INTEGRATED ANNUAL REPORT 2023
For the year ended 30 September 2023
For the year ended 30 September 2023
To deliver on our growth ambitions, we need to be able to attract, retain and develop future-fit employees who are consumer-obsessed, excellent executors, collaborative, agile, innovative and resilient, centred by our purpose, values and culture of winning behaviour.
In the context of increased competition for skills and talent – and given recent challenges in terms of high rates of attrition and internal rotation – we have placed a strengthened focus on ensuring effective execution of our people strategy. Through the three strategic pillars of talent, leadership and great place to work, we seek to attract, retain and develop a diverse talent base, deepen our leadership capabilities, and provide an engaging work environment that inspires execution excellence, accelerates innovation, and creates an agile culture that is highly focused on the consumer.
We have laid a strong foundation in talent acquisition and management by identifying and developing the essential skills that align with our strategic goals and priorities. This has involved a concentrated effort on internal growth and promotion, accelerating the development of core and future-fit capabilities across relevant internal disciplines. This year, in response to more challenging market dynamics, we sharpened our focus on talent acquisition, accelerated the development of a diverse talent pipeline for critical skills, and continued to build core capabilities at all levels across the company. By strengthening our targeted talent management processes internally, we have improved our ability to transition talent across categories and functions, enhancing our capacity for internal talent growth.
The focus on internal placements, coupled with a skills shortage in critical technical areas, has depleted our middle to senior leadership talent pipeline, and created readiness gaps in succession planning. To address these gaps, we have established a talent acquisition hub to better leverage talent insights, prioritising the filling of critical vacancies and building robust talent pools.
Over the last three years, we have enhanced our ability to grow our own talent and improved our succession bench strength. We have also made substantial progress in our Rest of Africa talent strategy, filling essential positions, and implementing graduate development, coaching and mentoring to prepare for in-market placements. In 2023, we made a total of 409 new hires, filling 32% of our leadership vacancies through internal career moves and promotions. Tiger Brands was once again recognised as one of South Africa's top employers.
Targeted skills development is executed through our learning academies, which we have recently aligned to our core capabilities and digitalisation goals. Remote-working arrangements have enabled us to integrate digital learning more seamlessly into daily work practices. In 2023, we accelerated the implementation of our targeted development programmes to strengthen internal pipelines and support the growth of our own talent. In 2023, 3 298 employees were trained through our academy core capability programmes. We invested R93 million in learning and development across all areas of our business, averaging R861,68 per full-time employee.
We continue to make progress on promoting workforce diversity, increasing African, Coloured, and Indian (ACI) representation, and promoting gender equity and the inclusion of people with disabilities. During the year, we implemented various women development programmes to support achievement of our gender equity goals. The Tiger women's network offers networking and development opportunities, as well as personalised coaching and mentorship. Training in unconscious bias, and various other dialogues supporting a culture respectful of diversity and non-discrimination continue to form part of our leadership development and cultural transformation efforts.
In 2023, our workforce was 96% ACI, with a management level representation of 64% ACI in top-tier management. Internal leadership placements were 83% ACI, and our management trainee intake was 100% ACI. Females make up 31% of our workforce, with 30% in top management and 46% at senior management. The year's management trainee intake was 82% female. Most new hires belonged to Generation Y, with 97% ACI and 52% female representation. Our full employment equity profile is reviewed in more detail in our sustainability report.
We work to deepen leadership capabilities across the organisation through our future-fit leadership development programmes and targeted rotations, using leadership assessment tools, mentoring and coaching to further enhance performance, stimulate innovation and catalyse our desired culture. We track progress on leadership behaviour shifts by using a 360° MultiRater feedback platform that helps foster a growth mindset within our leadership talent pool and bring our values and behaviours to life.
Our 12 to 18-month WINGS accelerated leadership development programme, launched in 2022, aims to bolster succession planning by fast-tracking the development of experienced talent by rotating them into various roles across the business and providing mentorship and coaching from senior leaders to support their learning. Through this programme we have successfully promoted two employees to senior leadership roles in the company in the last year.
