The Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) has introduced the Employers of the Year Awards (EYA) set for September 29, 2023that aims to honour the best employers.
FKE Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jacqueline Mugo stated that the award seeks to recognise best practices amongst employers in Kenya since 2017.
During Tuesday's launch at Waajiri House, Ms Mugo revealed the award falls under eight categories.
The categories are inclusion, working environment, enterprise performance, employee relationships and other areas.
“The Employer of the Year Awards, whose tagline is “Honouring Best Employers,” is FKE’s prestigious flagship event that aims to showcase and reward employers best practices and innovations in the areas of Corporate Performance, People Management and Industrial Relations practices amongst employers in Kenya. Our goal is to raise and sustain productivity, enterprise performance and responsibility,” she said.
Further, she noted that the body envisions seeing consistent improvement in the performance of enterprises operating in Kenya to enhance competitiveness and improve the capacity of companies to create jobs and progressively provide a decent environment.
Moreover, Mugo commended the Affordable Housing initiative saying it will provide decent housing if only Kenyans would be involved in determining how to do it.
“This is in line with the law which requires employers to cover employees’ housing or pay 15% for house allowance, which is mostly done by the private sector,” said Ms Mugo.
Ms Mugo lamented the 3% of the housing levy, saying people’s living standards and net earnings should be considered.
“The federation finds it difficult to support the housing levy as proposed because our members are complaining it is coming on the heels of very many other proposals that pause taxes on levies to us, we have just implemented the NSSF, discussion about NHIF going to 2.7% of an employee’s salary and all this will be pushed back to the employer,” Ms Mugo said.
According to her, the introduction of levies will pose a danger to the loss of jobs, citing the pressure will be too high for the employers who will have to bridge the gap by increasing the employee's salary.
The Employer of the Year Award focuses on the voluntary disclosure of relevant information that shows an organisation’s workplace practices.
The award continues to embed a strong industrial relations culture in Kenya for enhanced industrial harmony.
