The third JobCrystal Happiness Indicator takes a look at how salary, level of seniority and location affects how happy South African employees are. Employees earning higher salaries and in more senior positions tend to be the happiest, with employees living away from major metropolitan areas being happier.

1. Salary
Employees earning between R10,000 and R24,999 per month are the least happy, and as income increases employees’ happiness levels rise as well.

“This unhappy group is likely to consist of young employees who know they have great prospects, but who still need to get some experience under their belts in order to advance in their career. This level of disgruntlement may point to Millennials’ trademark sense of entitlement, ambition and awareness of their worth,” said Kevin Laithwaite, managing director of JobCrystal.

It’s important for companies to realise, however, that even the happy high earners are looking for new opportunities – they know they are marketable and will consider new positions.

JobCrystal: % happy employees by salary band
Salary per month Happy employees*

R10,000 – R24,999 55%
R25,000 – R49,999 58%
R50,000 – R79,999 60%
R80,000 + 63%

*Percentage of employees rating themselves “comfortable” or “happy” in their current role when registering on JobCrystal, www.jobcrystal.co.za.

2. Job level
The JobCrystal Happiness Indicator shows a distinct trend towards employees with more management responsibility being happier. Senior managers with large teams and executives came out tops in the happiness stakes.

“It seems likely that the happiness level is linked to how well these senior employees are regarded in the company and how much control, independence and decision making ability they have,” said Laithwaite.

Again, the indicator raises a red flag for employers because even though almost two-thirds of senior managers and executives are happy in their roles, they are open to other opportunities.

JobCrystal: % happy employees by job level
Job level Happy employees*

Manage managers (team 20+) 64%
Manage managers (team 10-19) 63%
Executive 62%
Manager (5-9 staff) 60%
Manager (0 staff) 60%
Skilled (2-5 years) 58%
Manager (10+ staff) 57%
Junior (<2 years) 57%
Manage managers (team 1-9) 56%
Senior (5+ years) 55%
Manager (1-4 staff) 53%
*Percentage of employees rating themselves “comfortable” or “happy” in their current role when registering on JobCrystal, www.jobcrystal.co.za.

3. Location, location, location
According to the JobCrystal statistics, it appears that your employees are more likely to be happy if they don’t live in a major metropolitan area. Smaller cities such as Richard’s Bay, Durban and East London, have a higher percentage of happy employees than larger cities such as Cape Town and Johannesburg.

There could be a range of reasons for this including better work-life balance, less stress and even experiencing less traffic.

JobCrystal: % happy employees by location
Location Happy employees*

KZN: Richards Bay 67%
Garden Route including Oudtshoorn 62%
KZN: Durban Ethekwini 61%
Eastern Cape: East London 60%
Gauteng: Pretoria Tshwane 57%
Gauteng: Johannesburg, Sandton, Randburg 56%
Cape Town: Southern Suburbs 55%
East Rand: Ekhuruleni 55%
Cape Town: Northern Suburbs 55%
West Rand: Mogale, Krugersdorp, Roodepoort 52%
*Percentage of employees rating themselves “comfortable” or “happy” in their current role when registering on JobCrystal, www.jobcrystal.co.za.

The first JobCrystal Happiness Indicator, released in April 2010, looked at levels of happiness amongst South African employees and found that less than half are happy. The second JobCrystal Happiness Indicator, released in June 2010,  looked at which South African companies had the happiest employees, and which employers were ranked as the best to work for. The low correlation between the two data sets indicated that even if employees bought into the company culture and values, they also needed to have their individual aspirations met to be happy.

The JobCrystal Happiness Indicator data is compiled from the 110,000-strong JobCrystal database of jobseekers. Employees are asked how happy they are in their current position (miserable, frustrated, comfortable, happy) when they register on JobCrystal. One of the ways in which JobCrystal improves the recruitment process and the hiring success rate for companies is by using this and other data to make the best matches between candidates and vacancies.

