Our people sustain our group

Engaged employees help establish better relationships with customers, since staff are the ones who are actually in contact with customers.

This is why FirstRand Namibia focuses heavily on internal transformation to embrace its diversity, embed its culture and values effectively by managing talent, improving open and transparent communication, rewarding and recognising improvement and most importantly the personal wellbeing of employees as the essence of their strategic People Pillar.

To develop and entrench our desired owner-manager, high-performance culture we launched our FUSED values campaign in 2016 to acknowledge and reward employees who set an example through their daily behaviour in how they live the values.

That same year we launched our in-house Diversity Intelligence programme with the focus to increase awareness on unconscious bias and the effect it has on others and the work environment as well as to expand employee knowledge on the importance of valuing diversity to build inclusivity.

This programme continues, and will remain an annual compulsory development intervention for all newcomers.

“To remain sustainably competitive in an environment where the war for talent is ever-increasing we understand that attracting and retaining passionate people is key to our future success. Our talent management strategy is therefore a major strategic focus area and we will continue to invest in this important aspect of our business,” says Andrew Kanime, FirstRand Namibia executive officer: human resources.

FirstRand Namibia conducts a Graduate Development Programme, and to date ten graduates have successfully completed the programme. The focus of this very intensive and specialised one-year programme is to attract and retain high-potential Namibian graduates who will be employed in entry level single-dependency professional roles where skills are generally not available internally or externally.

The graduate trainees are specifically developed to take over an identified critical or specialist position.

Our Bursary Programme is one of our flagship corporate responsibility programmes. The aim of this programme is to give tertiary education access to financially disadvantaged, yet academically strong students. Our bursaries provide full financial support to each student and covers all tertiary costs, accommodation, books, travel expenses and monthly allowances.

As part of our capacity-building programme, internal bursaries were extended to previously disadvantaged, non-managerial employees and/or their dependents, through the Staff Assistance Trust. This trust additionally covers unexpected medical expenses. A total of 72 employees and/or their dependents received financial assistance last year alone.

To retain our talented workforce, we require highly competent leaders that have the ability to motivate and inspire employees to achieve exceptional results. For this reason, we developed and implemented our first in-house Leadership Development Programme that is designed to equip our managers and supervisors with theoretical and practical tools in order to be able to implement their learnings in the workplace.

We believe in involving our employees in shaping the culture within our group and to this end launched a Public Recognition Competition where employees had to come up with innovative and cost-effective proposals to reward and recognise employees who display and live the owner-manager and high-performance culture. A total of N$20 000 in prize money was awarded to the top six finalists.

“The physical and emotional well-being of our employees remains a priority for the group and therefore we continued to embark on a variety of programmes and initiatives to sustain happy, healthy and engaged employees,” adds Kanime.

*Elzita Beukes is the group communications manager at FirstRand Namibia.