AngloGold Ashanti’s values are intrinsically linked to our business strategies and aligned to every initiative undertaken across the company. The challenge for the business is to ensure that employees in every region in which we operate and across all levels support these values through their actions and interactions with others. One of the ways that AngloGold Ashanti is working to embed its values is through its System for People, a people management system to be implemented throughout the business. As part of the process of implementing this system, a survey of values and organisational behaviours is being conducted globally. Work on the survey started in 2009.

In July 2008, AngloGold Ashanti launched its vision, mission and values globally to employees. AngloGold Ashanti is a values-driven company which sees its values as the starting point for developing relationships built on mutual trust and which support each of its employees making a contribution to the organisation’s shared success.

With the launch of AngloGold Ashanti’s people management system – the System for People – in 2009, and within the context of our 2009 annual values review, the company decided to undertake a global values survey to determine value-based organisational behaviours as experienced by employees and their interpretation of the effectiveness of the values.

The survey was started in July 2009 (the anniversary of the 2008 values launch date) with a pilot run at the company’s corporate office in Johannesburg to test logistics and gather information prior to the larger global study, in order to improve the latter’s quality and efficiency. A combination of web and paper based surveys have been designed to engage all employees across the organisation while maintaining confidentiality within the organisational development team.

Representative cross sections of employees from each business unit globally and across all levels of work are pre-selected to participate in the survey and asked to identify acceptable and unacceptable behaviours for each of our values statements.

Voluntary participation is actively encouraged in the interest of obtaining a good response rate and hearing interested opinions. Responses from each region will join a growing list of employee specified behaviours to be published and communicated on the company intranet. From this list, employees will be invited to select behaviours that they feel most characterise each value statement.

Although the process for the global survey remains unchanged as a result of the pilot, there have been learnings from the pilot primarily relating to ease of use which will be incorporated into the global survey. Responses from the pilot will also be included in the company-wide list of identified behaviours.

The manager responsible for conducting the values survey, Fernaaz Ismail – organisational development specialist, stresses the importance of the outcomes of the survey and the role that it will play in implementation of the System for People in AngloGold Ashanti.

“As the objective of the survey is to support a deeper awareness and understanding of our values across the organisation, the most frequently selected behaviours will be those to which most people in the organisation will connect. We expect that the most elected undesirable behaviours will highlight areas of concern that need to be addressed,” she says.

“The final outcome, a set of discreet values-based behaviours, will be used as guidance for all of us, supported by a communication platform and reinforced through the System for People”.