JobCrystal focusses on candidates looking to earn R150,000 per year and more. It charges a flat fee per successful placement, with no upfront charges. Companies including Nashua Mobile, Mr Price, The Ovations Group, Santam and Foschini are using JobCrystal to source candidates.

- ENDS –
About JobCrystal
JobCrystal turns traditional hiring on its head by placing employers directly in touch with a pool of 110,000 passive jobseekers. The online service is highly automated and cleverly matches candidates with employers, making the interactive talent management portal faster, cheaper and more effective than any other way of recruiting. Founded by Kevin Laithwaite and Karl Westvig and launched in August 2009, JobCrystal is used by companies including Nashua Mobile, Mr Price, The Ovations Group, Santam and Foschini to source candidates.

For more information please visit: www.jobcrystal.co.za (for jobseekers) or www.jobcrystal.co.za/talent (for employers).

Released on behalf of JobCrystal by:
Vanessa Clark
Twokats Communications
Ph: +27 82 335 1117
Email: Vanessa.clark@twokats.com
Web: www.twokats.com

Surprisingly these aren’t always at the same places

10 June 2010 – The second JobCrystal Happiness Indicator takes a look at which South African companies have the happiest staff and are the best places to work. The Auditor General has the happiest employees, with Shell Oil, CSIR, Softline Pastel and Anglo Platinum also performing well. KPMG is rated as the best place to work in South Africa with Sanlam, Momentum, Pick n Pay and PricewaterhouseCoopers also getting the thumbs up from employees (see charts below).

The low correlation between companies where employees are the happiest and those rated the best place to work demonstrates an important take away for companies. Even if employees buy into the company culture, vision and environment and so rate the company as a good place to work, they also need to have their individual goals and requirements met in order to be happy. (See data tables below). It’s worth remembering that all these companies mentioned have a significant number of active and passive jobseekers, which have signed up on JobCrystal, www.jobcrystal.co.za, amongst their employees.

The JobCrystal Happiness Indicator data is compiled from the 100,000-strong JobCrystal database of jobseekers. Employees are asked how happy they are in their current position (miserable, frustrated, comfortable, happy) and also how they rate their employer (the best, excellent, fair, poor, awful) when they register on JobCrystal.

JobCrystal: Companies with the happiest employees
Company name	Happy employees1
1. Auditor General	72.6%
2. Shell Oil	70.0%
3. CSIR	69.8%
3. Softline Pastel	69.8%
5. Anglo Platinum	69.1%
Note: See the notes to editors for a sector breakdown.
1 Percentage employees rating themselves “comfortable” or “happy” in their current role when registering on JobCrystal.

JobCrystal: Top companies rated by employees “best”/”excellent” to work for
Company name	Best company to work for1	Happy employees2
1. KPMG	75%	62%
2. Sanlam	71%	48%
3. Pick n Pay	67%	54%
4. Momentum	67%	61%
5. PricewaterhouseCoopers	66%	56%
1 Percentage employees registered on JobCrystal rating the company “best”/”excellent” to work for.
2 Percentage employees rating themselves “comfortable” or “happy” in their current role when registering on JobCrystal.

The first JobCrystal Happiness Indicator, released in April 2010, (http://www.jobcrystal.co.za/blog/post/JobCrystal/2010/04/Press_02/) showed that fewer than half of South African employees are currently happy in their role. This latest data shows that employees experience a huge difference in the impact of the general company environment as opposed to the achievement of individual career ambitions on their happiness levels.

“It is clear that the companies that focus on gaining staff buy-in for company-wide goals and objectives, at the expense of meeting employees’ individual career goals, are going to find it difficult to hold on to top talent,” said Kevin Laithwaite, JobCrystal Managing Director. “The two go hand-in-hand in terms of attracting and keeping star performers.”

JobCrystal compiles the Happiness Indicator from the data it collects when candidates enter their details on the talent management portal. One of the ways in which JobCrystal improves the recruitment process and the hiring success rate for companies is by using this and other data to make the best matches between candidates and vacancies.

JobCrystal focusses on candidates looking to earn R150,000 per year and more. It charges a flat fee per successful placement, with no upfront charges. Companies including Allan Gray, Santam, Standard Bank and Foschini are using JobCrystal to source candidates.

