Survey: Company values and culture top employee ratings

But tough economic climate dampens mood, writes David Jackson

Three top companies have again emerged as Southern Africa's most desirable employers, as voted by their employees in the 2010 Deloitte Best Company to Work For Survey.

They are: McDonald's SA in the large company category, Flight Centre SA in the medium company category, and Microsoft SA in the small company category.

The survey, now in its 11th year, is the only one in Southern Africa where employees rate their employers in 13 categories including leadership, values and culture, transformation, communication, rewards and management style.

David Conradie, director at Deloitte Consulting, said McDonald's - which has participated in the survey for several years - has moved up from being the winner in the medium company category last year. It also won the Consumer Business Industry category this again this year.

In the medium company category, Flight Centre - a participant for nine consecutive years - has also won the Tourism and Leisure industry category on each occasion they have entered, Conradie said.

Small company winner Microsoft SA is a previous overall winner of the survey and has taken the Information Technology award several times. Although a global multinational, in SA Microsoft has about 300 full-time employees.

"They go to market with a number of key partners, but the entity itself is relatively small in terms of its full-time employee contingent," Conradie said.

Since 2008, the Deloitte survey has been extended to include participants from the SADC region. This year, the Ohlthaver & List Group of Companies, Namibia's biggest holding company, ranked second in the large company category.

Survey findings are a barometer of employee sentiment. This year employees' satisfaction levels declined noticeably compared with 2009, scoring lower across all categories.

The findings indicate that negative economic conditions have affected morale, said Conradie, with the decline evident regardless of the size of business.

"However, the findings show that employers in general are aware of prevailing employee sentiment and many are taking steps to address this."

A feature of the employee responses across all winners this year is that company values and culture came through strongly, as well as the quality of the relationship between employees and their immediate managers.

"And relative to other participants, the view of leadership from an employee perspective was very positive. Clearly leadership has a positive influence in terms of overall employment experience in these companies," Conradie said.

What differentiates the Deloitte Best Company to Work For Survey from various marketing research is that the survey findings exclusively reflect the views of the company employees, not an external panel of judges or adjudicators.

"We collect two perspectives. We take a demographically representative sample of the employee population of the participating company, as well as a view from the executive leadership. However, the organisation defines that group," Conradie said.

"We do not attribute any weighting to that executive input, but collect it as a basis to determine the degree of alignment between what they believe their employees are experiencing and what the employees are actually reporting.

"So the weighting in terms of company performance is exclusively driven by the employee responses to the survey questionnaire."

Conradie said the survey findings indicated that the recession had had a different effect on companies and the people working for those companies. "This is highly consistent with the Deloitte experience globally around the overall impact of the economic slowdown."

In most instances, Conradie said, employees have been through two years of very depressed economic performance on the part of their employers. And while there is speculation in official circles that SA may be starting to emerge from the recession, at least at a technical level, "for many employees nothing really seems to be changing on the ground.

"As a result, expectation is starting to build up around their relationship with their employers, particularly when it comes to their pay packages."

Conradie added: "If nothing is forthcoming in the next salary review cycle, there may well be a lot more negativity on the part of employees.

"At this stage, this is an expectation bubble that we see coming through and one that employers will need to be aware of if they are to avoid a spike in voluntary turnover, especially among their critical talent."

Conradie said a key trend among participating companies was that those that had been involved for several years had tended to take a more mature view of their participation "and have almost expected that there would be a slight dip in terms of employee experience as reported by the survey".

"We have picked this up from the employer perspective. There has been an acknowledgement that employees are undoubtedly having to deal with more challenging work-related issues than they have previously.

"We place a positive interpretation on this, because that level of alignment suggests heightened awareness that, in most cases, is coupled with an intent to address the issues -if that was not the case, it would flag a potential time-bomb in the employment relationship."

Conradie said the overarching rationale from leaders of companies for participating in this year's survey was that it was seen to be even more important, in the prevailing economic climate, to engage with their employees and understand what was important to them and how they were experiencing the work environment - and to reinforce that message to staff.

"That for us has been a very positive indicator around the participants this year." Conradie added there was a very strong emphasis from companies on retaining talent.

"Despite the fall-out that companies are experiencing from the economic downturn, the underlying shortage of critical skills and talent has not gone away," he said.

"So where companies have these people on board, we still see a meaningful amount of investment going into their retention, often through focusing on their longer-term career development as well as in their current roles in the organisation.

"There is a concerted effort to engage with those staff and, from an overall perspective, the talent management perspective is very much focused on retaining that key talent," Conradie added.