Page 10 - MiNDSPACE Issue 2 2022 - Old Mutual Corporate

stewardship impactSPACE
‘If your company isn’t thinking in an agile way, and responding to customers’ needs, you’ll become irrelevant in the new business landscape.’
– Prabashini Moodley, MD: Old Mutual Corporate
An agile way of working makes
sense to Moodley. However, she cautions that
it involves a
significant mindset shift,
and systems can’t evolve if people can’t adapt. ‘Company culture does
change. Some people are
understandably anxious about
what that means for them. At Old Mutual,
Fiona Zerbst is a senior writer and editor who covers a wide range
of business, financial, conservation and
cultural topics. She also contributes to titles such as Finweek, Financial Mail and Mail & Guardian.
‘We set up an SME team to find out what smaller businesses’ most pressing needs would be – employee benefits aside – and how we could assist,’ Moodley says. ‘We then studied what the team had found – what worked well, what didn’t – and adapted accordingly. It was a perfect example of how things have to change
in order to be agile. Teams no longer have the luxury of spending a year designing a perfect process. In fact, being agile means living with unfinished processes – but the advantage is being able to deliver to stakeholders amid organisational change.’
Old Mutual Corporate, which has long delivered employee benefits to companies of all sizes, reached out to many smaller companies when Covid-19 hit South Africa, as they were hardest hit by the lockdown.
we have done our best to offer training
to give our teams the right skills, and we offer
a wellness programme that helps to replenish those who
are fatigued and who have faced challenges during the past couple of years.’
Old Mutual has also created smaller teams
that are empowered to make decisions, thereby functioning much like small companies but still enjoying the advantages of corporate backing such as a
healthy balance sheet. ‘We’re even more responsive to customers and we’ve brought them closer to the way we design and implement products and solutions,’ Moodley says. ‘We work faster and more collaboratively, but we don’t cut corners when it comes to compliance.’
For Moodley, the most successful part of the process has been breaking down silos in the business and showing employees that everyone is part of the chain that links to the customer.
‘If your company isn’t thinking in an agile way,
and responding to customers’ needs, you’ll become irrelevant in the new business landscape,’ she predicts.
8 | oldmutual.co.za/corporate
IMAGES: GALLO IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES AND SUPPLIED