Vodacom Integrated Report 2018

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this year our South African business migrated to the digital-based
Global Resourcing Process, significantly boosting the efficiency of
our recruitment.
We strive to create a culture of recognition that motivates
employees to deliver performance above-and-beyond what is
expected, not only in terms of individual performance, but also
with the aim of encouraging more effective teamwork and reward
our top performers accordingly.
Each year we conduct an annual People Survey, undertaken by
independent consultants, to track how engaged, well managed
and ‘included’ our employees feel. We compare our scores with a
high-performing peer group and other Vodafone Group companies
to assess whether we are creating the right environment for our
people to excel and grow. This year, our overall workforce
participation rate was 88%, unchanged from last year.
2018 2017 2016
Engagement Index 78 79 76
Digital Index 77 – –
Despite the slight decline in our Engagement Index (from 79 to
78), we remain on par with the high-performing peer group that
we benchmark ourselves against, the results suggest that
employees remain motivated and proud to work for Vodacom.
Areas identified as requiring greater focus include driving
improvement around speed and simplicity in the business,
supporting employee progression and recognition, as well as
ongoing employee communication and engagement on People
Survey actions. We have approved various actions in response to
the results, including: undertaking dedicated CEO-led employee
interactions and targeted leadership engagements, enabling line
managers to recognise staff achievements, and increasing our
focus on employees’ individual development plans. We have also
rolled out a focus group initiative (‘#haveyoursay’) that seeks to
solicit deeper employee inputs across all organisational levels,
and to co-create solutions to some of the challenges identified in
the survey.
Aligned with our ambition of embedding a digital culture, the
People Survey also includes a measure of the digital experience
we offer our employees and customers. This year, we obtained
a score of 77 on the Digital Index, which is on par with the
Vodafone Group. We will be driving the digital culture agenda
through various initiatives that form part of a comprehensive
transformation plan.
Encouraging workforce diversity
We place a strong emphasis on encouraging diversity within our
organisation, not only to address historic imbalances, but also to
enhance our ability to serve our diverse customers more
effectively by broadening our pool of experiences, perspectives
and ideas. As a company with roots in South Africa, we are
committed to delivering on the objectives of BEE and
employment equity. In our South African operation, Black
representation in the workforce is 74%, with 67% at the Executive
Committee level and 56% at senior management level. Women
represent 43% of the workforce, with 31% at senior management
level. We have various initiatives aimed at promoting gender
diversity and supporting women in progressing their careers at
Vodacom. These include our flagship female leadership
programme undertaken in partnership with the Gordon Institute
of Business Science, our women in leadership programme with
the North West University, and the Women’s Network Forum
initiative aimed at promoting cross-gender understanding and
an inclusive culture.
Our safety performance
We are saddened to report the loss of life of three Vodacom
contractors this year, in a road traffic accident in the DRC. On
19 November 2017, a Vodacom contractor driver and two
passengers were fatally injured in a collision with an oncoming
truck. All other markets recorded a fatality free year.
Road-related accidents remain our principal safety risk,
accounting for 43% of all incidents this year, followed by
electrical fires (11%) and slips, trips and falls (11%).
Contractors account for 67% of all reported incidents. We are
continually focusing on initiatives to enhance and improve
our risk mitigation methods. This year, we conducted ‘deep
dive’ audits on all our high-risk suppliers to assess their road
risk controls and promote compliance with our stringent
standards. Our lost time injury frequency rate was 0.03, a
further improvement on our performance in prior years
(2017: 0.05 and 2016: 0.11).
Further details are provided in our Report of the Social
and Ethics Committee at
Leveraging data through
Big Data analytics
Harnessing the power of Big Data analytics is a
critical enabler to delivering on our growth strategy.
We are looking to replicate the success we have
already achieved with machine learning through
our ‘Just 4 You’ offering and smart notifications –
and take this to scale, investing in the people
and platforms needed to accelerate our Big Data
analytics, and to develop our capacity to provide
machine learning as a service. This year, we have
enhanced our core team of data engineers, data
scientists and modellers, and will be looking to
double our capacity in the next year. We also have
made substantial investments in the platform and
technologies that enable Big Data storage and
real-time processing.
Our early efforts in machine learning and partial
adoption of Artificial Intelligence have already
delivered material increases in profit margin,
contributing for example to ‘Just 4 You’ deal
enhancements, valuable leads in fibre sales,
preventing proactive churn on post-pay, and
informing customer value management interactions.
We are looking to broaden the use of Big Data across
the business, to optimise call centre performance
through enhanced voice recognition, to combine
customer information for deeper analytics, and
to more effectively track competitor offerings to
improve our competitiveness.
Strategic Enabler
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