Sally Kamsa is reshaping workplace culture at Ipsos Kenya through policies built on listening and lived experiences. Her approach to people and culture goes beyond HR compliance, focusing instead on creating support systems employees genuinely need and use.
Sallynavia Kamsa shortened her name to Sally for practical reasons. Sallynavia is a tongue twister, she says, and she long ago decided that the energy people spend wrestling with it could be better spent on the conversation itself. She is the senior HR business partner at Ipsos Kenya, a certified engagement and productivity coach (CEPC), a member of a work cycling group- colleagues at Ipsos who hold each other accountable through cycling as a way of being in charge of their wellbeing and also a hiking group that has taken her up Mount Longonot, William Hill, Kijabe Hills, Elephant Hill and the Ngong Hills including a few half marathons, and the person who got IVF written into her organisation's medical cover
She arrived at that last item by listening in the gender balance network, in informal conversations and in the small moments where someone shares something that most organisations are not equipped to receive.
“The average age at Ipsos is 40,” she says. “Through different topics people discuss and share, sometimes when someone shares a story you realise that there are things that people are dealing with at a personal level. And at a corporate level, you ask what else we can do to support. So, when I was renewing the medical cover last year, I reached out to our medical provider and asked if it's something we can throw in. It came with additional premiums but it is a benefit that has been well received.”
Listening first
The policy extends to male employees as well. Their spouses can access the IVF benefit. It was designed as a family benefit, which is a distinction Sally is deliberate about.
The other policy Sally names with particular pride is the phased maternity return. It exists because she has watched what happens when women return from three months away to find the organisation has not changed at all and is simply waiting for them to be back at full capacity from day one.
Her version works differently.
“By the time someone comes back from maternity leave, I remind them: for the next three months, please enjoy this. You work four hours during the first month. The second month you work six hours. The third month you choose to come in early or you choose to leave late. Just providing that balance. The organisation holds its expectations back until she is ready to carry them,” she says.
This is supported by a lactation room and fridge where returning mothers can express milk and store it to be taken home.
This is not common industry practice, as most companies only provide statutory maternity leave and a return-to-work date, surrounding a woman’s transition back into the workplace after a long absence, including balancing the demands of a new child and her responsibilities at work, are often left unaddressed. Sally, however, takes these realities into account and also monitors whether the support systems she has introduced are actually being used, because a policy that employees do not access cannot be considered effective.
“The third strand is perhaps the least expected, because at Ipsos Kenya there is a gender balance network, a forum that brings together female colleagues to share and mentor each other on areas that affect them. There’s also its counterpart, the “Table of Men,” which started as “Men’s Gathering” she adds. The Table of Men is now fully established and run by her male colleagues with support and facilitation from HR.
The Men’s Gathering meets every quarter. Through both internal and external speakers, it addressed topical issues that affect men at the home front, society and the workplace because we need a ‘grounded man’ in the workspace and also at home. It runs because Sally observed something that many HR functions choose not to act on: that men also carry things they cannot easily discuss in a workplace, and that a professional environment which only creates safe spaces for one gender has missed something.
Sally describes it the same way she describes every other programme, as a practical response to an observed need. But its existence reflects a philosophy that runs through every policy she has built: the work of creating Belonging cannot be done selectively.
Coming home
Her career began in the UK where she was a self-sponsored student at Staffordshire University. A journey she is, in her own words, still learning how to tell because it was not all rosy. A self-sponsored student, she had to study and work to pay for her school fees and upkeep, and for a long time she did not speak about the difficulty of it. She completed a master's in HR at Oxford Brookes University and attended a Careers in Africa summit that changed the direction of everything.
The day she graduated with her master's degree, she received a job offer from KCB. She calls it her one-way ticket home.
“People go like, oh, you shouldn't go back home, what are you going back home to do. But for me I always knew I wanted to come back home. It's not because of the weather. It's just the social aspect of being around people and being close to family,” she recalls.
She joined KCB as a management trainee and grew steadily through starting off with handling entry level recruitment and progressed into a resourcing manager. Four years into her career at KCB she got a posting to KCB Rwanda as HR manager, this posting presented her with new growth opportunities which graduate school does not teach you, appreciating cultural nuances. She arrived expecting the working culture to mirror Kenya's- it did not.
