Eskom provides an employee assistance programme through internal advisors and an external service provider. This ensures that all employees and their families have access to psychosocial support 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the event of trauma or crisis. Support entails telephonic counselling, face-to-face counselling services, and voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) campaigns. The external service provider also has a managerial consultancy and coaching programme that assists managers to help employees deal effectively with psychosocial issues that may affect their productivity.

Health and wellness

Eskom’s comprehensive health and wellness programme is modelled around the six pillars of wellness, namely, physical, emotional, occupational, spiritual, social, and intellectual wellness. The services include focused primary health care, occupational health, chronic disease management, and an HIV/Aids workplace programme. Other services include sports and recreation events, biokinetics, spiritual wellness, health education, and travel medicine and expatriate health, supporting employees on international assignments).

Managing the impact of HIV and Aids

Eskom operates in a high HIV-prevalent country and has identified HIV/Aids as one of the risks it needs to manage for its own business sustainability. The goals of the HIV/Aids workplace programme are to have zero tolerance to new HIV infections and mother to child transmissions. The company manages the impact of HIV/Aids through integrated response strategies, which are education and awareness, prevention, know your HIV status, treatment, care, and support. Free condoms are provided to all employees. Eskom met the human resources sustainability index standard, which requires 50% of staff to have undergone voluntary counselling and testing (VCT).

Last year also saw the launch and formalisation of a support group run by Eskom employees living with HIV and Aids (ELWHA), which assists employees infected with HIV to register early on the disease management programmes provided by the medical aid societies and also assists employees to comply with medication and to destigmatise HIV at Eskom.

Eskom has a supply chain programme that assists the SMMEs to manage HIV at their workplace. This initiative is managed in partnership with the South African Business Coalition against HIV/Aids (SABCOHA) and Tshepang Trust. These organisations offer VCT and ART (antiretroviral treatment) free of charge to the SMMEs.