Human capital

We have built on FY22's strategy of driving employee centricity through inclusive leadership. Our people are core to our business and we continue to put our employees at the centre of what we do through leader-led engagement initiatives. Our foundation is solid and our people planning framework remains our core focus, ensuring that we build a future-fit organisation with the right people with the right skills.

Retaining talent has become increasingly difficult as employee and employer expectations change and impact this. Our strategy has been informed by the trends identified by research from the Gartner International HC report:

1. Person-first experience: 82% of employees believe it to be essential for their organisation to see them as a person, not just an employee.

2. Shared-purpose: 53% of employees would like their organisations to take action on issues they care about.

3. Flexibility: 52% of employees believe flexible work policies will affect the decision to remain at their organisations.

Focusing on building a future-ready organisation, we have had to acknowledge the evolution of the Human Capital (HC) role worldwide and we see remarkable opportunities to partner on a more strategic level with business. We fully understood that we would have to build new capabilities in our team, shift how we think of our role and building the correct capability required to lead the new employee expectations. This had to be carefully designed to allow leadership capacity.

As we embarked on FY23, we were enthusiastic to align ourselves with the changing expectations of our employees. We needed to understand this in order to navigate the path ahead and to ensure a seamless engagement with our people and leaders. We needed to build a strong connection with our leaders and to understand the objective and challenges of each business unit.

We have:

  • Built a strong foundation for employee engagement and have enhanced it with our internal application so they can stay engaged anywhere, helping motivation levels and improving productivity;
  • Reviewed our current values and although it is the heart of our business and replicates our culture, we will be refreshing our values, in order to assist Blue Label in driving outlook and what is essential for the coming year;
  • Designed a more suitable leadership development programme that allows us to develop emerging talent and middle and senior management leaders;
  • Established our first-ever succession planning for all occupational levels in business throughout the business;
  • Reduced over R9 million in recruitment cost;
  • Built our employment brand to attract the best talent which has given us a 33% growth in LinkedIn visibility;
  • Built a pipeline, ensuring emerging talent development and successfully rolled out five YES programmes across subsidiaries and employed over 250 YES youth, thereby affording young people the opportunity to gain experience for future roles;
  • Understood the shift from a reactive role to a proactive one, as we are focusing on long-term workforce planning, talent management and employee development; and
  • Commenced and are working closely with our leaders providing insights and guidance to support their strategic decisions.

To view our latest employment equity statistics in our Annual Report click the link below.