People Management

Deep Catch Namibia, a frozen goods direct distributor offering storage and trade has grown enormously in the past two years and thus needed additional, qualified employees from the locality. However, the company had difficulties in finding sufficient new staff with the skills required.

Using DEG's newly developed BSS measure People Management, Deep Catch was able to identify especially relevant qualification requirements and gaps the company had. Based on best practice approaches and with the support of experienced advisers, the company developed requirement profiles for existing and new jobs, in addition to training concepts and measures in the areas of leadership, sales and customer service, as well as development strategies for functions already in existence.

The implementation focuses on fostering skills such as flexibility, customer orientation and sales talent, as well as introducing a living corporate culture and corporate identity. The possibility for staff to acquire company shares contributes to boosting corporate identification, among other things.

Within a short period of time, Deep Catch was able to achieve a noticeable improvement and systematisation in its recruiting process, and make inroads into higher staff retention and satisfaction, and thus also improved business results.

The example of Deep Catch Namibia clearly shows that effective personnel management and adequately qualified and motivated staff are the basis for the long-term financial success of a company.

The company, dealing with the distribution of food commodities and finished food products in Sub-Saharan Africa, is currently undergoing a strong growth process, supported by only one HR employee. Although an additional HR assistant was recently employed, the department is struggling considerably with delivering its business support functions. After establishing a complete picture of the company’s people management challenges and understanding their underlying root causes, solutions were developed to address the challenges considering the company’s size, objectives, and the business culture. In this way, DEG could help the company by building a more efficient recruitment process and establishing an extensive talent development program. Thereby, the company's management could build the foundation for sustainable long-term growth by shifting its mindset from a strictly operational to an also developmental and creative one.

The company is one of the largest fully-integrated producers of beef and beef products in South Africa and employs 1,200 workers. The challenges the company is experiencing are, among others, difficulties with finding well-qualified new employees, high turnover among its workforce (30%), and low employee engagement. The solutions developed were mainly aimed at changing the external and internal perception of the company as an employer and develop appropriate processes, structures, and policies that allow people to develop more effectively, that offer performance-related remuneration, and that reconcile the company’s interests with those of its workforce. The implemented solutions not only led to better performance, but also to higher employee satisfaction, especially among the company's blue-collar workers by showing them that they are an important part of the company's family, too.

The company is part of a group founded and located in Germany, a global specialist for producing denim and leisure wear and has a laundry, sewage, and photovoltaic plant in Vietnam. Other production sites of the company's are situated in Bangladesh, China, and Tunisia. In the light of the company's ambitious growth path, successful management cooperation and alignment regarding all HR activities became central and had to be optimized in order to organize growth in an appropriate manner under more complex management structures. The measures included technical skills and leadership competencies development, and development of a more efficient recruiting, and a quantitative performance-assessment system. In this way, the company's management could get a clear picture of the underlying complex challenges and chances.

The company was founded in 2012 and is a company in the food & beverage (F&B) sector in Mexico City, currently employing 541 people. It was set-up as an investment platform to acquire majority stakes (between 51% and 100%) in small and medium-sized companies in the F&B sector in Mexico and to consolidate, strengthen, and develop these businesses. The company's aggressive growth strategy and business objectives require a professional HR department, and HR management in general was seen as a major challenge. Second, the production site has moved to a new location and the company is currently in the process of recruiting new personnel. Moreover, it is a very young company with a lot of development work to be done, also in terms of HR structures. Our solutions developed together with the company were a new communication strategy and change management system, the further standardization of working conditions and salaries, and a more exact description of the job profiles' functions with the necessary functional and cross-functional skills expected from the applicants. Thus, the company is now able to identify gaps between its job profiles and existing employees’ and applicants' skills. Thereby, it is now able to recruit and develop people efficiently.

The company is the fifth largest Sri Lankan life insurer as measured by Gross Written Premium with 515 employees, a dedicated management, and the ambitious growth target to assume market leadership by 2021. The company's two main challenges were attracting and selecting talents at the entry level, especially in the sales agency, as well as establishing a feedback and development culture, both within the sales agency and the internal organization. Our developed approaches to these challenges helped the company grow further sustainably and maintain a competitive advantage in the long run, especially by retaining its best sales people and keeping them highly motivated.