In the period under review, Safaricom recognized and celebrated teams and individuals who embodied Safaricom way of SPEED, SIMPLICITY AND TRUST. Through the Safaricom way hero stories, 15 teams and 9 individuals were recognized for actively displaying the Safaricom way as they carried out their jobs. From this group two staff members were awarded with an opportunity to visit Vodafone in the United Kingdom later this year to attend the Vodafone Customer Experience event.

Diversity and Inclusion

Our purpose challenges us to look at the most immediate needs of our society, and find solutions that transform lives. Our focus on Diversity and Inclusion is an intentional effort towards ensuring inclusivity for all in the community. In financial year 2017/18, we continued to embed diversity and inclusion as a way of life. During the period under review, we accelerated efforts to ensure Safaricom mirrors the communities we serve. The company continues to position itself as the employer of choice through four Interdependent levers of Attraction, Retention, Growth & Development and Driving Change.

Gender: Overall, we have maintained a gender-balanced workforce of 50:50 whilst management has also remained at 68:32 with an ambitious plan to achieve 50:50 by FY 2020/1

Persons with disabilities: 1.7% of our staff force is composed of persons living with disabilities.

We have an ambitious goal of increasing this to five per cent by March 2021. Safaricom has so far employed ninety-six members of staff with various disabilities including visual and hearing impairments, paraplegics, and people living with albinism and dwarfism. Our desire is to create an employee value proposition that positions us as an inclusive, equal opportunity employer, not because we are required to, but because it is the right thing to do.

Supporting people living with disability

Our intention is not only to offer employment opportunities to persons with disability, but also to ensure that we provide a conducive working environment for them to realize their full potential. To this end, we have gone an extra mile to enhance our support concerning their diverse range of requirements specific to the nature of disability. These includes, enhanced medical cover, assistive devices, inclusive physical environment, emergency response equipment for persons living with disabilities and psychosocial support for staff as well as employees who have children with disabilities.

In addition, we conducted various trainings to create awareness and sensitize staff in a bid to eliminate stigma and discrimination. During the year, we embraced inclusive communication that entails captioning of Safaricom videos, inclusion of persons living with disabilities in our advertisements and sign language interpretation in our key events. Seventy-two staff members were trained in basic sign language.

Talent Management

Safaricom continues to invest and build its talent across the organization to ensure capacity and capability building stays ahead of business demand. Our members of staff determine our success, Safaricom is hence keen to ensure increased staff engagement, and continued improvement in productivity. As a digital first organization, we are constantly investing in capacity to innovate for continuous transformation and organizational agility.

Coaching

During this period, we introduced a coaching culture within the organization’s teams. An examination of various company-wide reports, surveys, and feedback has highlighted the need to develop and ingrain a coaching culture to support employee wellness, performance management, and leadership development. It is Safaricom goal to instil a culture of coaching in order to empower talent and inspire new levels of innovation, unconventional thinking, and workplace agility.

Coaching is used in Safaricom to develop people’s skills and abilities, boosting performance individually and as an organization. We now offer online coaching programs via staff eLearning portal. Over 70 certified coaches and 460 line managers were trained on coaching skills representing 76% of total line managers. All the executive leadership have started their coaching certification journey with an aim of completing before end of 2018/19 financial year. Our mission is to embed a coaching culture within Safaricom, where everyone acts and interacts like a coach actively coaching or being coached.

Safaricom Women in Leadership Programme

Safaricom Women in Leadership Programme aims at building an inclusive leadership culture that gives equal opportunities to men and women within the company. This move has in turn supported our goal of achieving diversity in leadership, improving our performance and allowing us to open up more opportunities to more women within the business.

In financial year 2017/18, fifty-seven women attended the Safaricom Women in Leadership Program. While thirty women were certified as productivity and engagement coaches in the business to build capacity for women coaching and mentorship. We also sponsored five women for executive coaching.

Agile

As a business, we seek to develop not only the right capabilities, but also employees who are agile and digitally ready to support and prepare the business through this change and ensure we are fit for future. These initiatives include certification of over five hundred employees in the agile methodology of working as we seek to change our ways of working to align to the new digital space. We also digitized our recruitment process to attract specific segments of digital talent in the market.

Culture

A critical component of the digital journey is our employees. We have identified the Safaricom Culture and are aligning these culture elements to our purpose, brand promise and our values. The elements include Purpose, Humanness, Growth and Trust. Culture is at the core of who we are as an organization, what sets us apart. Safaricom Culture will bring about the following outcomes, an admired brand, engaged and happier employees, innovation, personal and business growth, trust and collaboration across disciplines.

Through implementing culture across members of staff, our people will live the Safaricom purpose and values in their interactions with customers and community every day, everywhere.