joël Roerig (jroerig@chro.co.za)

“Managers who are accustomed to managing people in an office environment also have to adjust their management style.”

Tantaswa Fubu, Barloworld

“We have daily stand-up meetings. We set and agree on expectations and if something needs to be done by the end of the day it must be done," she says.

Training was needed Preparing managers for this kind of environment was something that needed to happen from the onset as some may have needed training on how to manage people who are working remotely. McDonald’s South Africa’s chief people officer, Brigitte Da Gama said they had done a massive amount of communication in which they set the tone for what would be expected because they went into remote-working mode long before the national lockdown was implemented.

Back then, they made it clear that they would keep people in the loop and told them that sacrifices would have to be made.

Said Brigitte: “We have ensured regular and robust communication with all our stakeholders, starting with our employees, in which we set the tone for what would be expected during this time. We have an app that allows everyone to be communicated to in real-time to facilitate this. We also conducted training on how to performance manage virtual teams.

We also realised that exceptional and elevated leadership skills are very good to have."

“Whether working virtually or from the office, you need to continue managing poor performance. It will have a far more negative impact on the team and the business if not addressed.”

Treat people like human beings Wesbank HR executive Phila Zondeki said it was

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important to be careful not to jump to labelling people as non-performers because, when lockdown started, all the research pointed to anxiety that people may be facing, “which as an HR leader, would direct you to play a more supportive role and relaxing the strict performance requirements that one has."

Phila added: “How do you manage output with seeing someone face-to-face? If I go into the operations side of the business and I look at what the outcomes are looking like right, I think it’s likely that I would assume that a lot of people are not carrying their weight. But performance management needs to be based on clear and explicit objectives and deliverables that take into account the context of Covid-19.”

She said that people would always follow what the leadership was doing and that, if the leadership was doing something that is contrary to what they say they expect, then there were bound to be employees who followed suit.

Ultimately, Tantaswa said performance management, even in times of Covid-19, is about treating people like human beings because they will then be more likely to open up about the personal challenges they are facing.

“We also have to be prepared to hear things that we are not prepared for, personal stuff and figure out how best to practically support our people. We should postpone labelling people as non-performers until we have understood their circumstances especially when we are dealing with people who are suddenly acting out of character,” Tantaswa said, adding that, if someone is a known performer, there must be a reason why they are now not performing in lockdown.

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from the md

Join the conversation Who knew it would take a pandemic to accelerate the unstoppable growth of an executive community? With physical events like summits and dinners being rendered impossible by the Covid-19 restrictions that have been in place since March, the CHRO South Africa community has taken refuge online – and how!

Amid the confusion and anxiety of lockdown, we soon realised that connections, support, perspective, consolation and fresh ideas are needed more than ever. The weekly CHRO SA Community Conversations on Tuesday evenings have quickly developed into the best platform for HR leaders to ask each other questions, exchange ideas, blow off steam and compare notes of what it's like to be in charge of the people agenda during such crazy times.

The CHRO South Africa community is now over three years old, with the launch of HR Indaba Africa in 2018 and CHRO Awards as 2019 major milestones in its growth. I don’t think we have ever added so many new participants to our initiatives as during the current lockdown period though. The topics have been tough, but also stimulating and inspirational – what a privilege to be part of these chats!

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What’s next? First of all, you’re going to be hearing from the HR Indaba Network soon. Secondly, we are entering the wondrous world of webinars. They won’t just be any webinars, but freely accessible HR masterclasses, panel discussions with CHROs and deep dives into tools, trends and burning questions. If the nearly 1,000 registrations for the very first webinar – about remuneration & Covid-19 – are anything to go by, we’re finding ourselves at the top of another rollercoaster ride.

If you would like to get involved in the CHRO SA Community Conversations or webinars, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

And if you want to expose your direct reports to the world-class learning and networking you have become used to, please send me a note about the corporate membership (see the page opposite).

As this people crisis unfolds further, I wish you strength, insight and a community to support you.

JOËL ROERIG MANAGING DIRECTOR CHRO SOUTH AFRICA +27 76 371 2856 JROERIG@CHRO.CO.ZA

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Membership Opportunities

Invest in your people and boost your success and that of your business

Support the CHRO community with a membership and grow the brightest stars in your HR team.

Your support does not only allow CHRO South Africa to keep growing the community that helps you and your peers boost your knowledge, network and career. A membership is also the best professional gift for two direct reports. They will be able to attend and benefit from all CHRO events in 2020, receive the CHRO Magazine 2020 editions on their desks and and will be invited to join weekly online CHRO Community Conversations.

Meant for: CHRO / HR Directors and up to two handpicked senior direct reports.

Immediate Benefits: Support the CHRO South Africa community

Exclusive invite to CHRO SA Community Conversations (Online)

Exclusive invite to all CHRO Summits

All issues of CHRO Magazine delivered to your desk

Exclusive invite to CHRO Awards

Weekly newsletter

Exclusive invite to CHRO Day

HR Indaba VIP team invite

Corporate Membership Investment:

R40,000 ex VAT per annum Terms and Conditions CHRO South Africa reserves the right to decline memberships.

Calendar of Events:

5 Aug 2020

CFO and CHRO Women's Dinner: Speaking the language of success

NEW DATE: TBC for Oct or Nov

CHRO SA Day

14 - 15 Oct 2020

HR Indaba Africa 2020

26 Nov 2020

CHRO Awards

75

Contact: Nick Smith | nsmith@chro.co.za | 072 202 1071 | CHRO.co.za

When the swirling mist and changing landscape clouds your thinking ... when the usual paths are blocked, and the obvious solutions no longer take you forward ... as an HR practitioner, you need a fresh set of eyes;

an employee benefits adviser who thinks differently about changing times - someone who sees new paths to your destination.

mca@momentum.co.za

momentumconsultantsandactuaries.co.za 76

Momentum Consultants and Actuaries (Pty) Ltd is an authorised financial services provider (FSP7677) and a subsidiary of Momentum Metropolitan Strategic Investments (Pty) Ltd and rated B-BBEE Level 1. Š2020 Momentum Consultants and Actuaries.