Sasol Limited Sustainability Report 2018

Across our global operations we build and sustain a talent pipeline through our bursary and learnership programmes whilst actively monitoring employee turnover to enable a sufficient supply of critical skills for our operations. In South Africa, Sasol has pledged commitment to the national Youth Employment Service (YES) campaign which is a partnership between government and corporates to drive capacity to shift South Africa’s narrative towards one of growth and optimism by providing employment opportunities for the youth in our country. In Mozambique, management placed more emphasis on driving localisation and critical skills development to ensure sustainability of operations.

We launched our vision and purpose together with our refreshed values and aspirational culture. These building blocks pave the way for the exciting next phase in our organisation’s culture transformation journey. Integral to our aspirational culture is that we value and promote diversity and inclusion. Our diversity 10-point plan continues to provide a set of qualitative measures designed to enable the achievement of our objectives in meeting our Employment Equity targets, including the recruitment, development and retention of candidates from under-represented groups, as well as measures to enhance gender equity. We launched “Let's talk about women in Sasol”, to encourage all of us to talk openly and honestly about how we can accelerate progress on gender equity. In South Africa, the appointment of persons with disabilities has been included as a measurement on our people scorecard. Nearly four years since we launched a programme to develop women in North America, we are proud to have doubled our female workforce in our North American Operations. The programme has been designed to touch each workforce development pipeline entry point and includes university partnerships and scholarship funding. In Eurasia, we also continue to focus on gender diversity and driving women empowerment strategies that are fit-for-purpose and these are progressing well according to plan.

We have critically reviewed our leadership approach and engaged our leaders to redefine the leadership style and approach we believe will be instrumental in bringing our aspirational culture to life. Our refined leadership style comes to life in the way we lead and how we live the values of the organisation. By inspiring high performance, promoting innovation and becoming multipliers of people performance, which is being embedded through the LEAD Sasol programme, we endeavour to build a resilient organisation. In this vein, we also placed more emphasis on the roll-out of multiple leadership development programmes, with particular emphasis on frontline leadership capability building to strengthen the relationship with our employees.

Our global talent forums are well embedded in the organisation and provides a clear overview on key and critical talent segments. This also helps us with the integration of our global talent development programmes. Specific focus has also been placed on the rotation of Young Professionals through our global mobility programme, as well as development opportunities for our Young Engineers and our Learning, Experiencing, Accelerating Potential (LEAP) participants. These participants are selected for their potential to develop into senior leadership roles in the organisation. This development programme includes placement into a full-time job for a defined period to gain practical experience.

Sasol recognises the right of employees to collective bargaining and to freedom of association in accordance with all relevant labour legislation. We maintain constructive and healthy relationships with all representative trade unions and works councils across our regions namely; South Africa, Mozambique, North America and Eurasia respectively. These stakeholders retain consultative or negotiating powers on issues of mutual interest. In an endeavour to further embed operations stability and employee productivity improvement, we have focused on the effectiveness of our partnership forums to collaborate on the delivery of our business objectives. Further, we have also delivered multi-year wage agreements across most of our regions. Finally, across our global operations, focused attention has been placed on heightened employee engagement and strengthening the relationship with our employees. In this regard, specific interventions have been rolled out to empower our leaders, with particular emphasis on frontline leadership capability building to improve connectivity with our employees.

In order to improve the well-being of our employees, specific interventions namely; affordability assessments, financial management and debt counselling programmes were implemented with the aim of enhancing the quality of life of our employees so that they are more focused and productive. During 2018, the organisation further launched a Quality of Life Survey for our South African employees. The survey outcomes will enable the organisation to review and align our benefit structures to better address the needs of our employees and improve their experience with the organisation. In essence, the survey assessed the current living standards of our employees and which of our benefit offerings are most and least valued. This initiative placed the organisation in a better position to review our employee value proposition journey.