Our strategy
Performance
summary 2020
| ✓ | Completed our fit-for-future organisational structure |
| ✓ | 79% of leadership positions filled internally |
| ✓ | Key changes made to business leadership at executive and category leadership levels |
| ✓ | Introduced a digital on-boarding framework |
| ✓ | Voted number 1 employer of choice in the manufacturing sector by graduates for the first time |

Great people
A winning mindset and great place to work
To enable us to win in the market through unleashing the power of our people, we continue building a diverse talent base, developing leadership capability, and creating a great place to work, supported by our commitment to execution excellence. Through our people strategy, our goal is to ignite a culture of consumer obsession, agility, and a growth mindset that will accelerate innovation and winning performance.
Talent
Building a diverse talent base and core capabilities to deliver our growth strategy
We continued our focus this year on building commercial and supply chain capability across the organisation. This was supported by targeted talent strategies, where we prioritised building pipelines for scarce and critical skill roles specifically in bakeries and manufacturing by leveraging key partnerships with selected service providers.
As part of our ongoing journey to improve the employee experience and create a great place to work, we undertook various campaigns – both internally through our communication portals and externally via social media – to communicate our employee value proposition and employer brand. These included the Youth Month Campaign, Women's Month Campaign, Rising Star Awards and Rising Star Female Forum. These employer branding campaigns were well received, as reflected by the 140% increase in followership on Tiger Brands' LinkedIn profile, from 100 000 in September 2019 to 239 000 in September 2020.
In looking to attract talent for our Africa operations, we have commenced the rollout of our Africa talent plan and appointed new talent in some of our African operations. We have developed a customised Africa management trainee programme, and sourced management trainees for Mozambique, Zambia and Nigeria.
We maintained a strong focus throughout the year on promoting employee diversity, with African, Coloured and Indian employees making up 95% of internal appointments this year. Through our gender equity strategy, we are working to improve the representation, engagement and development of women in core functions and at leadership levels. The gender equity strategy includes a specific focus on three core areas: our RISE women in leadership development programme that focuses on developing women through action learning business projects; the Tiger Women's Network that focuses on enabling women to overcome the barriers that women traditionally encounter in the workplace; and function-specific development programmes that equip women with core technical skills, strengthen leadership capability and improve the overall talent pipeline of female talent. Through these programmes we aim to increase overall female representation at all levels, especially in management, to 44% by 2023. We also aim to increase women participation in leadership development, career growth and progression initiatives to 50% by 2023.
We have recently developed and commenced the implementation of a generational diversity management strategy, where our goal is to ensure co-existence of multiple generations, foster a sense of belonging and connectedness amongst generations, and improve the employee experience of each generational group at Tiger. Next year we will be launching our young professionals networking forum (NexGen Tiger), as a platform to enable inclusive networking, development and engagement among young professionals across the business. Through this forum we aim to amplify the voices of the young professionals at Tiger Brands, and bring to bear a different perspective that will help deliver winning performance.
Our diversity profile
| ACI actual | ACI target | ||||
| Top management | 2020: 50% | 2020: 55% | 2021: 55% | ||
| 2022: 64% | 2023: 64% | ||||
| Senior management | 2020: 55% | 2020: 59% | 2021: 63% | ||
| 2022: 64% | 2023: 65% | ||||
| Middle management | 2020: 62% | 2020: 69% | 2021: 70% | ||
| 2022: 71% | 2023: 76% | ||||
| Junior management | 2020: 80% | 2020: 79% | 2021: 80% | ||
| 2022: 81% | 2023: 85% | ||||
| Semi-skilled | 2020: 97% | 2020: 97% | 2021: 96% | ||
| 2022: 96% | 2023: 96% | ||||
| Unskilled | 2020: 100% | 2020: 100% | 2021: 100% | ||
| 2022: 99% | 2023: 99% | ||||
ACI: African, Coloured, Indian.
Gender diversity profile

We recognise the challenge of achieving our employee diversity targets at more senior management levels and we are proactively addressing this through targeted talent sourcing, internal placements, promotions and various leadership development programmes as set out below. Next year, our talent focus will be on further enhancing our marketing, sales and commercial skills and deepening our supply chain capabilities, by executing targeted talent strategies. We will also maintain our focus on executing fit-for-purpose learning and skills development, and further embed just-in-time digital learning across Tiger.
