Certified for nine successive years
CLICKS is certified as a top South African Employer for the ninth consecutive year and Group HR Director Bertina Engelbrecht ascribes this to clear vision and a growth strategy that provides unlimited employee opportunities, especially for people with passion.
The retail healthcare group, employs over 15 000 people. Its headquarters are in SA with a footprint stretching across Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland. It has in the past year invested R125 million in learning and skills development, for more than 6000 employees. This included on-the-job training, skills programmes, learnership programmes, short courses and academic qualifications. Black employees accounted for 89 percent and women for 62 percent.
Engelbrecht adds, “Those interventions focused on enhancing management and leadership competencies, developing scarce and critical skills, and facilitating organisational transformation with, among others, Deloitte’s management consultancy practice, the business schools at each of our premier universities and TVET colleges.
“As the largest employer of pharmacists in the private sector, we partner with pharmacy schools, external learning providers and other stakeholders to ensure delivery of talented, motivated healthcare professionals who choose to work for us.”
The group’s Pharmacy Healthcare Academy, registered with the SA Pharmacy Council, develops pharmacist assistants. Currently 624 learners are registered on learnership programmes and the annual investment in bursaries is driven by a transformation agenda reflected by 92 percent black and 62 percent female students this year.
Elaborating on the Employee Value Proposition, Engelbrecht says Clicks acknowledges every employee as unique through education, knowledge, behavioural and technical competencies, personal attributes, and experience.
“We develop people for their current role and for varied circumstances and capabilities required for our future organisation. Internal and external development opportunities support the diverse functional areas across our multiple business units.”
Insisting that workforce planning is about ensuring organisational capability for today and tomorrow, she explains how employee analytics enhance it, “At the most basic level, we are better at understanding our workforce demographic profile and the application of our human capital practices through the lens of diversity and we are able to provide the business with HR dashboards that at a glance clarifies our human capital metrics. Like many other organisations, we are challenged to engage meaningfully across the generational divide. Hence a review all of rewards practices to respond to differing employee needs. We also re-trained managers on how best to deliver results by using their self-service facility within our Human Capital Management (HCM) system – whilst managing potential data breaches.”
One of the latest projects involves embedding the group’s labour model within the HCM system. An expansive growth strategy has been set over the medium-term that requires scarce and critical skills for up to 40 new Clicks stores and up to 30 new pharmacies every year.
The initial scenario and demand forecast planning highlighted significant gaps in the availability of resources in the internal and external labour markets - a constraint on the aspiration of expansive, profitable growth. Engelbrecht and her central team took the lead in identifying solutions for challenges revealed by environmental analyses performed by the business units as part of the group’s strategic planning process.
The opportunity to design default store labour models and embed them within the HR system was recognised, based on the need to enhance employee productivity and achieve employment cost savings. There was also a need to improve the accuracy of employee master data as well as integrate pay and benefit policies to improve HR reporting and analytics, the resourcing and learning interventions to proactively improve the talent pipeline and organisational capability.
“The team”, Engelbrecht says, “recognised the need to implement consistent labour models based on a methodology that could be applied to all business units, without constraining our agility to respond to changes in customer and market demands.
“Success came through active consultation with all stakeholders, whilst ensuring that the business leaders assumed executive sponsorship of the final solution. The efficiency of labour models is a key focus area, with remarkable results quantitatively and qualitatively. We realised savings in excess of R30 million in the first year, whilst generating significant quantifiable benefits.
“Our Clicks Learning Delivery and Resourcing teams critically reviewed the alignment and efficiency of their delivery models, resulting in additional cost savings and the Group further advanced its Transformation agenda.”
She cautions, however, “You cannot even begin to think about workforce analytics if you are not consistently delivering the basics. This builds the credibility of the human capital fraternity and justifies the investment in a quality HCM system as a key enabler of analytics.
HR practitioners must also be credible business partners, not only fully aligned to but understanding the medium -term business strategy and the drivers of success. A quality, controlled HR system with superior scenario planning and reporting capabilities, accurate employee master data and an embedded organisational design are absolute pre-requisites.”
Group CEO David Kneale, concludes, “I’m reminded of Robin Sharma’s quote - The way we do small things determines the way we do everything. The Clicks Group’s high performance culture is underpinned by continuous pursuit of excellence. We aim to get the basics right every day and to innovate and improve our processes, it is what enables us to consistently deliver great results.”