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.

Remote work was never really about home. It was about focus.

The pandemic exposed something everyone half-knew: Open-plan offices are terrible places to think. Developers wrote better code at home, analysts built better models and writers wrote more/better.

In SA, the case was sharp. Commuting on the N1 in peak traffic was costly and load-shedding forced everyone to invest in home setups anyway.  Discovery Bank found that working from home saves the average employee around R2,900 a month on fuel, while OfferZen's survey put it bluntly: More than half of SA tech workers would consider leaving if forced back full-time.

Then something shifted that nobody quite priced in.

The deep-focus work is being automated

The thing remote protected best (long stretches of uninterrupted production) is exactly what AI is most useful for. A US Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found Gen-AI users save roughly 5.4% of their working hours, with daily users saving four or more hours a week. And a controlled experiment found that support agents used AI to increase issues resolved per hour by 14%.

In SA, PwC's 2025 Africa Workforce survey found 91% of South African executives say AI has already boosted both the quality and productivity of work.

So, the drudge layer of knowledge work (the bit that needed quiet) is collapsing, begging the question of what we need to protect focus for?

What's left needs other people in the room

Brainstorming with real friction, reading your colleagues’ reactions, mentoring others and building trust fast enough that a project moves. All of these need you there in-person. And as AI takes the production work, the relative value of the remaining human goes up alongside it.

Hence, 54% of Fortune 100 companies now require full five-day office weeks. And 72% of SA CEOs are favouring the same direction, with Vodacom's senior staff already all back. 

The catch nobody talks about

There's a quieter problem in this. Harvard research found that more junior engineers come into the office than seniors, especially when teammates are present. Not because they love the commute, but because they value the mentorship, visibility and accidental learning that doesn't happen on a scheduled call.

In a country where youth unemployment is 46.1% and a junior SA developer is now competing with peers in Lagos, Lisbon and Bengaluru for remote contracts, the gap between juniors who learn in person and juniors who learn alone widens fast.

So, a hybrid policy of "everyone two days a week" benefits seniors but likely becomes a handicap for juniors.

The Companies Amendment Act 16 was signed in July 2024, but the pay-gap disclosure clauses (Sections 30A and 30B) remain unproclaimed 21 months later.

The intent behind the clauses is that the government wants to get SA pay grades in line with the UN’s recommendation of executive-remuneration-to-minimum-wage ratio of max 50:1, and currently the JSE’s Top 40 comes in at over 1,270:1 on average.

It’s been 21 months, and we don’t know when it’ll come into effect. But when it does, the law will require every public company to disclose top, bottom, average and median total pay, plus the ratio between the top 5% and bottom 5% of earners. 

Shareholders get binding votes on the policy and the implementation report. And rem-committee directors can be barred if reports are rejected, so boards will be staking their own seats on these reports.

The question worth sitting with: Shouldn't you be running this calculation yourself and having internal discussions, before the law forces you to publish it?

R269,600.90

is the new annual earnings threshold under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, effective Friday, 1 May 2026; a 3% increase. Anyone earning above R22,466.74 a month loses automatic BCEA protections on working hours, overtime, Sunday and public holiday pay, and some CCMA arbitration rights. Salary increases handed out in March may quietly have moved your people across the line. Worth running the audit before the weekend.

Source: Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr Employment Law Alert, April 2026

Got an event SA employers should know about? Reply and tell us.

Know someone who employs people?
Forward this to one person who should be reading this.