Johannesburg, 20 May 2013
Market leader in enterprise application software, SAP today announced it has been listed in Triple Pundit's Top 10 Employee Engagement Strategies for its Social Sabbatical programme, whereby SAP's most promising employees from across the globe support under-served communities in South Africa, Brazil and India, with the aim of providing mentorship and helping solve those communities' most pressing challenges.
According to an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) survey, sponsored by SAP, the world needs to create more than 500 million new jobs by 2020 to provide career opportunities for the unemployed as well as for young people who will be joining the workforce. The bulk of this challenge falls on countries in the developing world, including South Africa, Brazil and India.
SAP's Social Sabbatical programme aims to contribute to addressing this challenge while also creating a foundation for employee learning and innovation with a focus on team volunteering, mentorship and coaching. An international team of 30 SAP high potentials recently travelled to South African communities in Mabopane, Tembisa, near Johannesburg, and in Swaziland, bringing their business and IT expertise to local projects, such as the development of an efficient supply chain strategy to strengthen the local artisan sector. The programme also gave SAP employees a unique opportunity to further develop leadership skills, business acumen and connect with leaders and organisations from all over the world.
"An engaged workforce is critical to ensuring SAP achieves its ambitious African goals," said Pfungwa Serima, SAP Africa CEO. "Our objective is to increase our employee engagement index to 82% in 2013 (up from 79% in 2012). This is critical to foster a workforce culture based on innovation and career development."
Through various global initiatives, from employee volunteering and philanthropy, to youth and entrepreneurship mentorship programmes, more than 100 000 SAP employee hours have been invested in volunteering across the world. This has resulted in more than one million lives having been impacted and more than 1 000 non-profit organisations benefiting from SAP's engaged workforce.
"Effective employee engagement is directly linked to our ability to innovate, deliver customer value, positively impact lives and ultimately become the engine for economic growth in Africa to help solve African problems," concluded Serima.
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