The long-term sustainability of
our African operations, as in South Africa, entails
one pivotal challenge: the ongoing need to maintain
well-motivated, customer-focused teams of employees
with the requisite skills to fulfil their responsibilities
and to help our group to achieve its business
objectives in a responsible manner.
Employment practices
Stanbic Africa’s employment practices are managed
to harmonise with both group policy and practices,
and with the legislative requirements of the countries
in which we operate. In the absence of legislative
requirements in certain countries, we ensure that
we align our employment practices with group practices.
As we continue to grow and enhance our businesses,
we continuously seek to achieve consistency in
standardising and evolving our employment practices.
Payroll and benefits
Payroll and benefits differ from one country to
another in Africa, depending on the particular market
conditions. An appropriate service provider has
been sourced to conduct salary benchmarks and surveys
across all Stanbic Africa countries with the aim
of aligning and standardising these as opportunities
arise. Stanbic Africa seeks to ensure that its employees
are remunerated at market-related scales, thereby
ensuring that we retain our most valued talent.
Employee skills development
We endeavour to ensure at all times that we have
sufficient employees with the necessary knowledge,
skills, experience and commitment to achieve our
present and future business plans. To this end,
we commit 5% of our annual salary budgets in Africa
to learning and growth initiatives.
The learning and growth area of the human resources
department is responsible for developing and implementing
our African learning and growth strategy. With
the strategic context and competency requirements
in mind, our learning and growth strategy takes
into account three critical learning processes
that will facilitate the improvement of individual
business and organisational performance:
- how to improve access to learning;
- how to develop and deliver learning opportunities
in a holistic manner; and
- how to manage learning and realise value.
Our learning and growth team (situated in Johannesburg
and in most of the African countries in which
we operate) offers a range of hard and soft skills
courses covering topics and disciplines as diverse
as asset and liability management, ATM operations,
bond markets, customer service, fraud awareness
and prevention, leadership, management information
systems, managing personal finances, presentation
skills, secretarial skills, selling skills, trading
skills, treasury back office operations, treasury
dealing and understanding finance for non-financial
managers.
Some of the key employee learning and growth
challenges we face include the:
- demand for system conversion training and
rollout training, as new products and services
are introduced due to our organic and new-acquisitions
growth strategy;
- demand for training due to the increase in
our wholesale, retail, credit and risk operations
as well as increased support services;
- continuous alignment of our development programmes
and learning investments with performance and
business needs;
- need to continue developing the right learning
options and opportunities;
- installation of the right systems throughout
our African operations to manage our learning
process cost-effectively; and
- need to ensure that our employees receive
the skills and knowledge they need to meet
project
deliverables on a just-in-time basis.
To maintain a standardised approach, we develop
and produce our training modules centrally at
our head office in Johannesburg.
|
