Safaricom - 2020 Sustainable Business Report

73 INTRODUCTION OUR BUSINESS OUR MATERIAL TOPICS OUR STAKEHOLDERS CONCLUDING REMARKS Supporting persons living with disabilities Target 2025 FY20 FY19 FY18 FY17 Persons living with disabilities 5% 2.3% 2.1% 1.7% 1.4% The UN Flagship Report on Disability and Development 2018: Realizing the SDGs by, for and with persons with disabilities – emphasises that people living with disabilities are at a disadvantage regarding most of the SDGs, but it also highlights the growing number of good practices that can create a more inclusive society in which they can live independently. We aim to recruit more people in this group as permanent staff in the technology division and across the business. We have set an aggressive target that five per cent of our workforce will comprise persons living with disabilities by 2025. Currently, 2.3 per cent of our employees are persons living with disabilities. Even though we had hoped to have recruited a larger number of persons living with disabilities during the year, we anticipated that progress would be slow. Much like the challenge of gender representation, this is a multi-dimensional challenge that we are unable to solve on our own. Creating a pipeline of persons living with disabilities to recruit starts long before they arrive for an interview at Safaricom. As a result, we have spent a good deal of time putting the foundational pieces in place. We have been creating relationships with around 40 disability-related organisations so that we can start identifying and supporting potential candidates at earlier stages. We are optimistic that this hard work will start to pay dividends in the near future. During the year, we continued to raise awareness among organisations and leaders in the private and public sectors. We have become a lead member of the Forum for Global Disability, which meets quarterly to accelerate, track and report progress on the disability agenda in Kenya. We also became the first Kenyan company and fourth African company to join the coveted Valuable 500, a global movement that takes the disability agenda to the boardroom. We have also worked at raising awareness within the company and were gratified to see that 90 per cent of employees believe that we celebrate diversity within our workforce in the latest SEMA Survey. We also won two awards for Diversity & Inclusion from the Federation of Kenyan Employers (FKE) during the year, and the Daima Trust DIAR for being the most inclusive company in Kenya. Employee engagement We use the Employee and Manager Engagement Indexes (part of our SEMA Survey) and staff turnover rates to measure the morale of employees. The two indexes measure how employees and managers view the organisation by which they are employed, the level of connection and commitment they feel to the organisation, and how passionate they are about their jobs. As the following table illustrates, employee engagement decreased by seven per cent to 89 this year. We attribute this decrease to the disruption and uncertainty created by the sudden passing of our late CEO, Bob Collymore, at the start of the year, and the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of the year. A score in the high 80s, nonetheless, suggests that employees have a very positive attitude towards the company and a high level of commitment and satisfaction. Employee morale FY20 FY19 FY18 FY17 Employee Engagement Index (%) 89 96 90 84 Manager Engagement Index (%) 89 84 87 85 Staff Turnover Rate (% of total workforce) 5.0 5.7 5.4 5.2 SEMA Survey Participation in the SEMA Survey improved this year with 4 919 members of staff responding, which equates to 89 per cent of employees (up from 85 per cent in FY19). This level of participation suggests that our people remain confident in this dialogue process. Nine out of 16 categories have improved since 2018, although some of the progress made in FY19 has not been sustained. There is continued effort to engage with employees as we work towards improving our performance going forward. Overall, the scores place the company at par with other high performance companies.