Fit-for-purpose people practices
to drive performance excellence. Accountability and integrity are crucial in all we do, and we hold our employees to this and ensure they contribute to their own growth.”
Old Mutual’s people strategy is enabled by a solid employee value proposition, which is linked to its aspiration to do great things. The pillars of this are a great global brand, great leadership, great culture, great careers and great compensation and benefits.
Continues Archary: “This is the foundation for how we engage and care for our employees. We have a multi-modal approach made up of contacts through both face-to-face and technology-enabled HR to build our relationship with both current and prospective employees.
“Old Mutual’s culture of fostering greatness touches every individual’s career, creating a working environment that empowers employees to do great things for our customers and communities.
“We are living in a digital era and therefore all organisations are faced with the challenge of having leading practices to support employee engagement. Consumers transact through mobile devices and online platforms. Our future employee base prefers this method of communication and the same applies to employ- ees as well.
“Organisations are looking for most effective and cost-conscious ways to reach employees, and therefore the shift is evident in more businesses leveraging mobile connectivity and virtual working tools like video conferencing to minimise travel costs.
“Technology must support and enable business decisions rather than replace the personal contact that people enjoy with each other, so we are also on a journey to continuously drive MMS, SMS, online, apps and TV communication as some of the channels to improve employee engagement across generations and workforces.”
Archary says Old Mutual has done some exciting work in driving the understanding of employee segments within its business and has introduced typologies that help them understand the basic need states of employees, based on generations and life-stage.
“For example, millennials have certain attributes and needs that are very different to those of preretirement employees. We deal with the employee experiences through dedicated programmes and we have introduced frameworks for engaging employees differently.
“‘Enable positive futures’ is our company’s shared vision and promise to customers, employees and the communities where we operate. As part of our proud heritage of 171 years we have strong values of accountability, respect, pushing beyond boundaries and integrity, which guide all our interactions as employees in our business. These are integrated in all our people practices, evaluated in terms of each individual’s performance scorecard.
“Like most businesses we do drive the employment equity agenda in terms of reporting and execution, but our differentiator is our focus on employee engagement.
“One long-standing initiative is called Diversity Day, which is now celebrated on the birthday of the business — May 17 — by all employees, in all our locations around the world. On this day employees choose a theme of diversity that we celebrate in terms of cultural heritage, history and differences,” says Archary.
“We also have a strong focus on gender empowerment. The Old Mutual Women’s network is a platform for empowerment, education, awareness and mentorship. The network runs a full calendar every year of interventions that support empowerment and inclusivity.”
Old Mutual strives to encourage innovation and avoid implementing restrictive policies. To create an environment of entrepreneurship, Archary says Old Mutual has a set of core behaviours that the company promotes.
“We call these ACTNOW leadership behaviours: Accountability, Customer First, Treat the business like your own, Need to talk honestly, Own your decisions and Winning Together.
“All these behaviours are core to our business strategy and culture shifts that we are driving to enable positive futures for our customers and communities. We run employee recognition awards across the organisation, and employees receive psychological and monetary recognition for outstanding creativity and entrepreneurship over and above the core achievements on their performance scorecards.
“Our chief executive also runs a dedicated chief executive recognition programme where he awards specific individuals who have demonstrated outstanding creativity with sound business results.
“Our leadership development programmes encourage innovation; employees work on a real-life business problem and generate solutions for it. These solutions produce tremendous return on investment for the organisation and for employees in terms of on-the-job learning.
Attract and inspire
“We believe that policies are an important tool to enable organisations to be effective and create harmony on the basis of consistency. This is linked to our responsible busi- ness strategy to ensure Old Mutual is