Empowering the workforce, with Tsebo Solutions Chief People Officer Elanie Kruger

[Music] Welcome to the CHRO South Africa podcast. In this episode you will hear from Tebosolutions Chief People Officer, Ilani Kruger, about the role that HR leaders should play in combatting South Africa's worsening unemployment crisis. She also talks about the strategies she's found to be most effective in addressing historical workplace balances and how businesses can move beyond the tick box approach when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. Welcome to the CHRO South Africa podcast. My name is Rulanka Binde and I am the community manager at CHRO South Africa. Today I'll be speaking to Ilani Kruger Chief People Officer at Tebosolutions, which is a leading workplace management solutions provider across Africa operating in about 26 countries and with over 32,000 employees. Ilani is a very valued and longtime member of the community who has made immense contributions to the HR fraternity through many of our sessions. And we're taking some time today, which is long overdue to get their thoughts on how organizations and HR leaders can contribute to the skills development landscape in South Africa. So thank you very much Ilani for joining and welcome to the podcast. Thank you Sungula. Thank you for having me. Lovely. So Ilani, before we start recording, we were talking a little bit about what Zeppodas and I think many people have the wrong idea or underestimate how much you guys actually do. I thought it was simply providing security and catering and cleaning services but it's a much, much bigger operation about Kyrgyz. Can you share some light on what that is? Thank you Sungula. I think if you look at Sehbu and what we actually do on a day-to-day basis, you will be astounded with the workplace solutions that we offer, not only in South Africa but across the continent. We have as our mantra, we develop people to serve people, to uplift society and it's something that really prides us. If you look at the services that we offer, it range from hard services like engineering, like energy, soft services that could be cleaning vacant property solutions and waste management to specific projects like revamping your office space, especially now after COVID, looking at more friendly and engaging office environment, optimization of workplace designs, how to use predictive analytics actually to manage your day-to-day retail sector and mobilisation of employees, also doing consumption analytics from energy and utility management perspective and we've got many large multinational clients but also smaller clients where we offer several hospitality and other services across the continent. Thanks for that, Elani. Before we get into the skills development stuff, let's just get a little bit of background into you and your career. Can you tell us about the highlights and your journey, how you got into HR and so forth? I think reflecting on my journey, I actually realised that I've always been involved in some transformation process whether or not it was transforming businesses or it was transforming people and sustainability to me was always key and the one thing that's a golden trick for me that I've learned is that sustainable relationships is just as important as focusing on sustainability and therefore I've had the privilege to work in many great companies and working with many great people to where I've learnt an exceptional amount in terms of my career. Some of the highlights was as a youngster being deployed to developer station so it was a very different environment that I was used to in coming from Stalin-Posh as an honest graduate at the time in economics and industrial psychology but I thoroughly enjoyed it, I enjoyed the people and the one highlight that I really enjoyed there was the whole transformation that the country were going through at the time. It was the separation, a abolishment of the Separate Immunities Act, it was the abolishment of the Group Areas Act and you had to take communities through change management and look at different ways of working and actually be a catalyst for change and transformation for the future of South Africa. And that is something that I'm very proud of and a journey that there's a lot of lessons learned during that period that I keep very close to my heart. Further on I think another highlight for me is when I worked for Iskum at the head offices I was the head of the industry relations for the generation group, all the power stations and it was also again a transformation journey with the likes of Guerimantashi, Flubbaise, Chalema Moklante, sat around the table and negotiated for a better future for the people of Iskum with the management teams. So that to me is a highlight and also something that I'm very proud of. I finished my master's degree in industrial psychology, I'm very proud of my profession and very passionate about it and I wanted to get more exposure outside the realm of industrial relations although everything went through the bargaining units at that time and I joined Forma K which was now to ask for Forma K but it was a pharmaceutical company and there again it was transformation of our results and by focusing on values and purpose and shared beliefs. We achieved our sales targets and I would never forget 364 of us, Lutu Mauritius at the end of that year because we did achieve our sales targets. So that was quite memorable to me. I then joined group four securities, completely different industry and was involved in a brownfield BBB where I have learned so much from a commercial perspective etc and by looking at businesses and looking at how you could create a different business model from a normal government institution and bring in change and innovation in that process that to me was very good. From a historically perspective then transformation was very big in the BBB field and instead of achieving a 10% employment from the community that was represented I achieved a 60% in terms of that. Something that I was very proud of and it just showed to me if you look long and hard you will find the right skills of people in the community. So that was very valuable to me. I was then pulled out of South Africa to the UK following my husband's career and there I did executive search and worked in terms of strategic business planning for a company called Ceridian. What I've learned there was cultures, different cultures, different approaches, different ways