Employees

Workforce demographics

Employees by gender

* Includes executive leadership

We are an equal opportunity employer, actively recruiting diverse staff from different backgrounds to be to be reflective of the communities that 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.

We are committed to equal gender representation at all levels. Our target is to achieve 50:50 gender parity at senior management level by 2025. At the close of the reporting period, the proportion of women in senior management roles was 35 per cent (an increase of one per cent from FY19) and in our executive leadership it was 36 per cent (an increase of nine per cent from FY19). While we are satisfied that we are moving in the right direction, we acknowledge that there is still much work to be done if we are to achieve our ambitious target by 2025.

In terms of achieving gender representation at senior levels, progress has been slower than we would like because this continues to be a multi-dimensional issue and one that affects technology companies like Safaricom disproportionately. The lack of women in senior positions is an issue that starts at tertiary-level educational institutions, which find fewer women applying to study technology-related subjects, and, even earlier, at school. We are addressing this ’external’ aspect of the issue through our Women in Technology (WIT) programmes, which seek to develop a pipeline of female talent in the field of technology (see the WIT summary presented in the Society section on page 63 of this report).

Internally, our Women in Leadership (WIL) programmes, such as the Paa Dada initiative and the Safaricom Mowgli Mentorship programme, work to support and develop female leaders to create a pipeline of potential talent that is ready to assume senior positions within the firm.

The following table describes the movement of employees 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 gender (not the proportion of the total staff population).

As the table illustrates, the labour movements within the business remained fairly stable. This was largely driven by the measures put in place to achieve gender parity at all levels as well as our employee value proposition aimed at making us the best place to work. As we transition to a becoming a digital services provider, we continue to invest in upskilling our workforce and exposing them to broader roles and assignments.

Our transformation from being a telco’ to being the digital services provider has changed the roles and skills being prioritised within the business. This has impacted our talent management goals and slowed down the recruitment and growth of women within the business. We have had fewer vacancies this year and combined roles into bigger portfolios that are frequently absorbed upwards by a more senior employee, who is often male.

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.

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.

The decrease in training spend during the year reflects our intentional transition to e-learning via the Safaricom Business School and Digital Academy. The cost of delivering e-learning is substantially lower than traditional classroom-based learning. The shift has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and we anticipate that e-learning will account for at least 10 per cent of our budget going forward. Likewise, the percentage of employees that attended training was expected to decrease as we cut back on classroombased learning and shifted perceptions from seeing training as something that we undertake ‘away from our desks’ to part of our daily job.

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. The professional development and growth of trainees in terms of becoming functional experts in different areas, such as cyber security and data science, is measured throughout the programme. Each year we hire 20 graduates, split 50:50 by gender. We currently have 73 Discover trainees.

Total OSH-related incidents

* Employee-related

We continue to take our responsibility to maintain a safe working environment for staff and contractors very seriously. Regrettably, one fatality was recorded during the year. There was a traffic accident that resulted in the death of a pedestrian (third party). Road safety remains an area of focus and we continued with our road safety awareness campaigns, three card penalty system and “Tea with the CHRO” initiative for journey management offenders. Four hundred and fifty eight fleet vehicles are currently fitted with telematics.

During the year, we also continued to work with our contractors to ensure they understand, and comply, with our health and safety standards. We used our quarterly engagements with suppliers and the annual supplier conference to address these issues and have offered further training and support. We also focused on the safety of casual workers carrying out trenching work and reclassified this activity as high-risk.