Full integrated annual report - African Bank - Investoreports

Within the context of further building to scale, maintaining lowest cost and ensuring that we deliver on our
vision of making a difference in people’s lives, ABIL has chosen fi ve strategic themes to pursue over the
medium term. These are:
Return on equity
Return on equity
Return on equity
Return on equity
Return on equity
S1
Growing our people
S2
Delivering value to our customers
S3
Maintaining a foundation of fi nancial strength
S4
Achieving operational excellence
S5
Expanding our accountability horizons
The fi rst four of these themes have been part of the group’s strategic agenda for the past two years and
progress has been made in many aspects. All these initiatives are however part of a journey and much
remains to be done. The fi nal theme is one of formalising and providing direction to a range of initiatives in the
organisation that focuses on improving our accountability to society as a whole.
S1. Growing our people
ABIL is of the fi rm view that our long term prosperity is strongly dependent on looking after our people, who
will look after our customers, who will, in turn, look after our profi tability. We have proven over the past year how
a strongly motivated workforce can generate a momentum in the business despite a diffi cult and competitive
trading environment. By allowing our people to understand and contribute to our vision and be developed to
step up to the new challenges, we are building an organisation that will remain at the forefront of innovation
and value creation for all our stakeholders.
We believe that the key to the sustainability of our business lies in the evolution of our culture. Our people
roadshows revealed what immense potential lies within the human spirit. The key rests with the leadership of
this organisation and how much of that potential we can unlock by focusing on people issues. We are working
quite deliberately on this agenda.
African Bank undertook another 43 roadshows to its people and customers during the year, to interact,
reiterate its value systems, share ideas and receive feedback regarding product and service needs. Many of
the new products and services that were offered in the business this year were as a result of feedback from
our people and customers.
Employee satisfaction surveys
The group undertook employee satisfaction studies in 2011. The studies were based on the response of
3 049 African Bank employees and 5 262 EHL employees.
Integrated report 2011 | African Bank Investments Limited 39