of thinking about things, different ways of driving change management given cultures. South Africa is a very direct and forceful culture. If you want A you ask for A and if you wanted to be delivered in a certain way you would ask for that. In different cultures you just don't that might not be as acceptable so I became a bit more diplomatic I would say that would be my learning. I came back to G4S and then I really got involved in Africa. Africa is very close to Mahat, the people in Africa is very close to Mahat and I think what I really learned in terms of my seven, eight years then was to build communities and to also build the A-cho community and the importance to do that and it takes if you don't have teams it will take you about three years to get there. Then I came to Tsebo and Tsebo is such a diverse entrepreneurial company and the the ask was to can you please help us corporatise it to help us with our next growth opportunity and that is something that I've also apparently enjoyed. Lovely and how long have you been now with Tsebo? I've been with Tsebo now just over six years. Okay, yeah he has a trend of view really sticking it out with organisation. It's just something that's not very common to today. Is it just a matter of you being lucky with organisations you found or do you believe that it's important to stay at an organisation a long time? I think it's important to stay with an organisation because you have to go through a whole learning curve. A lot of the youngsters are found these days. They start off with something, they say oh I've done one round of succession planning, tick the box, I'm ready for one next move. No, you need to plan something, you need to execute it, you need to learn from it, you need to redo it. It's only by about the third time which you find that you would really say that you've mastered it completely. I'm not talking about menial doors but if you have big projects, change management etc, the other thing is you need to have grit, you need to stick it out. No relationship, whether or not it's in your personal capacity or it's in a work capacity, it would always be smooth sailing. The same happens in organisation and you need to write it out. Otherwise you will stumble into the same problems every time that there's a stumbling block you want to leave. You're never going to learn how to deal with difficult situations. Okay that's amazing and now let's move on to the actual focus of the episode which is to talk about skills development and more importantly HR's role in contributing in the fight against unemployment. The unemployment situation in South Africa is a crisis by all measures and this has dire implications for the sustainability of all businesses in the country as a whole. What in your view is the role that HR leaders should play to combat this seemingly undeterrable one-ster? I think first of all I would say what is HR's role in any crisis, not only unemployment and in a crisis it's there to make sure that your employees are adequately prepared through training that you create a safe environment for them that you have proper communication plans in place and that you actually protect them in that space. So if you then look at the unemployment crisis you can actually look at it from an internal perspective and an external perspective. So it's very important for employees to feel that they have the required skills to do the job, that their jobs are safe and that you create that environment for them to excel and to grow. But from an external perspective it's also important to create opportunities and maybe as a responsible employer think differently about what you can do to alleviate unemployment in the country. So let me give you an example. Learner'ships for example would be one where you take unemployed use, you put them through learning skills development program and at the end of the day they've got the skills to be employable because the problem in South Africa is the employability. We battle with employability. I find that in our quest for talent the talent market is not full of people that we can actually employ. They lack the appropriate skills and I think as businesses we must become a bit more open minded and not look for the perfect fit but maybe look for the 80% fit and then be open to actually develop them. It's also another one that maybe lots of everybody would agree with me but saying you've got two positions why don't you split it in three? You can still have the same cost structure but you give opportunities for people to learn or create more internship opportunities where people can come into the organisation and they can at least get exposure because they use today some of them have degrees etc but they cannot find jobs because they don't have the experience. Lovely. Yeah I mean you speak about these skills element as a very important one and you recently announced in the press release that you know it's a bit of a go the extra mile when it comes to spending on learning and development going above the mandated 1% requirement. What can you elaborate on why this commitment to L&D is essential for the business and South Africa's workforce in total? I think if you look at our purpose we say we develop people to serve people to uplift society so the development of people is at the core of everything we do we are a people business that's the main thing that we do so from a people business perspective we need to always ask ourselves if we want to grow what is it that we need from our people that will differentiate us at the end of the day and therefore if you look in 2022 we have engaged more than 12 and a half thousand people in terms of skills development programs and learningshops. You won't always have funded learnshops you might have unfunded learnshops but if you can really if you're really serious about transformation you need to do more than just I always want almost want to say what's in your financial means you have to give a little bit back to the community in terms of that what we find is the more we can upskill people the more at the end of the day they will be able to provide for their families the less the more taxes will be paid if you think about it and the less reliance on government for grants etc so if we serious about participating in South Africa in the community and making a difference we actually need to show and demonstrate our commitment to that and that's why our learning and development academy is really