The Covid-19 pandemic at its peak last year, greatly affected businesses in the country impacting production levels and revenues.
Businesses in the country due to the huge toll of the pandemic on their operations and in the bid to cut costs, resorted to reducing wages of workers, furloughing workers and in some instances, the laying-off of workers.
According to the COVID-19 Business Tracker Survey conducted by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the World Bank, in May/June 2020, an estimated 770,124 workers had their wages reduced, 297,088 workers had reduced working hours and 41,952 workers were laid-off.
Cashflow problems according to the survey, persisted with 7 out of 10 firms reporting a deterioration in their cash flows, businesses reported an average decline in sales of about Ghs 115.2 million.
But despite being hard-hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and unlike other businesses in the country that laid off their workers, Unilever Ghana, going contrary to the norm of the day, rather increased salaries of employees and even that of third party employees with no single employee laid off.
Speaking to norvanreports, Human Resource Director for Unilever Ghana, Michael Otchere Duah, stated employees were paid by the company even when they were at home doing no work for the company for the first three months following the outbreak of the pandemic in the country.
“Covid hit hard and no one expected it, but as a responsible company we put our staff first, and the first thing we did was employment protection. So we ensured that every employee whether your job was impacted in one way or the other, your salary was protected and that was done until June,” Mr Otchere Duah stated.
“No job was lost and we also ensured that every employee had his or her salary for the first three months when covid hit, and this includes even our third party employees. And we even continued to employ because we have a very ambitious growth strategy,” he added.
He continued saying, “No single employee or third party employee had a pay cut in salary, not even a 0.001 percent cut. Most of the staff were sent home but their salaries were protected for three months although they were not working from home but were only resting at home until July when the company resumed its operations and staff members begun working, some from home and others from the office.”
According to Unilever Ghana, for last year alone, it was able to reduce its debts from a staggering Ghs 100 million to Ghs 20 million, starting 2021 with lots of capital to further expand its operations.
