Angelique Montalto

IMAGINE HOW YOUR EMPLOYEES FEEL

SAP Concur’s regional sales director Angelique Montalto explains why organisations’ duty of care is elevated during times of crisis.

We are all experiencing and embracing new challenges as we navigate the current climate of social and economic uncertainty. Globally, one and all we need to adapt to the new accepted norm of remote worBY ANGELIQUE MONTALTO king and in more severe instances, a total lockdown of business as usual.

Organisations owe it to their employees to keep them safe either while working remotely or travelling on official company business. In times of major disruption or heightened risk, companies need to take all necessary measures to ensure they can meet the necessary duty-of-care obligations and keep their employees informed and away from harm while they are operating on behalf of the organisation.

What is duty of care?

Duty of care refers to a company’s moral and legal responsibility to care for the well-being of its employees during the course of business. This has clear implications for things like workplace culture, employee well-being, company benefits and other aspects guiding employee safety during the performance of their work duties – whether at the office, working remotely or travelling. In South Africa, employer duty-of-care obligations are guided by statutory requirements mainly under the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA). In terms of the OHSA, the CEO of every employer is liable for contraventions of the OHSA, and can be fined or criminally convicted if found negligent. Importantly, while the OHSA refers specifically to ‘the workplace’, that workplace can be anywhere

where official work duties are performed, including working from home or travelling abroad. This puts pressure on organisations to meet their duty-of-care obligations. Companies should know where their people are, whether far away or close to the office, and must be able to alert employees during a crisis, provide them with any assistance they may need, and keep open lines of communication until everyone is safe.

Challenges with keeping mobile employees safe

In one study, 77 percent of finance leaders said they were not confident they could quickly and accurately locate employees during an emergency. Considering the growth in business travel and remote working, this is alarming: over the past 15 years travel spend has doubled to more than $1.2 trillion, with employee-initiated spend the second-largest expense in a growing number of organisations. An additional complication is a growing behaviour of employees booking business travel trips independently, outside the company booking tool or preferred travel management company. Without access to accurate and timeous data for each employee, companies simply can’t track their movement or get in touch during a time of emergency. For most companies, manually tracking their employees is impractical or downright impossible. And their employees notice: in one study, 41 percent of employees who were near a natural disaster said they were not contacted by their company at all. This is where technology offers some vital tools to assist in the effort to keep employees safe and meet their duty-of-care obligations.

Tools to monitor and track employees’ well-being

The Active Monitoring and Locate services within SAP Concur provides companies with a powerful tool for capturing and accessing location data about employees in real-time. Through Locate, companies provide assessments and alert pre-trip to warn of potential dangers involved with the employee’s itinerary, and can reliably communicate directly with employees regardless of the situation. By using a single tool to monitor employee location, companies also gain intelligence on country-specific travel disruptions and risk events, and can proactively alert employees no matter the time of day. Active Monitoring is an additional service designed in collaboration with risk management experts to simplify an organisation’s duty-of-care responsibilities. The service is integrated to SAP Concur and offers a full operations centre powered by HX Global, which specialises in tracking, alerting and assisting business travellers around the world 24/7/365.

Companies gain access to multiple channels for communicating with at-risk employees during times of emergency or crisis. They are also able to facilitate the sharing of information and advice to ensure they get their employees to safety as quickly as possible. SAP Active Monitoring and Locate are both available through the SAP Concur travel and expense management platform. 

For more information, visit: www.concur.co.za www.supplychainpartner.com www.scania.com Or scan the QR code:

Brigitte Da Gama, McDonald's SA

Phila Zondeki, Wesbank

Non-performance: A thing of the past?

HR leaders say an overwhelming majority of employees have pulled up their socks to ensure their organisations remain sustainable despite the impact of the Covid-19 notional lockdown on revenues.

BY SUNGULA NKABINDE

With a lot of the focus regarding Covid-19 and its impact on employees leaning to towards the need to be more sympathetic to employees working from home, one of the recent CHRO Community Conversations turned to the subject of how to manage employees who are not collaborative, not productive or not coping and don't "get with the programme" during these unprecedented times.

The participants were asked: "Surely some employees may not collaborate as well as you would expect to during this time of lockdown and restrictions. How do you balance empathy with the need for the company to survive in a sustainable way?”

Barloworld group HR director Tantaswa Fubu said that her team had not experienced any slacking by their people during the lockdown. In fact, it was quite the opposite. She said people at Barloworld were working even harder during this time and that this could partly be because people are concerned about losing their jobs and want to prove their worth more than ever before.

“That said, not coping and not being productive can be two different things. One of the reasons for someone not being able to work productively can very well

Ruth Wotela, Silverbridge

Zuko Mdwaba, Workday

be be cause their lockdown environment is not conducive to being productive. It is then imperative for the line manager to understand what is happening in that employee’s life before labelling the employee as being unproductive or non-performing,” she said.

She added: “For those who are not pulling their weight, I don’t believe Covid-19 and the lockdown means we should throw our performance management processes out of the window. In fact, I think with lockdown it is much easier to tell when someone is not delivering. People who have been able to hide behind smooth-talking, looking busy and getting others to do their work are now getting exposed. It is now about showing results instead of showing face.”

