Building kinder organisations through ubuntu

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In an increasingly individualistic work culture, a panel of HR leaders at the 2024 HR Indaba called on business leaders to place kindness at the centre of their strategy and recognise that employees are human before they are workers. Speakers urged a return to ubuntu as the animating principle in workplace relations.

After an electrifying keynote address, the 2024 HR Indaba kicked off with a series of high-powered breakaway sessions, among them a panel discussion on kindness at the workplace. Here, BREATHE co-founder Lana Hindmarch began by calling to mind a familiar word: ubuntu.

“I am because we are. Ubuntu recognises that there is no place where I end and you begin, and that our humanity is inextricably bound up in one another. Kindness is the colleague who steps in to help you when your world is falling apart,” she said.

In evoking the philosophy of ubuntu, Lana encouraged HR professionals to inject kindness into the workplace to boost workers’ productivity. She cited research that shows kind organisations are more profitable. A 2012 study by Google, for instance, showed that teams in which employees could express themselves freely exceeded their targets by 17%, while those in which employees felt repressed missed their targets by 19%. Lana encouraged attendees to use data to secure buy-in from business leaders.

“I think we’ve forgotten about the language of the heart, and people in the workplace have paid the price. The best place to start is to distinguish between niceness and kindness. They are not the same thing. ‘Nice’ is something you do, while ‘kind’ is something that you are. Nice is about me, myself and I, about self preservation. Kindness is about ‘we’. It’s about acknowledging that your pain is my pain and your success is my success,” she said.

By way of getting started, Lana advocated for expressing kindness toward the self. She urged HR professionals to get into the habit of offering themselves compassion as a gateway to implementing kindness as a business strategy.

Also present on the panel was Kutlwano Rawana, group HR and transformation executive at Mustek, who spoke about the science of kindness. She challenged HR professionals to conduct an audit of their value systems to evaluate whether they replicate kindness.

“Kindness results in a feel-good emotion. It’s important for organisations to realise that whatever objectives are required, they start with the employees. People are people before they are employees,” she said.

According to Kutlwano, organisations that demonstrate kindness towards their employees promote team collaboration and encourage their workers to be committed not only to the business, but to each other. She related an anecdote about an employee dealing with a hard time at home, encouraging attendees to lead with compassion when handling sensitive situations.

The panel also featured Impact Institute Global CEO Gita Maharaj, who conceptualised kindness as a systemic issue that has tangible effects despite being invisible. According to Gita, one way to approach the problem was to examine organisational data over time to ascertain who was benefitting from it. She urged HR professionals to introspect as a way to unearth how their business processes have replicated human suffering.

“When I look at our people processes through that lens, what has stood out for me is that processes are designed in a way to bring people into conflict with each other. That’s not an aberration where the process failed,” she said.

Gita noted that such workplace processes bring unnecessary conflict into the workplace, creating friction between colleagues. Reflecting on her career, she pointed to modern performance management practices as a cause of toxicity in the workplace.

“The issue of reinforcing hierarchies. I’m sure some of you have seen this. When you’re part of a cross-functional team working on a project and you’re trying to influence stakeholders, some people won’t even talk to you until they understand where you’re from and your board structures,” she said.

She also highlighted how conformist perspectives on race and gender negatively influence people management, citing the need for a global transformation. Gita also highlighted merit-based pay as an issue in performance management, associating societal inequities to glaring pay discrepancies. She cited a study that tracked CEO and employee salaries over a 45-year period and showed that the salaries of C-suite executives had increased exponentially compared to those of their subordinates.

More recently, the Associated Press reported that compensation packages for US chief executives who run S&P500 companies rose nearly 13 percent in 2023, while those of workers rose by 5.2 percent, just above the rate of inflation. The Impact Institute CEO advocated a review of pay gaps to encourage accountability and equity.

In closing, the panellists called for the humanisation of the HR profession, calling for a re-evaluation of workplace culture and a rethinking of the role to put people at the centre of business strategy.

“We need to sharpen our influence skills and influence business from the top,” Kutlwano said.

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