Employees

Through 2009 we worked hard to continue to attract, engage and develop the best people in a very challenging year for the financial services sector. Continuing to invest in our people will position us well for future growth.

We employ over 53,500 people in 34 countries. Our employees are the foundation of our relationships with our stakeholders; by creating an environment where they feel supported, rewarded and encouraged to develop, we are able to help them reach their potential.

During 2009 we continued to maintain and develop our positive relationship with our employees. It was a challenging year for our business, and we are proud of the way they have responded. We have devoted considerable efforts to recognising their contribution, through a focus on fostering talent, listening to what they want to tell us, promoting health and wellbeing, and rewarding their ideas and contributions. Our success in achieving this in many parts of our business is reflected in the external awards we won in 2009, including:

Skandia:BSAM was named 'Best Employer' by Fortune Magazine in China;
Fairbairn Private Bank ranked 15th out of 1,000 companies in the Sunday Times 100 Best Small Companies to Work for 2009;
Skandia UK has been recognised as 'One to Watch' for two years running in the Best Companies to Work for survey.

So what did we do to deliver our commitments to employees in 2009?

Recognising and developing talent

We continued to provide highquality training for our employees across the Group and our Career Choices Model increased the access to, and quality of, career advice available to all our employees. For example, the Skandia UK business completed its Employer of Choice programme, which has successfully implemented a wide variety of new development and employee engagement initiatives. Employees now have dedicated resources to support, motivate and work with them to develop their careers and specialist support to provide professional development and technical mentoring.

At a time when leaders must be able to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty, while confidently managing risk and leading change across their business, we have increased the scope of our development programmes for senior management. The Global Business Manager's Programme and our new Global Strategic Management Development Programme have both been developed to facilitate strategic and leadership learning, networking and sharing best practice.

We take a proactive approach to succession planning, to mitigate risks and focus our development programmes where they are most needed. Our objective is to improve our ability to fill key roles internally thereby enabling continuity and providing career opportunities for the talent that we have throughout the Group. One initiative driven by our understanding of current succession plans was the creation of a Global Leadership Potential Programme. This provides individual action plans for people who show particular promise, to prepare them for appropriate future roles at more senior levels within the Group.

Listening to, and engaging with, our people

Maintaining high levels of commitment is important to both short and longterm business performance. We gauge employees' commitment, involvement and enthusiasm for their work and Old Mutual in terms of 'employee engagement'.

Every year we survey our employees confidentially, to ask them about their experiences of working at Old Mutual; and we use the results to inform changes within the business. Surveys of this type in 2009 indicate that, due to the recession, across all industries, levels of employee engagement have fallen. Our 2009 survey showed we were no exception. However, despite the slight decrease in scores we continued to rank in the top quartile of companies surveyed and engagement levels remain high across the Group relative to other organisations.

Our employees recognised our ability to adapt to change and rate our managers highly in their levels of honesty and integrity. This organisational resilience and trust in managers place us in a good position to remain competitive, continue building our performance score and retain valuable employees as the market begins to recover.

We place a premium on a strong internal communications process, both across the Group and within our business units, and we believe that this has been an important contributor to motivating our employees. For the first time in the Group's history we launched a Group-wide ezine, In Touch. This has been supported by our intranet and other internal magazines to share information between business units and keep employees up to date. In particular, it was important in 2009 to increase our communications about the financial crisis to inform our employees of the latest developments in the business and the sector. Employees responded positively, and this prompted many suggestions that have led directly to numerous improvements benefiting our customers and the efficiency of the business.

Wellness at Work

We want Old Mutual to be a safe, positive and rewarding place for our employees to work, so we take their health and wellbeing at work seriously. Across the Group individual business units have a variety of approaches for promoting wellness at work. These are just a few examples:

During 2009, over 11% of Old Mutual South Africa employees accessed the health and wellbeing services and support offered to them by our Employee Wellbeing Programme, including over 800 who received facetoface advice;

Nedbank established a network of 80 Wellness Champions in the latter part of 2009 who have volunteered to communicate health and wellness initiatives to colleagues.

Transformation

Transformation remains a key priority in our African operations and in 2009 we continued to focus effort on making the profile of our employees more representative of the demographics of the people we serve across South Africa.

For example, at Nedbank, our retail division has made good progress in advancing black and black female employees at senior, middle and junior management levels. This helped earn us third place out of 200 in the 2009 Financial Mail Top Empowered Companies Survey. The challenge remains to achieve our targets at all levels, and in 2010 we will continue to place a strong emphasis on achieving our goals.