focused on the development of people. Can you tell us about that academy is it something that's been around for a long time how many people do you take how many of those people do you employ? Okay so a lot of our skills development programs are run internally for our employees so that they can get a credited training but also we do have for unemployed learners in the past year we had about a thousand learnership our absorption in total is not that high it depends on availability or vacancies because you can't just expand your bicep but we do have a model for example in cleaning where you would first come in as a temporary employee you get the full training you get full induction and then you are exposed to various businesses and should there be an opportunity for you you will get the first opportunity it won't necessarily be directly as a result of that specific learningship skills program but more in terms of we did give you an opportunity to be deployed although it might not have been on a permanent basis and then further on so our learning and development academy is to an extended virtual and to an extend it is face to face as well and to extend it's a hybrid but we've got a broad catalog of about nine categories of course areas where people can then put their hand up all with development plans we identify specific training development that people should go through in terms of that in cleaning alone just on our learner management system we've got over 90 programs for cleanness and more than 12,000 people are enrolled on our learner management system that's amazing you touched on transformation being important and we you know how diversity equity and inclusion are really hot topics in the HR space at the moment how do you navigate that within this particular environment I imagine that most of your employees come from a specific demographic because of the kind of work that they do but how do you kind of champion the E&I in the table well first of all sungula if you look at Sabo we've got a 51 year plus history of working in South Africa and if you look at transformation more than 40 years ago we got our first award for transformation already from the BE forum so I would almost say transformation is part of our DNA but we don't only look at transformation given where we operate we don't only look at transformation in terms of gender and in terms of ethnicity and in terms of color what we do however is we yes that obviously is a given but we also look at transformation in terms of challenging ourselves to think differently bringing people that is not a copycat of you but bringing people that will challenge you with a different mindset maybe someone that comes from a different industry that will question you on your ways of working because we know in psychology the only way that you change or develop and grow is actually to have that uneasiness and realise that okay but maybe there is a different way of doing things and there is a different value in terms of that so if you look at our board membership the table board and 80% of our board is black and 40% of our board is black females across our top senior and middle management more than 50% of our employees are black and of which in our senior management 42% of our female would be black female employees and in our junior management we were actually starting to develop and grow and where you can see the focus in terms of development 93% of our employees are black and 46% are black females and that's where you start building your pipelines to get to your top management at the end of the day. Yeah that's quite impressive I mean if it's even at middle and senior management you are doing much better than a lot of organizations throughout corporate South Africa what do you think is your secret source that allows you to be so transformed at a race and gender level at least within the senior and executive levels. Well interesting 60% of our workforce are females so it is a very female dominated environment although in the security side obviously it's different but all in all it's predominantly female employees and I think it's just the nature of the beast and nature that the industry attracts a certain gender profile also we're very open to diversity so it's not that in our environment you have to convince people in terms of transformation. If you want to work at Sebrue this is our DNA this is what we stand for this is what we embrace and that would be so it's a cultural thing it's a DNA thing the second thing I think that's very important would be to look at our recruitment processes where we actively source employees from a range of backgrounds and that to us is first prize we also have a measuring place the EE guide yes you can promote from within we don't have restrictions in terms of that but in terms of recruit externally you have to demonstrate that you really looked long and hard to find the right demographic skillset based on how economically active population. Yeah I mean most of the people I speak to when they say they're struggling to appoint a women in this position or a black person in this position or disabled person in that position they often say the skills are not there what do you have to say to people who have that mindset? Look sometimes the skills are not there but all the skills are hard to find and if you are young and upcoming and very dynamic and you fall in the in the right category so to speak and those are the people that you pay top dollar for and not everybody can afford that so it's about making sure that you bring people into your organization that might not meet 100% your criteria but then you invest in them and you take time to really develop them. I think there's no easy answers from Gula in terms of that because they are certain roles where we really struggle and back all but they are but we also find James if you just look beyond the obvious. And you know what would you say has been the most effective strategies for making people feel included within the business you know as you say earlier for your reasons for staying in an organization it's very difficult to avoid any kind of conflict if you stay in an organization long enough however they are a number of how do I call it not maybe structural but barriers particularly for I would say women in some sectors maybe not so much in several ways it's it's very difficult to feel included and to progress within an organization maybe reflect on your other experiences because