Momentum Metropolitan Holdings has been awarded Top Employer Certification from the International Top Employer Institute, the global HR authority on certifying excellence in employee conditions.

The certification is based on employers that provide excellent employee conditions, nurture and develop talent across all levels of the organisation, and who strive to continuously optimise employee experience and employment practices. Driven by a global HR leader, the certification enables employers to benchmark practices against world-wide standards and to align towards best practice shortfalls, calibrated against peers nationally and comparisons internationally.

"Momentum Metropolitan has credibly proven the organisation’s dedication to playing their part in creating a better world of work and exhibit this through their excellent people strategies and practices. The Group provides an outstanding workplace experience and journey, empowering employees at all levels within the organisation to truly reach their potential,” says Billy Elliott, Top Employers Institute Regional Manager: Africa.

The organisation performed exceptionally well in five of the six areas of the HR Best Practices Survey: Steer, Shape, Attract, Engage & Unite. Steer incorporates business strategy, people strategy and leadership; Shape covers organisation and change, digital HR and work environment; Attract looks at employer branding, talent acquisition and onboarding; Engage includes wellbeing, engagement, rewards and recognition, as well as offboarding; and Unite examines values, ethics and integrity, diversity and inclusion, and sustainability. Although the category of Develop, which speaks to the professional training the organisation provides to improve and grow employees skills measured as satisfactory, Momentum Metropolitan has prioritised it as a focus area and will continue to invest in our people to enable sustainable success.

Momentum Metropolitan Holdings also outperformed the Top Employers South Africa 2021 certified benchmark in Rewards and Recognition, Digital HR and Sustainability.

“We are honoured to be recognised as a Top Employer in Africa as we take our responsibility towards our people extremely seriously,” says Dr Dieter Veldsman, Action Group Human Capital Executive at Momentum Metropolitan Holdings. “Our Group’s Reset and Grow strategy included a focussed alignment on people practices and this contributed to the positive scoring in our certification. We work to create a culture of authentic support that recognises the whole human being, protects their wellbeing and promotes their development.”

This year’s survey data showed that the successful Top Employers focused on three themes in the past year: transparency and inclusion, accelerated digitalisation, and employee wellbeing.

Employers who were transparent and inclusive, empowered their employees to create a culture of openness and trust through clear goal setting, leaders who openly shared their personal development objectives and inclusive policies such as no gender pay gap. Momentum Metropolitan Holdings, for example, closed the pay gap over the last three years – and in fact, 48% of top earners in the Group identify as female.

Accelerated digitalisation meant using emerging technologies to attract, develop and engage employees to improve the employee experience – Momentum Metropolitan Holdings has developed their digital capabilities to include onboarding new staff, keep teams connected through virtual workspaces and engaged through pulse surveys, as well as to train them, amongst others.

Employee wellbeing emerged as a key business imperative during the pandemic – and this meant prioritising and supporting employees’ physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. Companies like Momentum Metropolitan who already had wellness programmes in place prior to pandemic scenarios fared well in the assessment.

“The pandemic sharpened our approach to think human first, and to consider the holistic needs of our people – making wellbeing in the workplace a fundamental priority,” says Dr Veldsman.

Already in place was the company’s free access to wellbeing resources such as the organisation’s health and wellness programme, ‘Wise and Well’, which focuses on supporting the mental, emotional, physical and financial wellbeing of the organisation’s employees, as well as to virtual 24/7 remote health service ‘Hello Doctor’. By providing flexibility to help employees deal with everyday life and juggling both their work and personal lives through a remote working policy Momentum Metropolitan was able to pivot quickly and efficiently as the situation demanded.

“We see it as critical to help our people find meaning in their work, and show them that what they do and who they are matters to us as we all navigate the ongoing uncertainty of the pandemic and find ways to cope with the ever-changing needs of the workplace,” says Dr Veldsman. “We will continue to invest in being a top employer for our people and in creating an environment that provides them the support they need.”

The Top Employers Institute certified 1 700 Top Employers for 2021 in 120 countries covering every region in the world. In Africa, 242 organisations registered to participate in the 2021 programme and 221 companies achieved the Top Employer 2021 Certification, spanning 32 countries and 22 industry sectors. In South Africa, 117 companies registered to participate and 97 achieved certification.