Barloworld Limited: Leading Brands

Diversity and inclusion

Recognising that our people are critical to achieving our business strategy, we focus on developing engaged, high-performing leaders and teams.

In 2020, we launched the One Barloworld Employee Engagement survey that enabled us to focus on improving the level of engagement of our people. We have used the feedback from the survey as a basis for acknowledging the positive aspects of our people focused talent strategies and for driving improvements that will ensure we achieve our goal of becoming a Top Employer whose people delight customers and inspire a world of difference.

We remain committed to ensuring that our people solutions enable us to create great everyday employee experiences that drive engagement.

Diversity and inclusion

Transformation in the workplace and equal employment opportunities are important for Barloworld and remain a key focus area. To create real value for our employees and the country, Barloworld is committed to building a diverse workforce that reflects the demographics of our operational environment.

In South Africa, race, gender and disability are included in our employment equity targets, in line with the Department of Trade and Industry’s (dti) Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) scorecard requirements with the target for all South African operations to achieve a level 4 or better. In our non-South African operations, localisation and gender objectives are set in accordance with local demographics and legislation.

Gender

We are making progress against our objective of increasing female representation at all levels of the company by 2021. Moreover, we have specialised programmes such as our women in leadership development programme and women behind the wheel that are aimed at the inclusion and participation of women in key roles of the business across the group.

There is continued focus on achieving sustainable diversity and inclusion through diversity and inclusion weighting on the divisional scorecards. This contributed to gender recognition that the company received acknowledgement at the Gender Mainstreaming Awards 2020. Barloworld took the overall Gender Mainstreaming Champions for 2020 for JSE listed companies. The Company also won in the following two categories: Investing in Young Women and Women Empowerment in the Workplace (JSE-listed companies as well as OVERALL winner in this category).

People development

We depend on our people to deliver the best experience to our customers.

Our approach to employee development aims to improve performance and build capacity for the future through a mix of on-the-job development, mentoring and coaching and formal learning.

We also provide opportunities for graduates and unemployed youth to gain much needed work experience and qualification in the form of learnerships, internships, work readiness programmes and workplace in-house training. A number of graduates and unemployed youth benefited from our skills development and learning programmes.

Our Young Talent Pipeline accommodated 983 candidates this year – 929 on apprenticeships and learnerships, 38 internships and 16 candidates in our Chartered Accountant Trainee Programme.

Furthermore, we provided tertiary education support to 164 employees and 13 external bursars accessed support to further their formal education.