Black Economic Empowerment is crucial to our philosophy as it represents the crux of our transformation objectives. We belief in BEE as a meaningful way to redress the imbalances of our historical legacy, and aim to not only to enforce its fundamental principles within our workplace, but also to extol the virtues of BEE and participate in it’s definition in our industry and the broader South African community.
The key features of our BEE policy emphasize balance and as such supports a broad empowerment profile which focuses on the following BEE components:
· Ownership Empowerment: This is the often seen as the main criteria in defining an organizations empowerment credentials, and is often used as a means to manipulate the spirit of empowerment. MicroVision understands its importance and will adhere to the spirit of BEE by specifying that while MicroVision is a private company its shareholding will at all times reflect South Africa’s demographics and is presently 100% Black Owned.
· Management Empowerment: This is an often neglected BEE component, but is critical as historically disadvantaged individuals (HDI) involved in the management of the company will ensure that empowerment concerns are integrated into company governance and adhered to. The goal of MicroVision is that management composition will always be characterized by the South African landscape.
· Staff Empowerment: MicroVision is committed to an Affirmative Action based recruitment policy as advocated and championed by the Employment Equity Act. We will undertake as far as possible to promote a workplace that is fairly representative of the wider community firstly and our industry community secondly. We also will instill equality in the workplace by rooting out all forms of discrimination, and ensuring that workplace advancement is just.
· Self-Empowerment: This component relates to our workplace skills plan, which is geared to the training and development of all company staff. This plan covers all aspects of the staff empowerment from technical to life skills training, and is individually tailored to individual staff members, by themselves and management. The purpose of the plan is to instill lifelong learning, promote well roundedness and ensure that our organization is constantly improving its skills base and overall productivity.
· Preferential Procurement: MicroVision will assess suppliers, sub-contractors and partners and only engage with organizations that have verifiable empowerment credentials that meet common held industry standards.
Our BEE policy also instructs us to constantly monitor our empowerment profile and benchmarked it against regulatory industry standards.