The Project
I was a lead change manager on a global HR SAP implementation for Sasol across Southern Africa, Eurasia, and North America. This included working with SAP as our implementation partner, as well as a matrix of stakeholders including HR, business representatives, Employee Relations Specialists and trade unions, and a wider global team of consultants.
The Goal
Sasol sought to modernise and unify their systems across continents and regions with one shared platform across the whole organisation. Streamlining their processes, they also aimed to empower HR as a key enabler to the organisation, from access to internal information, payslips and booking leave, to managing performance, compensation and rewards.
Strategic Insights
This project was hugely complex. Sasol as an organisation has extremely diverse working environments, teams and internal cultures, from employees in urban head offices to frontline staff in the plants and mines. As a global organisation, we were also working across multiple languages including English and other South African languages, German, Slovak, and Portuguese in Mozambique.
Sasol is also a highly unionised environment, which is standard in the energy industry. This meant working closely with Employee Relations experts and conducting regular meetings with trade unions to ensure factors like language, accessibility, and proper education around this tech transformation. Within this complexity, our objective was to regularly engage the right people with simple, clear and well-translated messaging.
My job as a change manager was to put myself in the shoes of the end-users from a psychological, emotional, and practical standpoint in order to provide the support they needed while reaching our business objectives at the same time. In this case, this technology introduced a whole new way of working for the organisation, from the CEO to junior staff. So our change team was careful not to underestimate how scared and overwhelmed people felt about the new technology and to factor that into our approach.
Inside such a large organisation with many existing, entrenched systems, it was also vital for our change team to immerse ourselves and understand the complexity of the company in order to lead this extensive change for an eminent global company.
This project is one of many I have worked on and led for Sasol, including a B-BBE Transaction, an Employee Value Proposition, a Culture Transformation, and Organisational Restructuring.
