Barnstone plays crucial role in share vesting of Implats trust

The Morokotso Trust was founded in 2006 to administer and manage Impala Platinum's employee share-ownership programme for some 26 000 of its permanent workforce.

The five-year vesting milestone was particularly important because it required the trust's multiple beneficiaries to make an important personal decision regarding their shares in Impala Platinum. When the Trust was founded, shares in Impala were sold to the trust for the benefit of the multiple beneficiaries employed at Impala Platinum.

Vital for beneficiaries to be informed

The basic principle underpinning this transaction was that the growth in share value would yield a financial benefit to the trust's beneficiaries. Five years after the trust's establishment, each employee beneficiary received the option to sell part of his/her shares at a volume average weighted share price, or for the trust to retain the shares for another five years in the hope of further growth in value.

For the trustees of the Morokotso Trust it was, and continues to be, vital that all the beneficiaries are informed and have adequate understanding of the key issues surrounding the Trust; particularly around this vesting decision. Each beneficiary needs to be empowered to make an informed choice and be sure that his/her choice is recorded and acted against in accordance with the Trust deed.

Key lessons learnt

"We faced the challenge of communicating a fairly complex concept to 26 000 beneficiaries within a fairly compressed time frame," says Karen Otto, a trustee of the Morokotso Trust and senior group rewards manager at Impala Platinum. "You also have to remember that as miners the beneficiaries worked shifts across a number of shafts in Rustenberg, plus at our refinery and the operations in Lydenburg. We needed Barnstone's experience in programme management to design the whole process and keep it on track."

Some key lessons learnt included the need for close collaboration with union representatives, particularly at the start of the process. According to Werner Botha, who led the logistics and programme planning it was vital to identify all the relevant stakeholders in the vesting process and, through extensive communications, to avoid a sense that any of them were being neglected. "Another key success factor was selecting and training the right type of person to conduct the facilitated engagements.

Facilitators needed to be people who not only could speak the right language but could also deal with pressure in sometimes hostile audiences."