People Sustainability: Lessons from the Maasai

People Sustainability - another buzzword in the SAP SuccessFactors World?

Well, yes. On the face of it, we can't deny it's another buzzword. People Sustainability is described as treating people (employees as well as local communities and other external stakeholders) ethically and fairly. HR software vendors including SAP SuccessFactors use it to define frameworks that help organisations thrive through investment in people and then build their solutions to support these frameworks.

Treat people ethically and fairly and they'll pay you back

This is hardly new, isn't it? So, you have every right to say, "People Sustainability" is just a new buzzword. And one that jumps on a trendy bandwagon at that, as is a term you can hardly escape these days. However, buzzword or not, I believe the framework as used by can add good value. They point to 6 important pillars, which provide more comprehensive guidance for the design of HR policies, HR processes and HCM systems than the Employee Experience concept on its own:

• Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB)
• Employee well-being
• Trust and transparency
• Health & safety
• Empowerment for growth
• Purpose

Corporate People Sustainability and SAP SuccessFactors

How do all these points connect to the SAP SuccessFactors HXM solution? Well, that deserves an article of its own, but there certainly isn't a simple button to click saying "Switch on People Sustainability". For some of those pillars the line of sight to the IT solution is pretty clear. Take Empowerment for growth, which is something the SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace with all the elements it connects to each other is obviously driving. For other pillars, like Purpose, the system can provide a clearer view for employees to understand the purpose and their contribution e.g. through Goals Management. However that does not only require a clever use of the system, but most importantly a solid and relatable purpose has to exist in the first place.

Well, we are going off topic. The focus should not be on SAP HXM technology here, but...

What the Maasai taught me about People Sustainability

In recent years, I had the opportunity to learn a little bit about the traditional culture of the Maasai people, who live primarily in Kenya and Tanzania. Some elements of their traditional culture did give me food for thought regarding People Sustainability.

In the following paragraphs I will elaborate on some elements of Maasai culture I found to inspire interesting perspectives for organisations to think about People Management. For those aspects, I'll share some ideas for practices to implement in the business world and then link those to features in the SAP SuccessFactors solution that might support them. This is first and foremost me sharing ideas and inspirations - not a cook book to guarantee corporate success. Please take this article with a grain of salt and I hope you'll enjoy the read off the beaten track and maybe it provides you with some food for thought as well.

Some considerations to keep this an inspirational rather than controversial chat on HXM

Now, before we continue, here are a few important caveats to put this article into context:

• I am not an expert for Maasai culture by any stretch of imagination. The little knowledge I have comes from personal interaction with Maasai in Kenya and some background reading.
• This article is NOT to be read as an essay on Maasai culture, but as a light hearted story about my personal observations I found could inspire a new angle on People Sustainability.
• Even to speak of "The Maasai culture" would be quite difficult, as there are considerable differences between regions and generations - not to speak of the difficulty for any outsider to fully understand it.
• There have also been big changes happening in the last decades. Some communities may still live very traditionally, whilst others embrace modern life more. Some spectacular features of traditional culture we usually think of first, have vanished almost completely, as the Maasai adapt to "modern" life. E.g., killing a male lion with a spear is no longer a mandatory right of passage for young warriors. To the contrary, despite some spearing instances in occasional conflicts to protect livestock, the Maasai have mostly turned into conservationists to protect wildlife including lions. That also allows their communities to benefit from the tourism they bring. In any case, some of my points on people sustainability discussed later seem to transcend regions and generations.

• Many elements of traditional Maasai culture sound alien and maybe even wrong to European ears. In my opinion we are not in a good position to judge, as we rarely understand the purpose of those traditions - and that's not even considering our own history. Anyway, this is not the place for a serious discourse on culture, but, as I said above, for a light hearted view that might provide some readers with inspiration to drive People Sustainability.

