Our employee philosophy and management approach is anchored by our talent principles:

• Every person is viewed as talent and can grow and develop
• We focus on capability not role
• Our top leadership will own identification, development, growth and retention of talent
• With proper development, employees identified as top talent, accelerated talent and successors should become future leaders
• Diversity and inclusion are both good for our business and the right thing to do

• Growing our impact means:
  • Owning the things that matter to drive growth across our business and deliver for our customers, communities and teams
  • Identifying and working through challenges, assessing options and finding simple ways to move forward
  • Being exceptionally effective at achieving impact goals and role-modelling Spirit behaviours
• The quality of our people managers is key to success – the development of trusting and empowered managers who motivate, engage and coach their people makes the difference
• To build depth and breadth for critical experiences, we will provide mandatory functional, cross-functional and cross-market moves for talent.

Our approach to talent is based on six relationship-building (RB) aspects:

Our culture

Our main effort during the year under review was to bring the Spirit of Safaricom to life in the way we lead and own our mission. We characterised this as Bringing the Spirit Soul Back, an initiative that is predicated on consistent commitment from leadership through role modelling and ownership of each team’s mission and transformation journey. This ongoing effort includes:

Mindset

We have consolidated all employee engagement communication and engagement under the #Living the Spirit tagline to excite the organisation and deepen understanding and ownership of the Spirit of Safaricom. We are also focused on socialising, as well as deepening understanding and ownership of our Leadership Charter for all people leaders. In addition, we have put significant effort into driving ownership and excitement in Agile and customer obsession through various initiatives such as:

• Weekly staff webinars, of which the majority are focused on
  the Customer Story
• Vodafone group hackathons
• Agile bootcamps
• Productivity sessions
• Safaricom CEO Heroes Event

We also undertook the embedding of purpose through the Doing Good campaign, with staff participating in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities across the country as the Safaricom Foundation celebrates 20 years of support for society.

For more on the Safaricom Foundation, click here

Skillset – Leadership development

To promote the delivery of our mission we continued to upskill and reskill our leaders through the Transformational Leadership Programme. This programme is aimed at creating a common language of mission and spirit performance across the organisation through:

• Purpose – Ensuring clarity on our priorities and actions to grow faster
• Customer Obsession – Being bold in attacking complexity, making it simple for our customers to choose us
• Innovation – Driving results, finding new ways to deliver an impact
• Collaboration – Developing talent and holding others to account.

Phase 1 was completed during the year, with 818 leaders participating. Phase 2, while completed for some teams, remains ongoing with 377 participants.

We also hosted quarterly leadership mentorship sessions through the leadership forum, with the last three sessions focused on leading change and mental wellness. We have identified leading change as essential for all leaders as Safaricom transitions to become a Technology Company. It is to ensure the wellbeing of our leaders that we facilitated the mental wellbeing sessions. These contribute towards awareness of the support to which leaders have access through our Employee Assistance Programme.

Toolset

This involved defining the Leading with Spirit Framework that incorporates Spirit elements in how we lead – that is, leading with spirit. This framework clearly maps the leadership behaviours, competencies and traits that every leader in Safaricom needs to model. The framework itself is clarified for leaders through functional engagement sessions.

We have also included the framework in the refreshed performance management “Grow my Impact” framework defining the “How” of achieving our mission in order to strengthen leadership performance and succession. We track the outcome of the framework through our SEMA Survey metrics.

During the year under review, through collaboration with key stakeholders, we continued to consolidate our effort towards enhancing our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda.

This is done through an annual SEMA staff survey. We conducted our annual SEMA survey in May 2024, with 5,518 employees participating and a 96% response rate, (FY2023: 93%) and translating into a 3% increase on the 2024 Annual survey.

The intent of the annual survey was to measure the progress of the actions taken following the Annual survey and to create a baseline for any emerging new issues.

The survey measured themes related to employee experience, in addition to capturing views on:

• The Spirit of Safaricom
• Customer Obsession
• Digitalisation
• Leadership
• Progress on becoming Agile and fully digital
• Key focus areas around:
  • Thrive (well being)
  • Customer Experience
  • Career Development

Overall, 15 out of 20 themes showed improvement over the Pulse survey with all scores above 60%.

