Date Listed: October 2022

Industry:
Hotels, Gaming & Entertainment

Employees:
6,761

Size of HR Department:
90

HR’s overall performance score:
4 out of 5

Survey Response Rate:
81%

About Sun International

Sun International has a proud legacy in the gaming, hospitality, and entertainment industries, with diverse assets, including world-class five-star hotels, modern and well-located casinos, and some of the world’s finest premier resorts. Their destinations offer experiential luxury, enduring quality, and incredible adventure, supported by an authentic dedication to personal service. Creating lasting memories for their guests and customers is in their DNA.

Their competitive advantage stems from their compelling and global competence in developing and operating casinos, hotels, and resorts.

Their approach has been to differentiate their properties in architecture, service, experience, location, and the mix of entertainment and activities. They created some of the world’s most iconic destinations, from The Palace of The Lost City at Sun City and Time Square in Pretoria, to Table Bay Hotel in Cape Town and Carnival City in Brakpan.

Sun International pioneered gaming in Southern Africa, introducing casinos to this part of the world in the late 1970s. Sun City set the standard for large-scale international events in South Africa. The Gary Player Country Club at Sun City has attracted the world’s best golfers for four decades.

Sun International places a strong emphasis on being a responsible corporate citizen through their contributions and commitment to the economy, communities, and the environment.

They are committed to developing all their employees, ensuring that equal opportunities and economic empowerment form the backbone of their human resource practices.

The Human Resources Function

The Human Resources function’s greatest strengths and value-add (according to executive, senior and middle Management)

  1. Regular interaction (once a month or more) between management and HR.
  2. Ensuring HR governance and compliance.
  3. Providing employee wellness programs that have a positive impact.
  4. Acting as custodian of diversity objectives.
  5. Successfully administering learning and development processes.
  6. Ensuring roles, responsibilities and requirements of positions are clearly and accurately defined, aligned to business objectives and linked to all HR processes.
  7. Executing HR initiatives that support Sun International’s strategic business objectives.
  8. HR is experienced as approachable, valuing all forms of diversity, maintaining sound relationships with people, demonstrating a genuine interest and care for people, passionate to make a difference, and having integrity.
  9. Factors that enables HR’s ability to add value to Sun International: HR is represented on executive management level, and representative of the demographics of their workforce.

How the Human Resources Function Benefited from Participation

“Participation in any HR survey is scary at first, when it aims to test the recognition of how the HR function and services are delivered and received by managers. However, partnering with HCBsolutions was indeed an invaluable experience.

I am glad that I did undertake the survey within Sun International South Africa as it once again highlighted and elevated the importance of the Human Resources function to all.

In addition, as a result of the survey, it has changed the dialogue amongst the managers to acknowledging and appreciating that the HR function and its deliverables to our employees cannot be achieved without a strong partnership so that the business fully benefits from the HR value chain.

The HRvalue survey is effective and very professionally designed. I would recommend it to all that is looking for valuable insights and thorough engagement with the managers on the topic of human resources.”

Verna Robson, Director Group Human Resources: Sun International