“It was an opportunity for me to appreciate different ways of working, lean in, move away from direct or assertive leadership style to a more collective and polite approach,” Sally says. “I also discovered that some words in Kinyarwanda are the same to her Maragoli dialect and it helped in breaking the ice and connecting with colleagues.”
She left KCB in 2015 for Co-operative Bank, where a boss she still calls one of the most significant and influential in her career stretched and nurtured her beyond what she thought she could be and achieve-if growth was a person then that boss was it. That boss continues to be her mentor to date a relationship she does not take for granted. From Co-op Bank she moved to Kenya Airways in November 2019, one month before COVID arrived.
The Kenya Airways period is where Sally's capability was tested most completely. She was head of the people and culture department, overseeing all HR business partners and all 48 stations across the network.
Leading through crisis
“When COVID hit, the work became simultaneous and relentless: Organisation re-design to become a fit for purpose, supporting colleagues through the covid-19 pandemic, restructuring or right-sizing as our CEO then would call it, union negotiations, salary deferrals, compliance with the labour laws of every country in the network. It was two years that really tested my grit and built my change management skills. And also, just being able to learn how to negotiate, because you're negotiating with staff, you're negotiating with unions, and you're collaborating with different bodies across 48 stations,” she explains. She also learnt that at some point, HR professionals also need someone to debrief with and go through therapy.
The pay cuts not just in KQ but across employers were huge and impacted employees in a way that was excruciating, at some point the cuts reached 80 percent at their worst and staff were taking home 20 percent of their normal pay. What Sally remembers most clearly is not the negotiation, it is what came alongside it. Care packages vouchers negotiated by the CEO then where staff got supermarket vouchers. They had someone offering pro-bono virtual Zumba classes to keep teams connected and their mental and physical well-being visible to the organisation. ICC Church came in handy in matters spiritual wellbeing, and it carried them through that period
“Every good thing or not so good has to come to an end, Ipsos came looking for me in 2022 and though at first I was not sure of the move, being a completely new industry I am glad I made this leap because at Ipsos I have seen my footprint and the impact I am making,” she says. She adds that when the CEO, finance and HR are able to work together then the results are seen in an engaged workforce and commercial growth.
Building belonging
The footprint she names first is an engagement score that moved from 79 percent when she joined in April 2022 to 90 percent without breaking the bank, she says, and without grand gestures. She introduced Clarity4D personality training which created awareness on teams and individual diversity and how they can all lean-in into each other’s village and work together but also grow and develop each other. It promoted team connection and the commercial growth into the following year was phenomenal; a future leader’s programme running for one year, delivered internally, already producing a country manager in Uganda and a new client partner. A company doctor who comes in regularly and within easy reach and consultancy for matters health and wellbeing both at individual level and work environment. Peer-to-peer recognition built into the culture.
And underneath all of it: the practice of listening before building
“The IVF benefit did not come from a policy benchmark, but from a conversation in a gender balance network where someone shared something they had never voiced in a professional setting before. The Men’s Gathering also emerged not from a DEI framework, but from recognising that men were not being asked the same questions as women. At Ipsos, the belief is that grounded men and women create a grounded society, and that employees carry important roles beyond work. By creating spaces where both genders are heard, the company is embedding vulnerability in leadership and strengthening psychological safety, a key driver of growth. Likewise, the phased maternity return policy came from understanding the real challenge of returning to work after three months away,” she notes.
She reminds HR professionals that they need to get to a place of tuning into genuine conversations and cultivate environments where both people and organisations thrive.
“Our greatest asset in HR is not always the policy itself, but the listening before policy. It is not just about crafting policies; it's about creating belonging and balance. At Ipsos Kenya, 2026 strategic direction is built on three pillars of being able to lead self in order to lead others, and being able to fully engage both with colleagues and clients in order to excel. I believe that through cultivating a culture that listens before policy, I will continue to steward leadership engagement and contribute strategically to the commercial success of the business,” Sally concludes.