Maasai Cultural Resilience and Corporate People Sustainability

I'd like to think of People Sustainability as setting people up for success in the long run - in their professional as well as personal lives. At the end of the day, this is the fundamental meaning of "sustainable": something that's built to last. For something to be sustainable, it also needs to be able to survive difficulties and disasters. An organisation that collapses at the first economic downturn or a department that doesn't function any more, if one individual leaves, are hardly sustainable, right?

This is what triggered the connection between Maasai traditions and People Sustainability for me: a Maasai acquaintance saying "Our culture is built for survival. We had to be resilient." Luckily, it's not always about life or death in the corporate world. But I believe the concepts that built resilience into traditional culture can teach us a thing or two about reducing the risk of failure for corporate employees.

Weave your safety net!

What really hits the eye is that traditional Maasai culture is all about relationships. People belong to their immediate family, their village and their tribe (the equivalent of corporate hierarchy). However, in an environment, where a flood, a drought or a cattle sickness could wipe out the livelihood of a whole village in a single season and where a family could be destroyed by a spear missing a lion by an inch, that isn't enough.

When talking to Maasai you'll soon start to wonder how many siblings an individual can have. Until you realise, that "brother" and "sister" are not restricted to biological siblings. You've hit the concept of age grades. Members of an age grade are those, who went through the rite of passage of circumcision in a given period of years (typically 5-8 years) and it is a strong source of identity. As a Maasai, you'd call everybody in your own age grade a brother or sister, but it goes far beyond labels. In any village you come to, you'll be welcomed by members of your own age grade and their parents will let you stay and eat with them just like their own children. So, in addition to the vertical connections you get through family, village and tribe, you have a horizontal one that reaches far and wide. Even if you have to travel a long way due to a drought, you'll always find a door to knock on.

There are many other ways in which traditional social rules spin a web of connections across geographies and families:

• Young men (the "Moran") used to travel across the land allowing them to form strong bonds within their group and to make connections across the region
• Marriage with a spouse coming from a different village
• Providing gifts, especially of livestock, to form bonds
• Children may be "lent" to other families, so they have more than one "mother"
• In a culture, where men were much more likely to die young in cattle raids or lion encounters, Polygamy was the only way to make sure every woman could marry. (It is much less common these days and the number of children is also going down dramatically, as parents recognise the importance of providing good formal education for each child.)

Don't put all your eggs into one basket!

Traditionally, Maasai used to live on their herd of cattle, goats and sheep. Even though most Maasai I met didn't work as herders, but as rangers, shop keepers, cooks, gardeners, nurses or safari guides, most of them still aspire to owning a decent herd of cattle. They'll join forces and pay some members of the community to look after them, while they are pursuing other careers. Cattle are not only an important part of their culture, but also a safety net - those working in tourism got a stark reminder of this, when tourists stayed away during the Corona pandemic. Even in the old days, when cattle was their only significant source of income, "Not putting all your eggs in one basket", used to be an important element of resilience. Their wide network of connections allows them to have some of their cattle looked after in far away villages, so not all is lost, when the herd of their own village is eradicated by rinderpest or failing rains.

Just as the emphasis on human connections this diversification strategy can also be observed by Maasai with modern life styles: It is quite common to have a various streams of income, so apart from working as a cook and keeping some cattle, they may also drive a motorcycle taxi (lovingly called "Chinese Gazelles"). Individuals, who work in modern jobs tend to keep a strong connection to their community, even if it is a remote, traditional village. This way they bring knowledge into their community. This goes both ways, as knowledge of the traditions, the land, wildlife and plants can pay off in tourism, modern agriculture or other jobs.

When comparing the "Maasai" way with Western careers and organisational design, it becomes clear that they put much more emphasis on resilience and therefore sustainability. They do this by driving relationships and diversification. I suspect that this is also a reason, why they are quite quick at adapting to change in a pragmatic way without giving up on their traditions completely. Their way of life may have been seen as "backward" not too long ago, but today most of them make good use of a smartphone when guiding tourists as easily as when herding cattle.

So, to summarise: A multitude of connections, diversification, adaptability and multi-skilling are concepts I have observed built into Maasai society to create resilience. Given that we have seen many unexpected economic bumps or outright disasters in the last 2 decades, and given that the business world is changing ever faster, maybe taking a leaf out of the traditional book is not such a bad idea?

