Safaricom best employer in Africa

Safaricom #ticker:SCOM has been named as the best employer in Africa and 67th in the world by Forbes business magazine that ranked 500 publicly-traded companies from 60 countries.

The annual Forbes Global 2000 list, now in its 16th edition, puts second best employer in Africa Naspers at position 224 globally followed by First Rand (432) and Sanlam (457) all from South Africa.

The ranking was based on analysis of more than 430,000 global recommendations in which employees were asked to rate their own employer and the likelihood they would recommend the company to a friend or family member.

Forbes also asked employees to recommend other employers they admired.

Being at position sixty seven in a list that was dominated by 185 firms from US means that many of the potential and current employees like the working environment at Safaricom.

According to Safaricom’s annual report, the telco had 6,130 staff members averaging 27 years as at end of March 2018. Of this, half are women.

Line managers

The telco says that it has 460 line managers who have been trained to be life coaches.

“The aim is to support employee wellness, performance management and leadership development,” says Safaricom

According to CEO Bob Collymore, the telco wants to create more opportunities for more women to transition into leadership positions so that by 2020 the proportion of women in senior management improves from the current 32 per cent to match that of men.

Safaricom has so far employed 96 members of staff with various disabilities and supports them through enhanced medical cover, assistive devices and special emergency response equipment.

Market value

The featured 500 firms together accounted for $39.1 trillion in sales, $3.2 trillion in profit, $189 trillion in assets and $56.8 trillion in market value.

Top on the list was Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Walt Disney and Amazon, all from US.

Last year, Remgro, a South African-based investment holding company with a portfolio across more than 30 companies, was the only African company on the list.

Safaricom’s recognition by Forbes comes barely two months after American multinational business magazine, Fortune, ranked it 19th on the ‘Change the World’ list which rates companies based on how they use profits to help address social challenges.

Fortune said that M-pesa service which Safaricom and Vodafone launched in 2007 now serves more than 30 million customers in 10 countries, mostly in remote areas far from banks.

Source:https://www.nation.co.ke/