The City of Johannesburg presented its revised Smart City Strategy 2019/21 two years ago, which established the city as a smart city. “city that is economically competitive, addresses its critical threats more efficiently and becomes attractive as a liveable and sustainable city.”
With the election of the multi-party leadership governing the City of Joburg over the last few months, the city has hinted that it is preparing to become a city of the future, with the council recently approving the Multi-Party Government’s Hybrid Working Policy, which it claims is the first of its kind for any city or government in South Africa.
The Hybrid Working Policy is based on international best practices and aims to increase employee productivity and morale while lowering costs and the City’s carbon footprint. This aligns with the Executive Mayor’s (Mpho Phalatse) priorities of ensuring that Johannesburg gets the basics right and aspires to be a well-run smart city for our residents.
McKinnley Mitchell, a spokesperson for the MMC for Group Corporate and Shared Services, says “the Hybrid Working Policy is centred on the pillars of international best practice with aims to increase productivity and morale of employees while reducing costs and the carbon footprint generated by the City of Joburg. This is in line with the Executive Mayor’s priorities of ensuring that Joburg is a city that gets the basics right and aims to become a well-run smart city for residents”
Mitchell believes that in order to achieve these goals, the city must professionalize itself and hire a professional and efficient staff complement, with employees serving as the city’s engine. “We want to strengthen Joburg’s status as an employer of choice – allowing us to attract the best and brightest. This policy will allow those employees who are not required on the front line of service delivery to execute their daily responsibilities with flexibility as they contribute towards Joburg’s Golden Repair,” Mitchell said in a statement by the city.
The spokesperson added to the statement “To attract and retain the very best talent, it has become important to recognize the fast-changing global landscape of work/life balance for all employees. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated existing work to achieve these goals and introduced the “new normal” for the entire world. We benchmarked our policy on local and international companies with similar employee numbers in the banking and technology sectors, which found that the implementation of such a policy will decrease carbon footprints, reduce traffic congestion, and realize savings from property rentals and other associated costs with these buildings, such as IT infrastructure and security services”.
The council stated that the city will now conduct a proactive assessment of all of its corporate buildings to determine the optimum space requirements of its workforce, which can then be outfitted with hot desks, breakaway rooms, and ‘dynamic spaces’ that can increase collaboration to break down the silo effect, which it claims is a barrier to productivity.
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Source of News: Joburg adopts Hybrid Working-Policy
