Head of HR Africa & Latam at Smollan

Jayshree Gopaldas

ESG and specifically, the role of HR in driving the social component of the agenda has become increasingly important to companies since recent events like the COVID pandemic, great resignation, black lives matter, and rising unemployment has spotlighted the importance of HR practices that create socially relevant and sustainable employment experiences. 

Many HR teams will focus their ESG thinking on key practices such as diversity and inclusion, gender and racial pay disparities and training, and education and empowerment projects that uplift marginalised social groups inside the workplace. These are all relevant and effective strategies, however, the cornerstone to building a long term sustainable ESG HR strategy calls for thinking beyond workplace and for strategies that directly address the most important societal issues. For companies operating in emerging markets, high unemployment and poverty is among the top social priorities that HR practitioners should be responding to. 

The Smollan case study

As a large company in South Africa employing thousands of entry level workers, Smollan’s recruitment processes were designed around enabling large scale hiring. Adopting a more socially conscious perspective required us to rethink how we could align our hiring practices to directly tackle poverty.  This led to a campaign we call the Household Hope Project – a campaign to intentionally employ individuals from households that live in poverty with no stable source of income, thereby contributing to a meaningful long term social upliftment of those households. The campaign was firmly aligned to our company’s purpose statement and ideals so getting internal stakeholder support was an easy task. More challenging was identifying and overcoming the barriers that impoverished households faced that excluded them from job and income opportunities. Redesigning our hiring practices to make them more socially inclusive required us to first educate ourselves on the social factors that excluded certain sectors of society from accessing job opportunities such as:

• Education requirements particularly a high school certificate,

• Minimum work experience requirements,

• Pre-existing criminal record,

• Access to transport,

• Digital access and data to apply for jobs, and

• Social stigma of poverty and its impact on mental wellbeing & confidence,

Once we grasped the extent of these barriers, we were able to align our recruitment processes to minimise or eliminate as many of these barriers as possible.  We also mobilised our existing workforce to act as scouts for the programme and incentivised them for referring eligible households.  This had the additional positive impact of inspiring existing employees who felt a strong sense of personal connection and shared purpose with the programme and who became passionate advocates of the campaign themselves.

“Finally, companies interested in developing long term sustainable HR practices should also identify ways to measure and report on the impact of their strategies in transforming the lives of their employees and the local communities.”

Since the programme was launched, we have employed over 2000 employees via this programme and many heart-warming stories of how this programme has transformed the lives of lives of impoverished households. Despite the successes of the programme, we are very much still in a learning phase and continuously developing our thinking on additional HR practices to tackle poverty and unemployment. 

Tackling poverty requires companies to consider the visible and invisible spectrum of poverty and call for differentiated strategies that not only open the door for the previously unemployable but also promote a culture of inclusion and advancement, once inside.  Additional actions HR teams need to think about are:

• How to make their education and learning content via digital and physical channels available.  Making available online learning content to support children and families of employees is a good starting point.  Companies can also link their CSI activities to encourage employees to adopt a school or get involved in community learning projects.

• Supporting employees to become financially literate is an important issue. Minimum wage remains well below the living wage level and many employees need more support to escape the debt spiral. Companies should consider practical solutions beyond offering financial upskilling programmes. One such initiative we introduced was PaymeNow, a digital financial wellness and inclusion platform.

• Expanding the traditional sphere of EVP programmes to offer benefits that address the main financial expenses for employees such as transport, food, and medical care. An initiative we have recently piloted is to offer employees a basket of essential groceries at discounted prices.

• How to best support female and single parent households.

• Upskilling for management and supervisory teams to enable them to adopt more inclusivity, empathy, and understanding in their day-to-day dealings with employees.

Finally, companies interested in developing long term sustainable HR practices should also identify ways to measure and report on the impact of their strategies in transforming the lives of their employees and the local communities. Beyond measuring metrics such as hires made or demographic representativity, they should partner with organisations such as the Greenlight movement to measure and report on the long-term sustainability impact their strategies have on households and communities.

As more companies recognise the importance of implementing ESG HR strategies, there is an important role that HR teams can play in addressing crucial societal challenges facing their communities.  By thinking beyond the walls of the workplace, HR can not only help promote sustainable and responsible business practices, but also contribute to the overall development of the communities and countries where they operate.