Mukuru is a leading next-generation financial technology services platform for Africa’s emerging consumers. Founded in 2004, Mukuru is a digital platform that empowers its customers to take control of their futures by putting financial freedom in their hands. Powered by advanced technology, Mukuru provides access to convenient, secure, reliable, and affordable financial solutions. Their products and services are designed to make it easier for you to do what you need to do when you need it done.

We caught up with Savina Harrilall, Chief People Officer, and JP van Zittert, Head of OE and Total Rewards at Certified Top Employer Mukuru. We spoke to them about their journey to become a Top Employer, how that fits in with their overall strategy, and how it has impacted their organisation since being in the programme.

How did you start your Top Employers journey?

As part of her first 100 days, Savina conducted a strategic analysis of its people practices to better understand the aspects that served the business and those that required iterations or introductions. Through a collaborative process in 2022, we then identified the essential capabilities required to transform our function from a transactional focus, primarily on hiring and firing, to one that aligns with the organisation’s long-term sustainability needs. This capability mapping informed our functional assessments, which led to structural refinements. More importantly, it facilitated the identification of necessary actions, practices, and processes that must be initiated or evolved.

As an employer operating across the African continent, with a presence in the UK and EU, we needed to benchmark our people-practice performance and consider strategies to achieve our goal of becoming a global magnet for top FinTech talent. The Top Employers Programme provided a valuable reference point for the initiatives we implemented following the co-creation of our People Strategy and aligned people levers. Our people aspiration is to be recognised as a people-led organisation supported by a fun and inclusive culture that fosters highly engaged communities of individuals.

We aim to empower our employees to perform at their best, take ownership, make an impact, and grow. Our People-First philosophy strengthens our relationships with both employees and customers. By leveraging our diverse skill sets and backgrounds as a competitive advantage, our efforts are aligned towards creating an environment where all individuals can bring their authentic selves. Our emphasis on enabling individuals and fostering collaborative organisational communities drives innovative solutions for our customers while cultivating a culture that celebrates our employees. A people-conducive culture leads to high employee engagement and creates an environment where everyone feels like they truly belong. The insights gained from the Top Employers Survey allowed us to pinpoint critical areas for focus and refinement, enabling us to shift the dial toward being recognised as an employer that genuinely values and recognises its people as the heartbeat of our business.

How were you able to align your Top Employers’ results with your broader strategy implementation?

We wanted to track our progress on the strategy and our progress as part of our broader strategy implementation annually. The Top Employers Programme was a neutral/objective partner that benchmarked and validated our process. When we had our first Validation in August 2022, it served as the foundation to create a baseline of Mukuru’s current practices and identify areas that we needed to focus on. The Validation outcome allowed us to align and refine our People practices at a tactical level (post our people-function capability map) to make progress on our People Strategy.

The follow-up validation, 8 months later, enabled us to objectively track our progress and further identify those areas that required more and different levels of focus. It was a team effort, and progress here is reflective of our Take Ownership, Innovate, and Solve Continuously, which are all Mukuru values.

Our engagements with internal stakeholders to ensure that our focus was still meeting and referenced against business needs remained a key success factor. This aligns with our connection with customer value. All of the work that we have and continue doing is towards achieving our People Aspiration, which is that we are recognised as a people-led business that is underpinned by an inclusive, fun culture, with highly engaged communities of individuals and that our people are enabled (through our people practices, and processes) to perform, take ownership and grow. We are committed to creating a culture and climate where our people thrive, feel like they belong, and can impact our business indelibly. 

Can you tell us a bit more about Mukuru’s values? What drives your organisation?

Our core values at Mukuru are:

What were the biggest hurdles you faced in becoming a Top Employer?

This is not a hurdle or obstacle but a critical success factor – bringing the existing Human Capital team on board, ensuring alignment to the shared vision of the People Strategy and getting buy-in and understanding of how we benchmark our people capabilities, practices and processes to the TE standards was pivotal for us to be able to see if and how we were shifting the dial of the People function at Mukuru, but also being measured against global standards, and not marking our own homework, could be a game changer for our roles and function.