- ENDS –

Notes to editors:

Companies with the happiest employees by sector
Sector & company name	Happy employees
Auditing
1. KPMG	62%
2. Ernst & Young	59%
3. PricewaterhouseCoopers	56%
Banking
1. Standard Bank	57%
2. Wesbank	56%
3. ABSA Bank	56%
Education
1. Tshwane University of Technology	63%
2. University of Pretoria	62%
3. University of Johannesburg	61%
FMCG
1. BAT South Africa	65%
2. Tiger Brands	57%
3. Unilever	55%
Government
1. Auditor General	73%
2. CSIR	70%
3. Department of Health	69%
Insurance
1. Metropolitan	63%
2. Momentum	61%
3. Discovery Health	57%
IT
1. Softline Pastel	70%
2. IBM South Africa	65%
3. Dimension Data	64%
Public Enterprise
1. Transnet	60%
2. SABC	56%
3. Eskom	55%
Retail
1. JD Group	68%
2. Foschini Group	60%
3. Edcon Group	56%
Telecoms
1. MTN	68%
2. Telkom	61%
3. Vodacom	61%

• Company details are only displayed if there is a statistically significant data sample size.

About JobCrystal

JobCrystal turns traditional hiring on its head by placing employers directly in touch with a pool of 100,000 passive jobseekers. The online service is highly automated and cleverly matches candidates with employers, making the interactive talent management portal faster, cheaper and more effective than any other way of recruiting. Founded by Kevin Laithwaite and Karl Westvig and launched in August 2009, JobCrystal is being used by companies including Allan Gray, Santam, Foschini, Mr Price, Ovations Group and Standard Bank to source candidates.

For more information please visit: www.jobcrystal.co.za (for jobseekers) or www.jobcrystal.co.za/talent (for employers)

South Africa’s most exciting marketing opportunity to showcase itself to the rest of the globe is here, in the shape of the 2010 World Cup. Visitors are going to experience the country’s natural beauty, football stadiums and world-class cities. And central to the urban experience is going to be tourists’ and locals’ enjoyment of commercial public spaces.

Steve Rennie, managing director at Rennie Property, which manages a R6 billion-portfolio of properties including Melrose Arch, looks at the primary property-related logistics that go into making multi-use public spaces a success during events such as the World Cup. With an estimated 373,000 foreign visitors arriving for the tournament, according to estimates released by Grant Thornton in April 2010, it is paramount that both locals and tourists have a pleasurable experience so that they return, and tell their friends to visit.

The focus for any owner or manager of a public space such as a shopping mall or tourist attraction is on security, ease of access, and showcasing the venue to its full potential and for the maximum enjoyment of visitors.

The biggest challenge for property managers is to maintain the same, or indeed better, standards of service during an event such as the World Cup. It is vital that both tenants and suppliers are kept informed, trained, and motivated to achieve this goal.

Property managers should have been working very hard on setting up the following:

1. Security:

Revised emergency procedures need to take into account additional visitors. Will there be enough hands on deck, and are the staff trained for circumstances they might not encounter in their everyday schedule, such as crowd control, social problems and the arrival of high profile visitors. Cashing up procedures specifically should be revisited, and supplies such as first aid kits should be checked and additional stock brought in.

2. Transport:

Drop-off and parking zones need to be planned, especially if a fan ride service is going to be picking up and dropping off fans attending the games. Road closures need to be taken into account, and ample access and parking for taxis and coaches needs to be provided. Signage and directions should be easily visible and very clear.

3. Supplier management and communication:

Making sure all third party suppliers, eg cleaners, are prepared for additional visitors, and know what additional events are being planned.

4. Tenant co-ordination and security:

Tenants need to be up to speed on emergency plans, security requirements and other planning. Any extraordinary marketing activities should be clearly communicated as well so that tenants can maximize these opportunities. Also, in multi-use facilities there are a range of tenants with conflicting requirements, eg the shops and restaurants love the additional foot traffic while offices and residents want to know that it will be business as usual.

