Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.

Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.

Imagine: something lands on your desk that isn't good enough. A quote with the wrong numbers, a client email that missed the point, or a job done halfway.

Most bosses handle it in one of two ways: they say nothing and quietly fix it themselves, or they say it on the spot while they're irritated, and say it badly.

South African workplaces struggle with this

Culture Amp's 2026 data on larger South African employers puts feedback and recognition well below its global average. That's a missed opportunity.

Gallup finds that 80% of employees who got meaningful feedback from their manager in the past week are fully engaged. Yet in one Gallup study of nearly 15,000 employees, only 16% said their last conversation with their manager was extremely meaningful.

A simple rule that fixes both mistakes

Try this: if someone's work isn't good enough, tell them within 48 hours. Don’t do it on the spot, so you give yourself time to calm down and work out exactly what to say. But also not next month when it's too late to be useful.

Stick to 48 hours.

Melinda French Gates (you know, Bill Gates’ former wife, from the Gates Foundation fame) takes this a step further: she told her team that if they haven't heard from her within two days, the work was good.

That way, silence stops being something to worry about, and nobody gets a nasty surprise at their review.

Her reason for being so direct is that "being clear is kind," because it gives people the chance to actually get better. It costs nothing, and it works in a team of three or three hundred.

When Sean Summers came back to run Pick n Pay in 2023, the retailer was heading for the first loss in its history. In the middle of that, he signed a six-year sponsorship deal with the Springboks.

Plenty of people called it crazy, Daily Maverick included. The news outlet has since apologised to him, because the deal worked: Springbok collector albums and in-store promotions have driven significant footfall and repeat customer visits, and Daily Maverick now calls the deal “not an insignificant part of the turnaround”

His reasoning was to tie the business to a national symbol at exactly the moment staff needed something to be proud of. He says it lifted pride inside the company during the turnaround, and that Springbok merchandise sales have been "absolutely phenomenal".

Most owners in a tough year do the opposite. They cut the things that make people proud of where they work, and promise to bring them back once the numbers recover. Summers hands over to Spencer Sonn in May 2028, with Pick n Pay’s latest results showing its loss halved.

The question worth sitting with: What have you stopped doing for your people "until things get better"?

39.1%

is the share of South African small businesses that employ just one to five people, the biggest single group in a survey of 800 SMMEs, even though almost a third of those surveyed have been trading for more than 20 years.

Plenty of businesses survive for decades without growing much, perhaps because surviving and scaling are different skills, and the jump from a handful of people to a team that runs without you is one of the hardest steps there is.

Source: State of the SMME in South Africa 2026

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