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.

A warehouse manager, rummaging in a stationery cupboard with colleagues, called over a male subordinate and made a joke comparing an item to the size of his genitals.

You don’t understand how much we wish we were joking.

But this actually happened.

Everyone laughed, including him, at first. But later that day, he told her it had upset him. She apologised immediately, and again more than once.

The employer did not ignore it either: It treated the complaint as a grievance (having no policies for handling this kind of thing), convened a meeting before an independent chairperson, secured a further apology, and rolled out staff training on appropriate conduct.

Reasonable actions, by most bosses' standards. Yet, less than two weeks later, the man referred a dispute to the CCMA because he had wanted disciplinary action against the manager, which never happened. In the end, the employer was found liable and ordered to pay him R100,000 (roughly 18 months' salary).

What the court actually held

In the recent Labour Court case, it upheld both the harassment finding and the employer's vicarious liability. A remark about someone's genitals is inherently sexual regardless of intent, and a single incident clears the bar when it is serious enough.

The case’s seriousness here was amplified by two things worth noting: The power gap between manager and subordinate, and the fact that the colleagues were allowed to laugh along.

Since there was a genuine apology and the incident was isolated, the court reduced the monetary penalty to R25,000. But the company remained liable.

Why the process was not enough

Three failures did the damage: The employer treated a harassment complaint as an ordinary grievance rather than a potential disciplinary matter. The employee asked for disciplinary action against his manager, and that request was never recorded or engaged with. And the statutory defence, that you did everything reasonably practicable to prevent harassment, was unavailable, because before the incident there was no harassment policy, no staff training and no reporting channel.

In a case like this, your company’s defence is built in advance or not at all. Everything this employer did was reactive, and, here, reactive does not count.

Every new leader promises to listen first. Thabo Hermanus, appointed CEO of Experian South Africa in July after years running its credit and bureau business, said it too.

But then took it a step further…

Asked what principle has guided his leadership, he described listening deeply enough to understand the context, the people, the facts and the trade-offs. Then he drew the line:

It sounds obvious until you count how many calls in your own business are parked in "let me get more input." Consultation makes a comfortable hiding place, because while you are still listening, you cannot be wrong yet.

But teams rarely lose faith in a boss who makes the occasional wrong call. They lose faith in one who will not make the call at all, because the work stalls, your best people carry the uncertainty, and nobody knows where they stand.

The question worth sitting with: Which decision in your business is dressed up as "still gathering input" when the truth is you are avoiding making it?

100,000

is roughly how many Two-Pot retirement withdrawal claims Old Mutual Corporate recorded in March 2026 alone, back near the volumes it saw when the system launched. Among lower-income members, basic living needs accounted for 45% of withdrawals, and across every income band the top reasons were essentials, emergencies and debt.

Warning signs: This is happening in a year when salary increases have averaged about 5.43%, comfortably ahead of inflation. Your raise landed, and your people are still raiding their retirement savings, which suggests the strain is somewhere your payroll line cannot properly see.

Source: Old Mutual Corporate Two-Pot withdrawal data and Remchannel salary survey, May 2026

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