they will clearly doesn't have that problem but how do you think is the best way to make employees who might feel marginalized feel at home in an organization. Okay in some of my previous environments where I work at I ran leadership values programs where I sometimes would have a special program just for women if it's an environment where they could where they could feel marginalized to empower them and what I've found as a result of that people actually started playing in their communities more of a leadership role and then they would transcend those leadership skills that they've been taught back into the organization. So if you know you have a problem in a certain area I always call it the pain points if you know these pain points you actually have to solution that not by sitting in your office but actually speaking to the people and asking them how do you solution that specific problem. So in other words what would you recommend what would make you feel different if what happens and then you're bold and interventions specifically around that situation because then often you find that it's not a single event or one person feeling like that but it could be a dream but you do get different personalities and sometimes you do get women scoring their own goals because at the end of the day I don't walk into a boardroom and think I'm a woman. I walk into the boardroom and I think I'm an executive and I expect people to treat me as an executive not as a woman they need to treat me with respect in any event like I have to treat them with respect in any event. Lovely and I suppose one last question talking about the skills developed in Angle again is technology you know AI is the big buzzword that everybody's talking about and given the work that you do predominantly maybe it's not so relevant but definitely from a skills development perspective there are a lot of gaps within the working and unemployed population in South Africa. What do you think is the best way for organizations to come to the party in terms of equipping employees and unemployed people to be digital ready. We have embarked on a big digitisation journey and not only in the HR space but actually from an operational finance sales space as well and we are busy with a major project in terms of how can we always stay on the forefront even when we look at our employees to use predictive analytics to make decisions around certain things and some of the new systems that we've acquired actually helps us to predict certain things. I think if you look at the example that I used when we spoke about what Seibu has to offer we also spoke about predictive analytics specifically in retail in terms of all the cues still too long should you deploy more cashiers and when is the time when you have more people etc but to come back to your question in terms of how you get the workforce ready. I think if you look at stats and ASI the surveys released I think last night there was about we are about 62 million in South Africa and off the 62 million we've got about an unemployment rate of 35% that's massive and there's a lot of youth in terms of that sometimes I do think we underestimate the youth and I think we underestimate people in general in terms of the ability to navigate technology and I often have debates around that there are so many people that's unscilled that or on Facebook that uses WhatsApp that engage with family using technology in some form or another it's about making it simple we saw with our extensive learner management system that we train people now online and most of those people would be classified as digitally illiterate so it's a mindset change to actually believe that you can get your employees digitally savvy if you spend a little bit time with them don't write them often say it won't work for that population then I do believe that communities can get together and identify specific programs where we can explain the world of work from a basic digitisation perspective giving people exposure to introductory programs so that that would enhance their skill and making them more employable and where do you see the other stakeholders in the country getting involved in something like that government education and business as well I mean there's a lot of pressure put on business to cover you know the shortfall where government is maybe perceived to not be coming to the party what do you think is the solution to getting effective collaboration happening if you look at countries like Singapore or Wanda for example they have actually implemented work programs where we have issues with infrastructure etc I believe that's where we should start we should actually create momentum in putting all our politics and owner-gainless aside and really think about what can transform the business so pull together and put our owner-gainless aside and see how can we work together to create something I think on the energy crisis for example there's already talks around how private businesses can help but then you also find that they would always be some resistance in terms of that and maybe if we can put the plight of South Africa first the agendas of your government and of private sector and other parties second then we would be able to create those job opportunities or job work programs that will actually yield the results that we want for the future the one thing I do know is that we can provide in terms of all the infrastructure areas it's not about cerebral going out and say we can do it it's about businesses pulling together and saying let's make a difference and work with government and for government to be inviting for us to to go forward in terms of the future lovely let's talk about your future with several what are your big ambitions to achieve in the next year or medium term what would you say is the legacy you want to leave I think I want to create an environment where the business flourish but the people flourish as well and people are very important to me but it's very important that we if we can grow the business and we look at how we can leverage people as our brand ambassadors as our talent ambassadors to grow the business at the end of the day it just creates more opportunities for everybody and everywhere I think the legacy I want to leave that are my different lovely and that brings us to the end of this episode of the CHROS Africa podcast my name again is Somalang Kabinday thank you for listening and I hope you'll join us next time