OUR EMPLOYEES

Offering job opportunities allows us to help integrate many talented and diverse population groups into the economy, ensuring that growth has a broad effect and is sustainable. Close collaboration between business units provides opportunities for the integration and sharing of ideas, knowledge and good practices.

Our value proposition to our employees is to offer a transformative experience throughout their entire journey working at Safaricom. The transformative experience is built upon inclusivity, equal opportunities for learning and career growth and unique reward propositions. We add value to our employees’ lives through humanness, trust, purpose and growth. Safaricom is an environment in which all employees have equal opportunity to be themselves and to belong.

As an employer, our values are:
We are diverse and inclusive
We offer dynamic workspaces
We offer unique wellbeing propositions
We are vibrant and fun
We strive to shape the future through innovation
We impact the community
We strive to support growth and learning opportunities

EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

We are an equal opportunity employer, actively recruiting diverse staff from different backgrounds to reflect the communities we serve. We strive to create an environment in which employees are empowered to thrive, regardless of gender, disability, religion, race, age, thinking style or any other quality.

INTERNAL LABOUR MARKET MAP
The following table describes the movement of members of staff during the year by career level and gender. The percentages in the table represent the proportion of the staff population at that career level and of each gender (not the proportion of the total staff population).

SUPPORTING GENDER DIVERSITY
We are committed to gender diversity at all levels. Our vision is to achieve 50:50 gender parity at management level by the year 2021. In FY19, the percentage of women in senior management roles stands at 34 per cent (up two per cent from last year), and in FY20 we aim to close at 39 per cent. To drive this, we conduct continuous gender target tracking at all levels, targeted recruitment of female managers and Safaricom Women in Leadership programmes such as Women in Technology, Paa Dada and the Safaricom Mowgli Mentorship programme.

Our maternity leave allowance is four months (longer than the statutory three), and we offer flexible working hours for six months upon return to work. To further support working parents, our facilities include a crèche with caretakers and teachers, and staff are encouraged to bring children to work. In the year under review, staff at our two crèches cared for a combined total of 638 children per month on average. We provide a mothers’ room and private areas for expressing and storing milk. We also offer additional support to staff who parent children with special needs.

We have a Women in Technology (WIT) internship programme in place to foster burgeoning careers in the industry, and among our own staff women comprise 30 per cent of our technology division.

SUPPORTING DIFFERENTLY-ABLED PERSONS
Inequality and poverty disproportionately affect people who are differently-abled, especially in developing nations.

At the inaugural Disability Summit in July 2018, held in London and co-hosted by the Kenyan and UK governments, Safaricom signed the Disability Charter for Change. This commits us to the following objectives for differently-abled persons:

eliminating stigma and discrimination;
economic empowerment; and
accessibility and affordability of assistive devices and technologies.

We aim to recruit more people in this group as permanent staff in the technology division and across the business. We have set a target that five per cent of our workforce will comprise differently-abled people by the end of FY21. Currently, 2.1 per cent of our employees are differentlyabled and in FY20 we intend to grow this to 2.9 per cent.

Case Study: Thrive
One of the fundamental pillars of Safaricom culture is Humanness, which affirms that we all matter and that our diversity is our strength. In line with our efforts to be 100 per cent “human at work”, our health and safety team has launched a holistic employee wellness programme called Thrive, a work-based intervention programme designed to provide support to members of staff and create a happy, healthy and productive workforce.

This programme offers interventions to support and sustain the integrated wellbeing of our staff based on:
Body – physical fitness, nutrition, sleep and movement;
Heart – a sense of connectedness and belonging;
Soul – a sense of purpose;
Mind – mental health and wellbeing through mindfulness, meditation, connections with family, gratitude and empathy.

The Thrive programme, which is in phase 2 in FY19, has a 90 per cent reach across the business.

We work hard to create an inclusive and safe environment that enables our staff to achieve both individual and business objectives. Initiatives include:

training all our line managers and employees on unconscious bias;
training at least 500 employees in basic Sign Language, which is a key driver for inclusive communication (these will be deployed “on the ground” in shops and centres to facilitate communication with the hearing-impaired community);
providing customised business tools (assistive devices and technologies);
ensuring our physical environment is accessible, such as by installing braille lift buttons and audible instructions;
procuring specialised evacuation equipment and continuous training; and
celebrating our diversity.

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Safaricom uses the Employee Engagement and Manager Index (part of our “SEMA Survey”) and staff turnover rates to measure the morale of employees.

