Read the editor's picks from last year's enlightening CHRO Community Conversations.
2020 saw the introduction of weekly zoom calls that enabled HR leaders to connect and grow. As the HR community tackled unique challenges, CHRO South Africa brought executives together to share experiences and learn from each other in a series of community conversations. Here are the editor's favourite five of those enlightening conversations.
Trevor Kunda, group head of leadership development and learning at Discovery, revealed the lessons he has learnt during the rollercoaster ride he has been on since joining the company, from face-to-face learning to a fully digital, asynchronous approach.
Trevor took attendees through some of the tools that they have tested and are currently using at Discovery. He provided insight into the rich data that online learning provides going on to plan the audacious move to strip physical classrooms out of their training budget altogether.
“The traditional models of learning need to be thrown out. People are no longer learning in classrooms – they are learning from a variety of sources at any given moment. Face-to-face learning was already on its way out before Covid-19 but that has been accelerated,” said Trevor, who provided examples of the learning interventions that they plan to implement that seek to build the right ecosystems for understanding people’s development needs and aspirations. Equally, their approach to learning has been about making sure that they make ‘the’ right learning available, providing a combination of e-learning, vILT (virtual instructor-led training), and collaborative learning.
2 How to cultivate a sense of belonging in the workplace
Human capital trends were in the spotlight in the conversation led by Deloitte associate partner Fortune Gamanya, who outlined the highlights of their annual report which. In 2020, the focus is on how the social enterprise can find the integration between technology and humanity at a time when humanity is in the spotlight because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Fortune said that belonging at work had become a top organisational priority, with many people are increasingly looking for personal fulfilment and satisfaction in a world of work that is becoming more polarised and volatile.
“This speaks to the fact that when someone leaves an organisation, it is most often the case that they are driven away by a particular person rather than being attracted by a more enticing opportunity.”
Fortune said 84 percent of South African respondents said worker well-being was important or important for their success over the next 12 to 18 months, but only 44 percent felt they were very ready to address this trend.
3 Talent optimisation as HR leaders discuss how they navigated talent-wise during Covid-10 lockdown
Capitec executive for HR Nathan Motjuwadi shared the journey that the bank took after Covid-19 reared its ugly head.
He spoke about how the managing executives decided to safeguard all salaries and bonuses and how Capitec reshaped its workforce by allocating people from branches to call centres. When the national lockdown was first implemented some of their people could not carry out their usual roles, Capitec introduced a talent optimisation project whereby the company enabled individuals to move across functions and divisions to enable those stuck at home to continue adding value.
“What we had to figure out was what skills we had in the organisation to get a sense of who we could shift to different business units. Our call centre was inundated with a flurry of calls, with incoming traffic increased fivefold to as much as 500,000 calls per day and our call centre teams were struggling, even though they were working remotely,” said Nathan. “We decided to support them by setting up temporary transfers whereby, for three-to-six months we moved people into that division to assist with the workload. It was something that had to be done with quite a lot of consultation. We had to be fair to say, those who were not interested in being transferred to the call centre did not have to go there and would be presented with alternatives.”
4 Women share lessons on overcoming limitations
Reserved for women executives in finance and HR, this conversation touched on both the self-imposed and external limitations that keep women from thriving in the workplace.
Raisibe Morathi, Nedbank Group CFO, and Juliet Mhango, Chief Human Capital Development and Transformation Officer at Cell C, each shared their experiences of climbing the corporate ladder as a woman.
Juliet said she found her language of success after searching within herself for the confidence to raise her voice. She found that, when she was sitting on the executive teams, she used to be the only female and often the only person of colour. She found it difficult to make herself heard. especially early on in her career.
“I would come up with an idea and express it, only for it to fall on deaf ears. A male colleague would say exactly the same thing and the idea would be taken on board. Over time, that started making me withdraw from conversations because I felt that my views were not valued. It was then that I had to look inward, within myself, to find my authentic voice, once I embraced the value that I was bringing, the rest fell into place,” said Juliet.
Juliet said that women generally have an apologetic language and play into the patriarchal stereotypes. “You have the same skills as your male colleagues, but when you walk into a boardroom, you undermine those skills,” she explained. “Don’t apologise, own that space, like everyone else in the room.”
Raisibe agreed, warning against women letting their perception of themselves come in the way of success, saying that "just because you are a woman, doesn’t mean you can’t be doing the same things as a man.”
5 Intimate community conversation offers time to reflect on impact of job cuts
In this conversation, Bridgestone HR director Julia Modise, Cisco HR director Andisa Liba and Tsebo Solutions group CHRO Elanie Kruger had a heart-to-heart about the challenges facing HR leaders.
Julia opened the conversation by discussing how Bridgestone recently had to close its oldest plant in Port Elizabeth. This decision, which impacted over 200 employees, was exceptionally difficult for the company. What made the process even more difficult was the timing. Having to execute the plant closure right in the middle of a pandemic, Julia said, was beyond challenging. The number of job losses and scale of unemployment in the Eastern Cape province made the process even more heart wrenching and difficult, given the tough economic conditions in the Eastern Cape and limited prospects of new jobs.
“We had to make the difficult decision to shut the plant down for a variety of reasons, in recent years we have seen our financial performance come under pressure due to a variety of economic conditions and industry factors.