5. Managing one-off property alterations:

Many public spaces are seeing the very quick construction of facilities that will only be used for the World Cup, and then dismantled immediately. Timing is tight in order to minimize disruption to every day business, but the structures need to be safe, well-constructed and stylish … and then quickly dismantled and removed.

Any property manager worth their salt would have done their preparation and have these plans in place to ensure a safe, enjoyable and profitable World Cup for their tenants and landlords, as well as laying the groundwork to benefit from this opportunity for years to come.

About Rennie Property

Rennie Property, South Africa’s top-performing specialist commercial property management company, offers property management, broking and consulting services. It was established in 1997, and for the past 13 years has looked after some of South Africa’s most prestigious buildings including Melrose Arch in Johannesburg, and the ABSA Centre in Cape Town. Its present portfolio of properties under management is valued at more than R6 billion.

For more information please visit: www.rennieproperty.co.za

eNetworks, the enterprise network services provider, has vastly improved the performance of local area network (LAN) for Saldanha Works, one of the plants of leading steel company, ArcelorMittal South Africa.

eNetworks diagnosed and optimised the company’s existing LAN topology in order to increase performance and uptime. The LAN is used for both the network monitoring system of the steel plant as well as general administration functions. Poor LAN performance and downtime can mean a direct cost to the company from a production point of view and by preventing staff working at maximum capacity, along with the associated frustration of a slow system.

“It’s not enough to set up a network and sit back. You have to constantly fine-tune it to receive the best performance and efficiency. After all, a LAN is the lifeblood of a company,” said Jonathan Maliepaard, Managing Director of eNetworks.

The 10 Gbps fibre optic LAN stretches between four data centres on the ArcelorMittal South Africa’s campus, includes 52 managed switches and is used by more than 500 users. The network is built using HP Procurve equipment.

“eNetworks takes the expertise normally reserved for external networks and applied it to our internal network,” said Hennie Mey, Manager of  Information Management at Saldanha Works. “We’ve seen the results in terms of increased uptime and productivity amongst our teams. In addition, they trained our staff at the same time to help us become more self-sufficient.

“We appreciated the fact that Jon and his team didn’t come along with an off-the-shelf remedy, but rather that they got a thorough understanding of the situation and our requirements, and then designed a solution for our specific circumstances.”

eNetworks has built and optimised some of the country’s largest high-end business networks. Its focus is on security, high uptime, redundancy and cost-effectiveness.

About eNetworks

eNetworks, the enterprise network services provider, prides itself on remembering what service is about. It offers managed ISP and enterprise network services to companies looking for a solution to suit their needs, rather than a generic offering.

eNetworks has optimised one of South Africa’s largest HP Procurve enterprise networks for ArcelorMittal, and provides business Internet and networking services for, amongst others, Ackermans, Protea Hotels, Habari Media, Mediterranean Shipping Company, Jeffares and Green Consulting Engineers and Edge Investments.

Entrepreneur, Jonathan Maliepaard founded the company in 1999. eNetworks is a Hewlett Packard preferred partner and an HP Procurve Specialist, and also has offerings in the server and storage space. It is also the African distributor for GTA firewalls. It has a level 3 BBBEE status.

For more information please visit: www.enetworks.co.za

Update: So 48 hours later I still don’t have email. Thanks to a load of misleading and inaccurate information from Web Africa I decided to not pull my domain name from Web Africa and point it somewhere else yesterday or even this morning.

Apparently 2.000 domain names were affected.

I am still waiting for the CEO of Web Africa to return my call.  I hope he does and can explain this catalogue of disasters. (His PA did get back to me, but couldn’t really do anything to help at that stage). In any case I will very soon be an ex-customer of Web Africa, and move to an ISP where “service” actually means something.

Mistakes do happen. But I stand by my view that total transparency with both your staff and customers is the best policy.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook today is probably sick to tears of me whinging about my lack of email and website thanks to a DNS foul-up at Web Africa, my ISP.