Employee engagement measures how employees view the organisation by which they are employed, the level of connection and commitment they feel to the organisation and how they passionate they are about their jobs.

While staff gave their overall work environment a rating of 81 (-2 vs FY18), we have made in-roads through a variety of initiatives.

In the year under review, our engagement score rose from 91 to 95. Ninety-four per cent of our staff are likely to recommend Safaricom as a great place to work, reflecting an affection for and commitment to the brand that is corroborated by Safaricom being rated the best company in Africa to work for in 2018 by Forbes Magazine. Staff turnover, at a five-year low of five per cent, bears this out.

Our Manager Engagement Index is 84% – this speaks of our ability to create a conducive environment for our employees to be at their very best when working at Safaricom – developing self and team, leading to creating a compelling career growth.

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Our new performance management process embraces partnering for success and has played a role in driving positive performance:

INTEGRATING THE SDGS INTO OUR GOALSETTING

This year, we began the process of integrating the SDGs into our annual objectives. All staff members were required to align their performance goals to the nine SDGs on which we have pledged to focus. Eighty-three percent of our staff were aware of how their performance goals contribute to the SDGs. This has helped them set more impactful objectives, as well as fostering a spirit of innovation in which they may identify business opportunities in underexploited areas such as (but not limited to) health, agriculture, education and green energy.

TRAINING AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT

We strive to inspire all our employees by supporting a culture of learning, growth and development.

We partnered with Nokia, Huawei, the Moringa coding school, Strathmore Business School, the Institute of Certifi ed Public Accountants of Kenya (ICPAK), the Institute of Health Risk Managers (IHRM) and the Institute of Human Resource Managers (IHRM) to provide learning opportunities to our staff and promote employability.

Company-wide career planning and counselling sessions have reached 4,000 employees. Eighty-fi ve per cent of line managers have undergone our Line Manager Toolkit Programme for developing self and team and creating a compelling career.

SAFARICOM DIGITAL ACADEMY

Our drive to meet the digital future head-on is facilitated by the introduction in 2019 of Safaricom Digital Academy. Over a six-month period, 60 engineers joined an in-house programme based on a hybrid model of learning, delivered in part by external partners (Strathmore, Moringa, Huawei, Edureka) and in part by an internal faculty of experts.

The programme covers the seven essential domains of our digital future, mapping them to real business challenges and opportunities:

Cloud computing
Cyber security
Mobile and web app development
Dev-ops
Data science and analytics
Future network technologies such as 5G, SDN (software defined networking), IoT, NFV (network functions virtualisation)
Agile methodology and design thinking

SAFARICOM DISCOVER GRADUATE MANAGEMENT PROGRAMME
Our Discover programme is a graduate management trainee programme that enables greater talent mobility within the business and supports our drive to make Safaricom increasingly global by accelerating the development of our talent pool. The 18-month programme incorporates rotations within and across functions in an accelerated learning environment to build depth and breadth of experience, and is designed to prepare future leaders to assume challenging responsibilities and roles.

Each year we hire 20 graduates, split 50:50 by gender. We currently have 73 Discover trainees.

Discover alumni/alumnae working at Safaricom
• 1 member of senior management
• 12 managers
• 7 Future leaders

SAFARICOM INTERNSHIP PROGRAMME
Our internship programme provides university students with three months’ job experience wherein students are exposed to real-life work scenarios and challenges. The programme provides a holistic view of how corporations are structured, fosters teamwork and provides an opportunity to build confidence.

Seventy-five of our interns in the year under review work under our “liquid workforce” programme, geared toward developing employees able to adapt and change based on their environment and meet the challenges of the digital age. The programme prepares students for a corporate career by furnishing the skills and experiences to make them employable after college while paying them a stipend.

A SAFE AND SECURE WORKING ENVIRONMENT

We take any potential risk to our staff seriously. We have occupational health and safety (OSH) protocols in place to ensure the physical security of staff, including strict security measures on all of our sites. In the event of a security incident, staff receive real-time SMS alerts and updates.

* Only Safaricom employee man-hours are tracked, so the FIFR and LTIFR are derived from the single recorded employee LTI

In FY19, the number of OSH-related incidents, LTIs and medical treatment cases were down year-on-year. Two tragic fatalities were recorded during the reporting period, both involving contract staff, and we have used our quarterly engagements with suppliers and the annual supplier conference to: address the need for enhanced awareness and oversight on contractor activities; offer training around common health and safety standards; provide assessment tools that enable our suppliers to identify and understand the areas in which they may not meet standards, and the associated risks.