At the recently held 2021 Reward Awards ceremony hosted by the South African Reward Association (SARA), Openserve won the Reward Project of the Year award while ABSA won the Remuneration Report award for the second consecutive year.
Morag Phillips won the prestigious President’s Award.
The annual rewards celebrate the companies and professionals who design total reward solutions that attract, retain, motivate, and engage employees in a way that makes a difference to their organisations.
Reward Project Award
The 2021 SARA Reward Project award recognised the team from Openserve for their Heroes Employee Recognition Project. The project recognises employees that go beyond the call of duty in providing excellent service to Openserve customers.
The process is employee-driven and administered via the Openserve Heroes portal, where individual employees are nominated weekly. Due to the basic setup of the portal, no management intervention is required, and there is little to no overhead in administering the system. Weekly and monthly winners receive a personal call from an Openserve Exco member congratulating them on their Hero status.
The annual process culminates in a virtual breakfast with the Exco and the monthly Hero winners. In the first cycle, the CEO announced a surprise gift of a weekend away with partners for all the monthly winners. There has been a healthy adoption rate among employees and key indirect business performance metrics all show pleasing improvements.
The other placed nominees of the 2021 SARA Reward Project of the Year award were Mr Price Group in second place for their Flexible Retirement Benefits implementation project, and Bridgestone South Africa for their Total Cost to Company migration project.
Remuneration Report Award
The winner of the 2021 SARA Remuneration Report of the Year award is ABSA. Goldfields received 2nd Place and Anglo American Platinum Limited received 3rd place for their submissions.
This award recognises organisations for the alignment of their remuneration reporting and disclosure, against the key principles of the King IVTM governance guidelines which exemplify fair, responsible and transparent policy and practice. Submissions were evaluated by a panel of independent and expert judges across all spheres of stakeholders.
President’s Award
A special President’s Award that honours outstanding achievement in the field of total reward was awarded to Morag Phillips from 21st Century.
Morag has served the South Africa Reward Association over an extended period. She continues to contribute to the value that the association creates for its members by chairing the Thought Leadership Committee, and previously the Conference committee and also makes herself available as a Mentor on the Mentorship programme.
She has written many articles and spoken at numerous conferences on HR and Reward matters and is viewed as an industry specialist and leader in her field.
Morag is an integral part of the leadership team that ensures SARA continuously innovates value adding services to members. Morag’s inner strength, inputs, and research have enabled the SARA Exco to optimise the diversity of its members. The association is honoured to acknowledge Morag’s invaluable contribution to the profession, our community, country, and continent at large.