Leadership
Developing leadership capability and capacity to inspire winning performance
To ensure that we develop inspirational leaders who are talent magnets, agile and drive a culture of innovation and winning performance, this year we rolled out two leadership development programmes across the organisation: LIFT and Game Changer.
- The LIFT programme is targeted at employees who have recently been appointed into a leadership role or those being considered for such a transition.
- The Game Changer leadership development programme was implemented as part of our culture transformation journey to develop leaders with the intention and skills to actively create and inspire winning opportunities in daily interactions with colleagues at all levels.
In line with our promise to continually develop our leaders and ensure that they receive developmental feedback from multiple stakeholders, we launched the MultiRater feedback tool during the performance year-end review period. This gave leaders an opportunity to receive feedback regarding their behaviour as aligned to Tiger Values, Winning behaviours and leadership competences. We also recently launched mentorship circles for emerging leaders looking to learn and benefit from more experienced leaders.
Our leadership competencies
- Inspires winning performance
- Nurtures and grows talent
- Shapes strategy
- Achieves results through others
- Market focused
- Customer obsessed
- Builds partnerships
- Builds teams
Our leadership development programmes
| Programme | Target audience |
|---|---|
| LIFT leadership programme | Lead operators |
| EDGE leadership programme | Frontline leaders |
| GAME CHANGER leadership programme | All leaders |
| SOAR leadership programme | Leaders of leaders |
| REIMAGINE Tiger Leadership Development programme | Enterprise leaders |
Great place to work
Creating a great place to work to energise a consumer-obsessed and agile "One Tiger" team
A key focus of our people strategy is to instil an agile performance-based culture that delivers on our identified winning behaviours of consumer obsession, teamwork, empowered accountability and focused execution. We began our culture transformation journey in October 2018 with the alignment of our teams on our aspirational culture, and a refresh of our values and winning behaviours.
We have continued to make progress this year in embedding our winning culture. Our employee value proposition (EVP) has been firmly defined and forms the basis of our actions to improve the employee experience and to enhance our ability to attract, develop and retain talent. An important development this year was the launch of our THRIVE employee wellbeing programme, which covers employee health management, psychosocial wellbeing and broader risk management activities. This was a key enabler in our response to the Covid-19 pandemic and through our comprehensive multi-pronged approach we were able to support both our employees and their families.
Since starting on this culture change programme, we have conducted numerous "Heart of the Tiger" dialogues with staff to deepen the internalisation of our refreshed values and winning behaviours, learn from their experiences and perspectives, and evaluate our progress in instilling the winning culture. Informed by this feedback we are taking various actions to drive the necessary shift in culture.
Although we have established and embedded a clear reward and recognition strategy and have made some progress in making our reward strategy more competitive, we recognise the need to improve business performance in order to retain key talent through our short- and long-term incentive plans.
Employee relations
One of the company's strategic intents is to establish and maintain a meaningful collaborative relationship with our key stakeholders, including our representative trade unions and employees. This year the company held its first top-to-top engagement facilitated by the CEO with key trade unions. This engagement was used to reflect on Tiger Brands' performance and to share the company's broad strategy and plans. The engagements were preceded by a collaborative approach with the trade unions on the company's response to Covid-19 within the company's operations across the country.
Early in the year, Tiger Brands initiated a fit-for-future structure review programme to drive savings and optimise the business towards improved consumer focus, cost-efficiency, ownership, accountability, agility and speed of execution. The implementation of this initiative was initially deferred as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, but with the impact of the lockdown exacerbating the already challenging business environment, the need for this restructuring became even more apparent, and the process was initiated in May 2020. A careful and structured workforce transition process was implemented to support our people during the restructuring process. This included upfront engagement with teams and individuals, the prioritising of redeployment opportunities for our people across the organisation through available vacancies, and mindful management of the people exiting their positions with the company. The process resulted in the optimisation of 493 positions and the retrenchment of 393 employees.
During the period under review, we launched a sexual harassment campaign aimed at educating both employees and managers.
Although the employee relations environment remains stable, a challenging operating environment and low inflation has resulted in challenged wage negotiations throughout the country.