Business unusual as SA companies zoom in on brave new world
● With life in SA now resembling a dystopian fantasy, courtesy of Netflix’s Black Mirror series, companies are adjusting to the new normal — living on video applications like Zoom or Microsoft Teams as they try to keep the wheels of the economy turning.
“Can we agree on the latest acronym — cylizm — ‘call you later, in Zoom meeting’,” quipped Elian Wiener, founder of Wealthwoke.com, on Facebook this week.
Everyone is adjusting to a digital working life that hardly seemed possible just a month ago.
Alexander Forbes, for example, says it became the first JSE-listed company in SA to “successfully hold a virtual shareholders meeting” on Tuesday after the governmentordered national lockdown.
JSE CEO Leila Fourie says the bourse had enabled Alexander Forbes’ virtual meeting.
She adds that most of the exchange’s 500 staff have been working from home, with only between three and five of them working at its office.
“We started testing remote work three weeks before the lockdown. We were fully expecting it [the coronavirus pandemic and a shutdown] to evolve as it has,” says Fourie.
“We engaged with the market quite early on in the cycle because the JSE is a very integrated and connected ecosystem and markets won’t function with the JSE operating as an island.
“We are highly dependent on connectivity to our market, whether they are traders, the buy side, which is the pension fund and asset managers, market data vendors, and we were obviously very dependent on some of our key vendors as well as ensuring that the entire market has equal and consistent access to the market.
“The obvious concern would be if, for example, a telco went down and wasn’t able to operate remotely — that would prohibit some of our trading members from connecting, which could create an unequal and unfair market.”
With this in mind, the JSE had held discussions with regulators and all market participants to ensure that “everybody had equally invoked their business continuity plan and also to make sure that they were able to, as far as possible, work from home”.
Fourie says it’s important to remember that “solitary confinement is considered an extreme form of punishment” and that a “mental-health pandemic” could follow if social distancing and the effects of the lockdown are not appropriately managed.
And with the “changing work cultures, it is important to prioritise personal interaction through technology — and leadership and engagement become an important aspect of running a business in these times”.
“I’ve been impressed by my leaders in the way they have stepped up to the plate in leading through difficult times,” Fourie says.
“I’ve also been impressed by the resilience the staff have shown and their random acts of kindness through the crisis.”
Discovery CEO Adrian Gore says 80% of the group’s up to 10,000 employees in SA are working from home.
“We are an essential service, so all of our businesses are functional and I’m proud about what the team has done there.
“The organisation is fully functional. We’ve moved virtually everything online but every single function of the organisation is working. If you are a client of ours, you should see nothing different.”
However, he also says the change to working from home has been “profound”.
Commenting on the challenges working from home can bring, Gore says: “I think the barrier between home and work doesn’t exist and it makes you probably work longer hours. You’ve got to stick to a routine, making sure you connect with people, even if it is virtually. Staying physically active is crucial.”
Trevor Adams, Nedbank’s chief risk officer, says 83%, or 17,500, of the bank’s campus staff are working at home.
“We’ve got about 12,500 staff with VPN [virtual private network] devices and about 9,000 staff on 3G. We’ve ramped a lot of that up and we were also able to negotiate with MTN and Vodacom [to get] quite an increase in bandwidth. We’ve managed to negotiate significant increases so your average user would get about 2 gigabytes and we’ve increased that to 10 gigabytes.”
A Standard Bank spokesperson says just over 60% of its more than 29,000 workforce are operating from home.
“A further 20% of employees are working from alternative locations within the group. This strategy enabled us to de-densify the work space to accommodate social distancing,” the spokesperson says.
EOH Holdings CEO Stephen van Coller says the group does a lot of work remotely across SA and in other countries, “so scaling that up has not been that difficult”.
“We also, as an exco, went a week early and just started working from home just to see what it would be like and just trying to make sure that everything works and to get yourself set up.”