In 2023, we introduced the Re-imagine Tiger leadership development programme in partnership with GIBS Business School, in which participants collaboratively develop innovative solutions for key business ventures aimed at accelerating Tiger Brands' growth agenda. This year, 163 leaders participated in leadership development programmes.
We are dedicated to creating a great place to work and to growing our company culture by continuously enhancing our employee value proposition and strengthening employee engagement. Our aspiration is to develop a culture that is collaborative, innovative, agile and consumer-obsessed where our people are inspired to execute on strategy with excellence. Our culture transformation roadmap clearly defines the aspiration for our culture and identifies the priority actions for getting there. Ensuring employee partnership in the culture transformation journey is a fundamental principle of our approach.
Each year, we conduct our Voice of Tiger (VoT) employee survey to assess the quality of employees' experience at Tiger Brands and their level of engagement in their roles and at the workplace. The survey results inform the actions we take to deliver our culture transformation journey. In this year's survey, undertaken in November 2022, we achieved an 85% participation rate, with an overall engagement score of 70 (up from 66 in the prior year), suggesting a generally positive work experience among employees, yet with evident room for improvement. We are acting on this feedback, engaging with leadership teams and employees to further embed the desired culture transformation, including through specific initiatives on strengthening performance-based incentives, streamlining decision-making and reporting lines, and addressing employee work-life balance.
Our employee wellbeing programme, THRIVE, makes physical, emotional and mental-health support available to employees and their families. This includes 24-hour telephonic counselling, and access to professional dieticians, bio-kineticists, and financial and legal advisors. In line with our goal of prioritising better work-life balance, we have embraced hybrid and flexible work arrangements, offering employees more autonomy in where and when they work.
We reward our employees to inspire exceptional performance and attract and retain top talent. We revise our reward strategy annually to boost performance, align with market standards, and satisfy the employees and shareholder expectations. We administer rewards fairly and responsibly, complying with our remuneration policy, International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions, and relevant laws. Our remuneration policy includes an explicit objective to address unjustifiable pay differentials. Our pay practices mitigate against unjustifiable pay differences between employees in the same role and between race and gender groups. A five-year long, company-wide initiative has succeeded in significantly narrowing the gap between the lowest paid groups and the highest paid groups. At every compensation review opportunity, we consider, report, and address pay differentials seen through various lenses, including gender and race.
Our reward framework follows a "total reward" approach, consisting of guaranteed pay, variable pay, and a range of market-relevant benefits, as well as professional growth opportunities that recognise individual and team performance. Our remuneration strategy is aligned with KPIs to measure and reward performance against our core business strategy. Long-term incentives are used to attract, retain, motivate and reward eligible executives, senior managers, and key talent to influence the performance of the group and align their interests with the interests of the company's shareholders. This, in turn, aims to incentivise employees to meet long-term growth and sustainability plans.
Our STI scorecard includes both financial and non-financial elements, with remuneration incentives indirectly linked to sustainability performance via weighted measures for achieving strategic sustainability-related objectives, including safety, quality, efficiency and carbon emissions. The incentives are applicable across the group from senior executives to employees who operate our plants. We continue to enhance our remuneration strategy and improve alignment with our strategic key performance indicators and shareholder interests.
Guided by our employee relations partnership framework, we seek to foster meaningful collaboration between management, employees and trade union partners, ensuring that as a minimum, we adhere to the ILO core conventions and relevant labour laws. This year, we maintained a high level of interaction, placing an emphasis on line manager skills development and implementing targeted interventions to improve employee engagement and wellbeing, advancing our collective bargaining strategies, and resolving outstanding legacy issues. We have made notable progress, particularly in enhancing employee engagement within our manufacturing operations, and are gradually seeing an improvement in the sense of partnership between our employees and line managers on the shop floor.
As at year end, 51% of our workforce is unionised. Our collective bargaining has stabilised, with a recent shift toward standardising processes and moving from annual to multi-year wage agreements. This year, wage negotiations were conducted for five of our sites, with three of the five being settled as two-year deals, and the remaining site settled as a one-year deal. With the year ahead potentially marked by tensions surrounding the national election, we will be looking to further strengthen workforce relationships, leveraging the impact of the two-year agreements signed last year, and beginning the next wage negotiation cycle across most of our sites.