Eskom Employee Reviews for Middle Manager

What do you like about working at Eskom?

"Purpose: If we get it right we can have an enormous positive effect on the entire country. Getting it right means providing cheap, reliable, consistent, clean energy. So there is a really good reason for the company to exist and a really good reason to try and make it work."

Do you have any tips for others interviewing with this company?

"Rather go and work in the private sector. Be prepared to wait a long time for the outcome of the interview. If you're looking for a job where you just get paid and you're not too fussy about contributing - this is for you."

What don't you like about working at Eskom?

"Eskom is a platform to make management very rich without any accountability to the public that they serve. It is status and greed driven. Inexperienced and incompetent senior managers put more and more controls in place to ensure their staff do not take advantage of them (do as I say not what I do). There is no feedback, the game changes every day, initiatives are not realised, planning is poor. Staff have little accountability."

What suggestions do you have for management?

"I would restate the companies objective. Then I would check to ensure that what the company is doing is enabling it to achieve that objective. I would refocus the work on the objective. I would turn management on its head and make management an enabling function not a controlling one. Managers would have to define the objectives, provide the tools and systems and training, and unblock issues. I would allow the workers to do their jobs, be professional, be creative, and deliver on the objectives. I would get rid of most of the controls (like hour tracking clock-in sheets) and empower people to be responsible. I would hold management accountable and ensure accountability is rolled down throughout the organisation. I would trust people to support the company. I would ensure we had metrics and data to be able to understand how well we were achieving our objectives. I would ensure people knew what was expected of them and remove uncertainty, create autonomy, refocus on status being earned and not your job title, promote relatedness and consistency. I would ensure people were informed and felt useful and in control. Thats just to start with."