Our talent strategy has been designed to scale the delivery of diverse talent and future-ready skills in order to embed the Spirit of Safaricom. Our ambition is to ensure we deliver:

• Diversity: Females in leadership at 42%
• Persons with disabilities (PWD) at 3.5%
• Succession cover for leadership roles at 75%
• Retention of critical talent in Fintech, Cyber and Big Data at less 5% turnover
• An employee value proposition (EVP) that will make Safaricom the #1 Best Place to Be

To this end, during the year under review, we deployed a multi-year
capability strategy on multiskilling and reskilling enabling the adoption of the 1 More Skill campaign on 14 prioritised digital
skill areas.

Our learning philosophy is anchored on the 70-20-10 approach, where:

• 70% of learning occurs on the job through challenging experiences, projects and assignments
• 20% occurs socially through coaching and mentoring
• 10% through instructor-led learning

This has resulted in significant cost savings, with total training investment for FY2024 standing at KShs 112 million.

With the Company transitioning to agile ways of working, there is now more focus on specific business outputs and contributions as opposed to leveraging on role profiles.

Our Agile Contribution Model supports our new ways of working. Moreover, we have embraced agility through four components aimed at supporting collaboration, flexibility, growth and craftsmanship, with a bias for doers:

• Contribution-based career model
• Performance management model
• Employment contracts
• Remuneration and incentive model

Our Agile people mode ensures that all job profiles are linked to specific business KPIs. Each role has a mapped contribution level aligned with Craft, People and Mindset, Business and Customer.

Each employee is assigned Objective Key Results in line with the overall business mission. These are documented and reviewed through:

• Regular weekly retrospect meetings
• Monthly check-ins
• Quarterly business reviews
• 360 Review sessions
• Bi-annual and annual reviews

Following the launch and adoption of the agile people model, our agility index stands at 78% with a target of 80% in FY2024.

Grow My Impact is the new approach to performance development that we have adopted. It is underpinned by our Spirit behaviours and seeks to unlock and enable a high impact performance and learning culture.

Every employee has Impact Goals set as specified tasks as per the mission, as well as a Grow Goal – an individual development plan aligned with our agile contribution model themes of:

• Business and Customer
• People and Mindset
• Craft

This has achieved great synergy in enabling growth for both business and employee.

During the year under review, employee safety, health and wellbeing continued to be a priority for the Company. While management of occupational road risk (ORR) remained our key risk area, risk management of our top safety, health and environment (SHE) risks, including supplier engagement and management, occupational health and wellbeing and community safety, ensured that we comprehensively addressed our risk areas. Moreover, the implementation of SHW strategy enabled us to achieve yet another fatality-free year of operations.

Our SHW strategic priorities

Our achievements in health and safety spanned our five strategic priorities of:

• Visible felt leadership
• Occupational road risk management
• Occupational health and wellbeing
• Supplier engagement
• Community safety

with notable successes including:

• Zero fatalities
• Three external awards, two CEO awards
• Advancing of our safety culture from Level 2 to Level 3
• Attainment of SHW country plan objectives
• Recertification for ISO 45001 to meet international best practice
• Legal compliance with all statutory obligations
  

The HR Services Awareness programme #Caravan Series is designed for engagement and interaction between all Safaricom Staff and HR. This programme has enabled the HR team to address staff queries and demystify the role of the Resources Division in supporting the business in achieving its mission. During the Caravans, we unpack existing policies, procedures, programmes and practices, thereby enhancing employee experience.

The drivers for these Caravans include shifts and new developments in our operating model, including:

• Our strategic goal of becoming a purpose-led technology company by 2025
• Our agile transformation and customer obsession efforts
• New ways of working occasioned by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic

The programme was devised out of our recognition that there was a need to re-connect, re-engage, and re-energise the teams. We are committed to continuing the engagements to ensure we cover all the chapters in Resources Division.

During the year under review, we ran a series of these virtual Caravans with the themes of:

• Talent and resourcing
• Health, safety and wellbeing
• Total reward
• Financial wellbeing
• Spirit of Safaricom