This was an internal focus, but we were determined to make it faster than the expected 36 months. This meant that a lot of time investment, long hours, innumerable hours of stakeholder engagement to get buy-in and input, refinements, and experimenting with stuff all served as our self-created pressure. Fortunately, it yielded the desired outcome: coordination and internal team alignment to ensure the delivery of key Top Employer practices.

What do you think you would do if you could go back in time and do something differently?

I don’t think there would be anything significant we would change. From the start, we all engaged, took ownership, and ran with the pieces that we could contribute to. We knew what our goal was and worked relentlessly in pursuit of it. We initially set a goal of 36 months to be certified, and we achieved this 18 months ahead of time.

Possibly, we could have pushed the dial more. This could have been a better utilisation of the practices on the platform. We did reference some of them, but we could have accessed it more. This speaks to our focus on growth through learning and bettering ourselves, but we also wanted to push the dial ourselves (Innovate and Solve Continuously).

I think that sharing the aim/goal with the team was important from the get-go. Positioning our intent that we will not mark our own work but align to best practices and be measured against other organisations.

How did you celebrate your Certification?

If there is one word that encapsulates how we felt when we received the confirmation email, it would be ‘WOW’, and that doesn’t even capture the numerous emotions that we experienced. It was and still is a surreal experience. But in true Mukuru fashion, we are already thinking about “what’s next”, meaning, which is the next country that we want to get Certified in.

We felt overwhelmed with pride at being externally validated for the hard work that the Human Capital team puts into this, to ensure that our business is set up for success and that our people can feel proud that they work for a company that truly values them and is committed to ensuring that they are valued. We are humbled to stand head-to-head with organisations 10 times or 100 times larger than us. We can say we are worthy and capable, and can be a magnet for fintech talent! 

Practically, we printed Top Employers frames, linked the Top Employers Certification on our website and socials, and created digital backgrounds for our People Acquisition team. At our 20th Birthday celebration, we celebrated the Certification for 2024 as a business. We recorded Top Employers videos that we use as part of our campaigns.

Have you noticed any changes since Mukuru became a Certified Top Employer?

Internally, we were in a position where we could reference our work against best-in-class global practices, making it easier to “sell”. It was also tangible, measurable, and not airy-fairy, which connected with business language. Within the HC team, it allowed us to reference the thinking and the work we intended to do against global practices. This either affirmed that we were on the right track or presented opportunities for refinement or overhauling. It serves as a great learning and thought-provoking basis. 

From a team morale perspective, it also served as a boost. When we could see that the possibility existed that we were doing more than others in certain spheres, it boosted the team and spurred them on to do and be better. The same applied to where we could see through the tracking that we were lagging. It wasn’t demotivating, but the information and support provided by the Top Employers Institute’s engagement team boosted our efforts by questioning and challenging how we were doing something or thinking about something. Our learning throughout this process was and remains an invaluable outcome.

Do you have any data that reflects these changes?

We do; they include:

Wow, those are amazing results. Can you share some of the results of your HR Best Practices Survey? I know that you surpassed the global benchmark in several topics.

Yes, in our last survey, we were honoured to receive the following results:

Do you have exciting plans for the future?

We absolutely do! We have many plans underway, but here are just a few:

Before we go, do you have any tips for other Top Employers based on your experience so far?

Never devalue or ignore even the smallest effort to improve or refine how and what you do for your people. Ensure that whatever you do is superimposed against the bigger picture of your organisation’s goals and its aspirations for your people. If your “why” is grounded in purpose and you always stay true to that, this serves as your north star, as it will keep you on track, even when it feels too much.

Set goals and targets with timelines and ensure that you check progress against commitments at your pit stops and refine where needed. Ensure that everyone is aligned and on board. Don’t rely solely on the people team for input and experimentation; involve your people and your leaders in the testing—they are the greatest source of information on what works/doesn’t and will/will not.

Achieving certifications like Top Employer is not a race, but an ongoing journey that demands dedication, low ego, honest conversations and reflections, iterations, and a thoughtful, measured team approach.

And the reward? A journey filled with the thrill of reaching the destination, and the excitement of charting the next adventure, towards creating a future-proofed, people-first, global organisation.

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