As we are celebrating youth day, we are reminded of the sacrifices the Soweto youth made to the liberation of South Africa. However, the most disappointing aspects of post-apartheid South Africa is extreme levels of unemployment, particularly less-skilled and younger Back people. These unemployment levels are further aggravated by the lack of infrastructure to equip these young people with the right skills. Therefore in the absence of effective infrastructure, structural unemployment remains the bleakest indicator of the welfare challenge facing the South African society.

Our client organisation adopted a talent management framework to deal with competitive reality in this raging war for talent. In spite of these efforts, the organisation had experienced high turnover amongst their management cadre. Consequently, the client commissioned an independent study to understand these turnover reasons and to generate action plans to mitigate this human capital risk.

Our locally validated employee engagement model provided a framework for the collection and analysis of data. The employee engagement survey was structured to elicit a thorough understanding of the management talent challenges and formed the basis for developing the Talent Engagement Strategy and Implementation Plan. At the heart of talent management is the employee value proposition (EVP). Focus groups were conducted to uncover the elements of EVP to attract, commit and retain management talent.

With economists predicting fierce trading conditions and longer recovery than originally anticipated means that South African companies will need to seek out ways to sustain their business performance. After all, retrenching more people, or slashing other expenses, will mean that they will be left with skeleton resources. Or that those who remain will have no means, nor the will, to produce the necessary results.

Towers Perrin Global Workforce Study (2008) looked at 50 global companies over a one-year period, correlating their employee engagement levels with financial results. They found that companies with high employee engagement had a 19% increase in operating income and almost a 28% growth in earnings per share. Conversely, companies with low levels of engagement saw operating income drop more than 32% and earnings per share decline over 11%.  

Economists are predicting a slow economic recovery. This means managers will need to work harder to improve the performance of their teams and retain key talent.

The recent research conducted by The Human Resource Practice, into employee engagement in South Africa contained both good news and bad news for employers.

Most organisations will be placing young graduates on development / internship programmes in their organisations at the beginning of 2010. These development programmes require huge financial investments which must provide a significant return on expectations i.e. feeding the talent pipeline.

Thirty one percent of South African employees younger than 30 recently surveyed were disengaged from their jobs and undecided on their connection to their job and organisation, an employee engagement survey has found.

We (The Human Resource Practice) conducted an employee engagement survey to determine the current levels of employee engagement in South African organisations. The survey was conducted during April 2009 and 767 responses were received.