🔒 Global Index shows SA business hits reputational crisis after propaganda onslaught

By Alec Hogg

LONDON – Like any other business owner, I pay a lot of attention to research about staff engagement.

Employment is a complicated relationship. Too often, today’s highly focused colleague becomes tomorrow’s self-righteous slacker. What attracts someone into the company is soon taken for granted.
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The best thinking on employee engagement comes to us from Frederick Herzberg who published a breakthrough article in the January 1968 edition of the Harvard Business Review. It is a benchmark whose reprint has sold 1.2-million copies – some 300 000 more than any other article published by the HBR.

Herzberg’s assertion, drawn from research conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, was that employee satisfaction boils down to hygiene and motivation factors.

Hygiene is things like status, pay, job security, working conditions, company policy and supervisory practices. Get them right and staff won’t hate coming to work. That’s all. Get them wrong and you reap a destructive force which HR departments call the actively disengaged. Think employees of big UK banks. Or unskilled labour on deep level mines.

The business elixir of actively engaged employees requires what Herzberg describes as Motivation factors: challenging work, recognition, responsibility and personal growth. It’s less about a manager’s prodding or stimulation – much more about whether the staffer feels they’re making a meaningful contribution.

I got thinking about this stuff again when analysing the 2016 Global Workforce Happiness Index, released yesterday. Now into its eighth edition, it is compiled by Swedish group Universum after processing responses from 250 000 professionals in 55 countries. It is regarded as the Gold Standard on the subject. Universum, which describes itself as the Global Leader in Employer Branding, says the Happiness Index gives companies an idea of how vulnerable their staff are to being poached. It combines worker satisfaction; their willingness to recommend their employer; and likelihood of switching jobs.

The cost of training replacements together with the loss of institutional knowledge makes poached staff an avoidable problem. But with around 200-million people a year changing jobs, this is clearly something many companies are getting wrong.

It’s instructive that the world’s two most valuable companies by market cap are also the ones which lead the Global Happiness Index.

After leading the field the last two years, Google is once again at number one for 2016 with Apple Inc. continuing its recent improvement from 9^th in 2014 to 7^th last year and now second. Top Ten regulars on the index fill the next few spots with EY 3^rd, Goldman Sachs 4^th, PWC 5^th and Deloitte 6^th.

None of this should really surprise us. Numerous surveys document how these are the companies which try hardest to meet Herzberg’s Motivation and Hygiene factors. What got me really paying attention was the rankings for South Africa based on responses from 21 961 professionals.

Pretty much everywhere else in the world, the public sector doesn’t feature as a preferred employer. In SA, it dominates. For instance, in the “Law” category Webber Wentzel (5^th) is the only private sector firm in the Top Ten. Interviewees ranked the Department of Justice, NPA, Legal Aid and SA Revenue Services respectively as the best employers.

It’s a similar story in “Natural Sciences” where the CSIR is top rated followed by the Department of Science and Technology and then the Department of Agriculture and Forestry. Sasol scored highest of private sector employers, coming 4^th.

In the Healthcare sector, the Department of Health tops the table ahead of MediClinic, Netcare and Discovery. And in the Engineering category, after multinationals Google and Microsoft, positions 3 to six are held by Eskom, Sasol, Transnet and the CSIR.

In Humanities/Liberal Arts/Education the Department of Education is top, Google second and then the Department of International Relations. But the biggest shock of the lot for me was in the main Business and Commerce category.

Multinationals Google and SAB Miller take the top two spots with the highly respected Investec 3^rd. But the next preferred employer is Transnet, with both the SA Reserve Bank and SA Revenue Services listed by students and staff in the top ten. And this for a category whose definition makes it “for profit”.

What are we to make of this?

For one thing, it can’t be because the State pays more. Universum tells us employees are attracted by the base pay and job security but once inside their satisfaction depends on opportunities and confidence in senior leadership.

Perhaps the campaign against “white monopoly capital” has greater cache’ among employees than the rational think possible. Ditto the ANC’s promotion of its idealistic and unworkable Developmental State which ignores how economies require taxpayers to keep the wheels turning.

Universum points out that employees show higher loyalty in struggling economies because there are fewer opportunities available. That is surely a factor. You’ve doubtless got your own views.

We can speculate all we like, but one thing is indisputable: South African businesses have a huge reputational mountain to climb. And with very few exceptions, most of the work needs to be done within the organisations themselves.