How's that transferable to corporate People Sustainability and digital HR?

A door to knock on in every function and location of the company

For any people strategy to be sustainable in times of fast and often disruptive change, it needs to make sure than employees do stay on board and can contribute to value creation in case of disruptions. Making sure they have relationships with peers outside their own team and with more senior colleagues beyond their own boss will make it easier to retain people, when a line manager leaves or is transferred and to allow them to find suitable new roles inside the organisation, if their positions or whole teams become obsolete.

Creating these relationships needs to be a conscious process rather than purely random - especially in a context of remote or hybrid work. There are lots of concepts already aiming at breaking down walls between departments and strengthening relationships, including Mentoring, Onboarding groups, secondments or simply cross-departmental projects. The reason, why employees often still find themselves in free fall once their direct line manager leaves, is not a lack of concepts, but in my opinion:

• Rare or half-hearted use of these concepts
• A failure to retain and build onto the relationships, because the relationships are not in our focus.

We are assigned to a project to deliver its goals and to learn skills, but not to create relationships with human beings. "Learn Python" is perceived as an acceptable objective, "Bond with Rehema" isn't. Unless the employees keep a private Whatsapp group on the training topic or meet their project team on a regular basis after work, relationships fade away fast.

So, for organisations to build this resilience through connections, the relevant concepts need to be supported by an organisational and infrastructural framework. Taking a quick look at the SuccessFactors HCM solution, it is easy to help and drive the process through technology:

• Groups across the normal hierarchy can be defined with extra relationships. Why not define the equivalent of Maasai age grades (you could use seniority or other criteria, but you need to inject some "identity") to give every employee a "door to knock on" (real or virtually) in every location and every function of the organisation?
• Finding colleagues, who work on similar projects or have a certain skill is easier than ever, if the respective features are utilised
• Dynamic teams is a recent concept that I hope to be adopted quickly by many organisations.

Why all this? If an employee's boss leaves or the team is dissolved, it should be faster for them to find support and maybe a new team to join inside the organisation than on Linkedin.

Develop skills broadly and make them visible!

I also find the cross-pollination with skills acquired in different parts of the organisation and outside of the organisation very interesting. For employees to acquire skills outside their organisation is a diversification and therefore resilience strategy for them. Employers also benefit, e.g. through

• Retention
• Filling skills gaps
• New ideas

One way for employees to expand their skillset into new fields is a side hustle. Really new technology skills are often learned through a hobby or side hustle long before corporate learning admins are even aware they exist. So next time you set up an employment contract to stop side hustles, think again.

But it isn't enough for employees to have these skills. They also need to find the roles or project, where they are required - or be found by the owners of these roles or projects. Lacking the incredibly effective word-of-mouth network of the Maasai community, organisations can turn to two SAP SuccessFactors capabilities to bring supply and demand of skills together:

• Opportunity Marketplace
• Talent Intelligence Hub

Survive and Strive!

So, if we swap "survival in the wild" from Maasai culture for "surviving inside the organisation and being able to add value", corporate and traditional strategies blend into each other. As an aspect of people sustainability, let's enable employees to find new line managers, teams, projects and jobs inside their organisations, if their existing roles are shaken up by disruptions. That's People Sustainability: setting your people up for long term success. At the same time employers win by retaining talent, adapting to change quickly and closing skills gaps faster.

At the heart of it all sit relationships between human beings and skills. We just need to think more broadly and not narrow them down to what's required to the one well defined job today. Who'd have thought that human relationships could important for Human Resource Management?

Let me know your thoughts!

Does the article give you a bit of a new angle to look at your organisation? Will you try to enable relationships more? Keep me posted how it goes!

... and dance!

Just adding this for no reason, but fun: attending a Maasai party (in this case: an adult naming ceremony) is an experience you never forget - just go easy on the beer. The rhythm and vibration of their songs to the shine of the fire is absolutely captivating: