Our people
At MTN we believe that the investment in our people is key to achieving our BRIGHT strategy and improving our competitive edge across the markets in which we operate. To deliver the best customer experience and improve our business performance, we recognise the importance of employee engagement and development. This commitment is evident in the implementation of initiatives around the 'H' element of the BRIGHT strategy which is dedicated to the hearts and minds of the people of MTN. The three areas of focus of our HR approach are:
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Employee value proposition
MTN’s employee value proposition, ‘The MTN Deal’, comprises five pillars:
- Brand strength.
- Leadership brand.
- Investing in our talent.
- Globally diverse culture.
- Total reward and recognition.
The MTN Deal aims to provide employees with real opportunities, real experiences, interactions with people who have a ‘can-do’ attitude, over real platforms and offering real rewards. In the 2017 group culture audit survey, scores for four out of the five pillars improved from 2016 with the fifth pillar maintaining its previous score.
Overview of our people
At the end of December 2017, MTN employed 15 901 permanent employees and 3 030 contractors. The number of people in the business declined by 2,75% from 2016, mainly due to ongoing initiatives to simplify MTN.
Engagement and culture
Achieving high levels of employee engagement and fostering the right culture is fundamental to achieving our BRIGHT strategy. Every year we invite staff to participate in our Global Culture Audit survey to measure our employee engagement and culture across 16 dimensions. In 2017, there was a 93% participation rate for this survey, which is the highest in 10 years.
Our mean score rose to 70% from 67% in 2016. Our sustainable engagement score improved by one percentage point to a score of 75%. This is now just three percentage points behind the global telecoms norm of 78%. The improvement is the result of the combined efforts of staff and management to prioritise the people agenda in the challenging operating environment across Africa and the Middle East. The WECA region showed the greatest year-on-year improvement in employee engagement, and the highest score of all three regions. In our key markets of South Africa and Nigeria, the sustainable engagement score improved by more than three percentage points year-on-year.
Sustainable employee engagement
We also recorded an improvement in our score on awareness of MTN’s vital behaviours which we are instilling through our ongoing culture operating system programme. Vital behaviours are the foundation of our social engine to ensure that our people work in a collaborative way that corresponds with the company’s values (see page 2), while feeling safe to speak up.
One of the key measures of success of the ‘hearts and minds’ pillar of our strategy is to be a leader in employee NPS. In 2017, we recorded an improvement in this measure. The percentage of our employees who were likely to recommend MTN as a place to work (i.e. were ‘MTN promoters’) increased to 45% from 43% in 2016.
Our employee voluntary turnover rate, which measures the rate at which employees voluntarily leave MTN, rose from 7,2% in 2016 to 7,9% in 2017, but remained below the telecoms sector benchmark of 9,9%. Several operations implemented skills refresh initiatives to better align to the group strategy. Several other operations based in areas of civil strife saw a rise in the voluntary turnover of employees who were seeking better economic and social opportunities.
Voluntary turnover
We remained focused on retaining our top talent in 2017 and kept the voluntary turnover rate of high performers below 5% at 4,9%. This compares to the telecoms sector benchmark for high performers of 7,3%.
A diverse company
Central to our customer-centricity approach is ensuring that we have a diverse workforce that understands the varied needs of our subscribers. We therefore aim to have a multi-cultural workforce across the markets in which we operate. At the end of December 2017, MTN employed 63 different nationalities, of which 38 were from Africa and the Middle East. Gender diversity is another important metric. In 2017, 37% of staff were women and 63% were men, the same ratio as that in 2016.
Developing our talent
We place significant emphasis on continuously evolving the skills sets of our talent base to ensure our staff are equipped to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving ICT industry. Our digital e-learning platform continued to be popular in 2017, with 445 606 course completions across 31 118 employees and contractors in 2017 – an average of 14 online learning programmes per individual. We continued to evaluate the quality of the material and achieved a 98% positive response from staff.
In 2017 our learning and development focus areas were:
- Customer experience.
- Sales and business operations.
- Technology excellence.
- Leadership and culture.
Through our strategic partnerships, we continued to roll out a variety of cloud-based programmes to deepen our functional leadership skills across our senior management in the areas of innovation, commercial excellence and execution.
Talent management is a critical driver of organisational sustainability. In a rapidly changing environment, MTN acknowledges that it is the quality of the people we attract, develop and retain that will have the greatest impact on profitability and provide us with a competitive advantage to drive sustainable business value. It is with this in mind that we developed robust talent management processes to identify, assess and develop future talent.
Through global talent reviews, succession planning and psychometric assessments, we identify individuals for the right job, at the right time, and in the right place. Talent is the sum of an individual’s ability, agility and attitude to either perform at their current level or higher. The extraction of talent analytics further assists us in identifying key risks to predict future scenarios and inform predictive trend analysis.
Succession planning remains an important outcome of the talent management process that highlights roles that are at the most risk in terms of current occupancy and future replacement. We ringfence critical positions for specific talent strategies to ensure that we are developing and retaining for future appointments a pipeline of talent. Through succession planning, we are able to identify key risk areas where top talent will need either to be bought, developed or retained. Having robust succession pipelines in place acts as a vital differentiator in ensuring the future sustainability of the business with top talent who are equipped to deliver on the MTN Group strategy.
Performance management
We completed our 2017 integrated performance cycle, ensuring that our pay-for-performance framework was cascaded throughout the organisation. We further improved our performance management framework to ensure greater alignment to our strategy to increase our focus on customer experience and commercial and financial performance.
Best practices
The Global Investor in People (IiP) standard is a people-management best practice accreditation that defines what it takes to lead, support and manage people well for sustainable results.
At December 2017, 17 opcos had achieved varying levels of accreditation. MTN Cameroon, MTN Ghana, MTN Nigeria, MTN Swaziland and Head Office all achieved Gold accreditation – the highest level available.
Digitising HR
In 2017 we focused on improved efficiency, effectiveness and experience for HR and rolled out several initiatives relating to digitising HR. At a MTN Group level, we implemented initiatives such as the Global MyStrengthsFinder system, which allows a more effective talent management and development platform for all employees. The group-wide implementation of InfoSlips provided an efficient medium through which employees can access their personal pay information. We also worked to increase the use of our on-the-spot recognition platform to drive a high-performance culture. These collective efforts across the business resulted in over 300 000 recognition messages being sent on the platform in the year.