CASE STUDY

Sanlam

Background

Employer Branding Africa partnered with The Sanlam Group towards the end of 2020 and 2021 to focus on creating an “Employee Centric Employer Brand”.  The focus was towards shifting to hearing the employees requirements. With multiple generations across five different business clusters and at different stages of their career, all with their own unique requirements/needs, this was not an easy feat.

Whilst the Sanlam Group has its EVP and key drivers, they felt it could be better translated through the employee workforce.

The Sanlam Group acknowledged that in order to attract the  new generation, they needed to start focusing on promoting working within their digital environment.

Upon defining the various segments and accompany unique differentiators Sanlam’s aim was to identify relevant solutions applicable to the different employee segments in order to enhance the overall employee experience.

Our goal

The Sanlam Group sought a better understanding of the extent to which the company was delivering on their EVP key drivers, the relevance thereof and the overall employee experience. This was especially necessary with the arrival of the COVID pandemic, with the company’s workforce working remotely and employees needs having shifted.

The company had collected a rich set of data insights having conducted recent employee culture and past engagement surveys.

Employer Branding Africa partnered with the Group to:

  • Confirm internal/external resources, project plan, roll-out and time-frames.
  • Through our discovery  phase, we took a deep dive into understanding the outcomes and findings from previous surveys. Gathering and distilling such information provided us with guidelines on which to build our discussion guide for our qualitative focus group workshops.
  • We tested and validated the Group’s EVP through facilitating 40 virtual focus groups conducted across five business units, generations, levels, tenure etc. All information was treated as anonymous and confidential.
  • Information was recorded and transcribed verbatim, before being analysed and reported on.
  • Ongoing virtual workshops and meetings were held with HR and EX stakeholders to analyse focus group outputs and research collected.
  • Met with Sanlam Group Marketing to review the EVP drivers, gathered an understand of which pillars still remain relevant and aligned to the Group’s desired EX  and identify areas to refine/improve on the 6 pillars to ensure EVP is appropriate.

What we did

(end to end solution):

The impact

The Sanlam Group confirmed the following benefits received through our partnering with them:

  • Verbatim testimonials and confirmation on how employees experience the culture and life working for the Group first hand from their most valued assets.
  • Areas for improvement and quick wins with assurance to enhancing the employee experience.
  • An informed understanding of how the EVP resonates/addresses the various cohorts through their respective life-cycle (from early to experienced stages) within each business units.
  • The opportunity for Group Marketing to utilize the content from focus group discussions with which to build a narrative around each key driver to support the Group’s EVP pillars. This depth of information can be used to internalise and imbed the Group’s EVP pillars, but also assist with their talent attraction strategies and recruitment marketing initiatives.
  • Granular data and insights specific to each Business Unit and/or cohort which the Group can confidently utilise in order to address gaps and/or dial up on EVP pillars which is specific to their area and/or employee lifecycle.