Line managers to share the blame

The conversation also saw focus turned towards line managers, who may also be struggling to manage people effectively in this new way of working.

"It’s easy to point the finger at employees but we must also remember that the manager has to share a lot of that responsibility. Managers who are accustomed to managing people in an office environment also have to adjust their management style and those who do not do so cannot simply point the finger at employees whose performance begins to drop during the lockdown,” said Workday country manager for South Africa, Zuko Mdwaba.

“As managers, it is absolutely imperative that we understand that not all people need to be managed in the same way. We need to tweak our approach to be able to get the best of every individual, especially

“One of the reasons for someone not being able to work productively can very well be because their lockdown environment is not conducive to being productive. ”

in cases where there is a vast difference in performance before and after lockdown.“

Silverbridge people wellness executive Ruth Wotela agreed, saying that has been their exact approach, explaining to managers that they need to adopt an individualistic approach when managing and leading their teams because this allows them to understand and raise performance issues proactively, and deal with those issues appropriately.

This article is based on insights and contributions from CHRO South Africa's weekly Community Conversations. To get involved in the online discussions, please get in touch with CHRO SA MD Joël Roerig (jroerig@chro.co.za)

Tantaswa Fubu, Barloworld

“Managers who are accustomed to managing people in an office environment also have to adjust their management style.”

“We have daily stand-up meetings. We set and agree on expectations and if something needs to be done by the end of the day it must be done," she says.

Training was needed

Preparing managers for this kind of environment was something that needed to happen from the onset as some may have needed training on how to manage people who are working remotely. McDonald’s South Africa’s chief people officer, Brigitte Da Gama said they had done a massive amount of communication in which they set the tone for what would be expected because they went into remote-working mode long before the national lockdown was implemented.

Back then, they made it clear that they would keep people in the loop and told them that sacrifices would have to be made.

Said Brigitte: “We have ensured regular and robust communication with all our stakeholders, starting with our employees, in which we set the tone for what would be expected during this time. We have an app that allows everyone to be communicated to in real-time to facilitate this. We also conducted training on how to performance manage virtual teams. We also realised that exceptional and elevated leadership skills are very good to have."

“Whether working virtually or from the office, you need to continue managing poor performance. It will have a far more negative impact on the team and the business if not addressed.”

Treat people like human beings

Wesbank HR executive Phila Zondeki said it was important to be careful not to jump to labelling people as non-performers because, when lockdown started, all the research pointed to anxiety that people may be facing, “which as an HR leader, would direct you to play a more supportive role and relaxing the strict performance requirements that one has."

Phila added: “How do you manage output with seeing someone face-to-face? If I go into the operations side of the business and I look at what the outcomes are looking like right, I think it’s likely that I would assume that a lot of people are not carrying their weight. But performance management needs to be based on clear and explicit objectives and deliverables that take into account the context of Covid-19.”

She said that people would always follow what the leadership was doing and that, if the leadership was doing something that is contrary to what they say they expect, then there were bound to be employees who followed suit.

Ultimately, Tantaswa said performance management, even in times of Covid-19, is about treating people like human beings because they will then be more likely to open up about the personal challenges they are facing.

“We also have to be prepared to hear things that we are not prepared for, personal stuff and figure out how best to practically support our people. We should postpone labelling people as non-performers until we have understood their circumstances especially when we are dealing with people who are suddenly acting out of character,” Tantaswa said, adding that, if someone is a known performer, there must be a reason why they are now not performing in lockdown. 

Join the conversation

Who knew it would take a pandemic to accelerate the unstoppable growth of an executive community? With physical events like summits and dinners being rendered impossible by the Covid-19 restrictions that have been in place since March, the CHRO South Africa community has taken refuge online – and how!

Amid the confusion and anxiety of lockdown, we soon realised that connections, support, perspective, consolation and fresh ideas are needed more than ever. The weekly CHRO SA Community Conversations on Tuesday evenings have quickly developed into the best platform for HR leaders to ask each other questions, exchange ideas, blow off steam and compare notes of what it's like to be in charge of the people agenda during such crazy times.

The CHRO South Africa community is now over three years old, with the launch of HR Indaba Africa in 2018 and CHRO Awards as 2019 major milestones in its growth. I don’t think we have ever added so many new participants to our initiatives as during the current lockdown period though. The topics have been tough, but also stimulating and inspirational – what a privilege to be part of these chats!

What’s next? First of all, you’re going to be hearing from the HR Indaba Network soon. Secondly, we are entering the wondrous world of webinars. They won’t just be any webinars, but freely accessible HR masterclasses, panel discussions with CHROs and deep dives into tools, trends and burning questions. If the nearly 1,000 registrations for the very first webinar – about remuneration & Covid-19 – are anything to go by, we’re finding ourselves at the top of another rollercoaster ride.

If you would like to get involved in the CHRO SA Community Conversations or webinars, please don’t hesitate to let me know. And if you want to expose your direct reports to the world-class learning and networking you have become used to, please send me a note about the corporate membership (see the page opposite).

As this people crisis unfolds further, I wish you strength, insight and a community to support you.

JOËL ROERIG

MANAGING DIRECTOR CHRO SOUTH AFRICA +27 76 371 2856 JROERIG@CHRO.CO.ZA