Now while I still am not 100% sure of what actually happened, these are my thoughts around the experience from a customer care point of view. This is something I am paying a lot of attention to at the moment, as I am about to launch a new venture that will both rely on and differentiate itself by extraordinary customer care.

1. Realise the magnitude of the problem – quickly. I first reported the problem at 5 pm on Wednesday. When I checked my email on Thursday morning and called the support centre to check in, I got the distinct impression that there were no alarm bells ringing at all at Web Africa yet.
2. Be grateful that your service is that important to your customers and treat them accordingly. The fact that I called in about my email and web site being down before 6 in the morning should have been a clue to the support person that I wasn’t just waiting for Facebook updates and cocktail party invitations. That I was relying on their service for business critical reasons, and that in fact my livelihood relies on my connectivity.
3. Share information. I get that sometimes this is difficult, especially when you are still establishing the extent of the problem. But explain what is going on, and why you can’t advise on whether this is a 30 minute problem or a 28 hour (at time of writing) problem. Don’t under estimate your customers and similarly don’t bamboozle them with jargon. A simple: “the computer that translates your URL into computer speak seems to have failed. We’re trying to find out if this is a slight spasm or a monumental cock-up. In the meantime, your options are X, Y or Z. Why not keep an eye on our site for updates.”
4. Empower your staff with information. The poor first line support guys are doing their best in the face of frustrated and angry customers. The least you can do is give them the information in point 3.
5. Make this information easily accessible elsewhere. And useful. And update it. When I eventually was told where the alerts are posted on the Web Africa site, they turned out to be the most unhelpful things in the world, without a date and time stamp, and weren’t updated regularly. How about using Twitter for this? Or another channel that your customer uses. Being able to get some information on a regular basis would have stopped me phoning the helpdesk on the hour, and then later on the half hour, further adding to everyone’s workload, frustration and expense.
6. When a more senior support person steps in to appease the irate customer, make sure they actually have something to say. Hats off to the person who did contact me when he said he would, but what a shame he actually told me less than the first line guys, couldn’t offer any other solutions, and really didn’t add that much to the party.
7. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. At least five times today I was told that my domain name was being fast-tracked for resolution. Awesome. Except I knew that everyone who was phoning in was being told the same thing. Let’s assume that was 100 people. So, I’m first in line, with 100 other people – not going to work. And you know what, it didn’t.
8. Compensation. I’m still trying to decide what the best thing is to do here. Today, I asked for some form of compensation, and I asked that someone contact me about this after the issue had been resolved. I am pleased that Web Africa is going to offer me compensation, but I am feeling a bit ungrateful at the moment because a) the issue is still not resolved and b) because it was offered to me in the middle of the whole fiasco, it feels more like a “let’s do something to shut this crazy woman up” rather that a “gosh we are really sorry for screwing up, please accept this token of our sincere apologies”. (BTW – embrace your crazy, enraged, het up customers. They care enough to contact you, rather than simply walking across the road to your competitor).
9. Apologise. And empower your first line people to apologise. I remember when I was at school and did a brief stint at a South Africa retailer for a holiday job, we were told, if anything happens to a customer you must never apologise. It’s admitting guilt and leaves the company open to litigation. (Clearly they were reading from a handbook someone had picked up in the USA!) Thank god that this is changing, and that many millennial companies are happy to put their hands up, say we screwed up, we’re sorry and we’re going to fix it in these ways. I do think many (most?) South African companies still need to learn this lesson.
10. Treat your support staff like princes and princesses. They are the face and voice of your company for your customers (those people who pay your wages, remember?) and are so often the worst paid, have the worst working conditions and are disempowered and poorly informed. I love the idea of every single person in a company, especially the CEO, doing regular stints at the helpdesk.

This is not intended to be a dig at Web Africa specifically. For a start I think it’s too easy to hammer companies nowadays using social media, and that often people don’t think before they post. As I mentioned, customer care is something I have been thinking about a lot recently, and today’s experience crystallised a few thoughts for me.

Having said that, Web Africa, I really, really, really would like to have me email back up right about now.