Celebrating the 2019 CHRO award winners

Dripping in extravagance outshone only by the exceptional CHRO leaders in attendance, this year’s CHRO awards gala certainly brought the X factor.

The prestigious annual event is a celebration of excellence and recognises the exceptional work of individuals in the HR industry.  This year’s winners did not disappoint, setting the bar high for HR professionals across the board.

Full list of categories and CHRO Awards Winners

• CHRO of the Year – Paul Norman (MTN)
• Learning & Development Award – Paul Norman (MTN)
• Talent Management Award – Paul Norman (MTN)
• Strategy & Leadership Award – Sharon Taylor (Standard Bank)
• Transformation & Empowerment Award – Sharon Taylor (Standard Bank)
• Young CHRO of the Year – Trishana Maharaj (G4S)
• HR & Technology Award – Matimba Mbungela (Vodacom Group)
• Employee Value Proposition Award – Verna Robson (Sun International)

MTN Group CHRO, Paul Norman absolutely dominated the awards this year taking home three prestigious awards for his incredible achievements this year. Paul has been the driving force behind MTN’s HR strategy for the past 20 years, spanning their expansion across 24 countries to the company’s agile transformation to become a digital telco.

More recently, he has shifted gears to focus on employee experience, introducing an on-the-spot recognition platform and a next-generation learning platform focused on creating unique learning experiences.

Standard Bank Head of Human Capital, Sharon Taylor entered the awards neck in neck, taking home two of the prestigious awards on display. Sharon has led the introduction of many of the people strategies, philosophies and approaches that define the bank today, and has helped Standard Bank make great strides with transformation and technology.

Noteworthy focus areas for Sharon and her fantastic team include employee engagement, leadership effectiveness and succession plans, bringing a compelling culture to life and ensuring that the workforce is fit to compete in the future of work.

G4S HR and Health and Safety Director (Africa), Trishana Maharaj is an absolute powerhouse earning her the Young CHRO of The Year award. She joined the company in early 2018 which saw her immediately impact the HR function considerably. She began developing commercial business skills and managing the wage bill of Africa’s largest employer to its best levels to date.

She is a complex problem solver with strong principles and the gallantry to speak her incredible mind at every level of the organisation. Her most recent accomplishment is embarking on a new mission to implement a single instance HR and payroll system across 23 African countries covering 110,000 employees.

Vodacom Group CHRO, Matimba Mbungela has been critical to the digital transformation journey that Vodacom has travelled over the past five years. This year his efforts have earned him the HR & Technology award.

Matimba is primarily proud of the Engage app created to cover the many aspects of employee engagement, including payslips, employee self-service, learning and development, leave management, onboarding and more. His team advocate for the human touch, but are known for driving tough conversations too, which is no doubt one of the many facets of their success.

Sun International Group HR executive, Verna Robson takes great pride in the Sun International incentives and benefits offered to its employees and her work has earned her the Employee Value Proposition award this year.

Verna is passionate about transformation and empowerment and has assisted in driving Sun International to Level 1 for the past three years. She has worked to digitise the HR processes with the IT department and is currently introducing an e-learning platform.

To borrow the felicitous words of Anatole France, “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.” Congratulations to the winners of this year’s awards, we at Adcorp Group recognise the contributions of these industry players and salute them on their prodigious achievements; pushing our industry forward.

About Adcorp

Across the Group we have a number of end-to-end workplace solutions solving a wide range of business challenges. We search, place, develop, train and manage people for temporary and permanent job opportunities. We also supply people resources on an outsourced basis and manage people-intensive processes on behalf of our clients. Our mission is to build workplaces and careers of the future by transforming the places we work in. We do this by connecting potential.