Investing in our employees is good business, improves our company’s performance and strengthens our employee engagement. We approach talent development and succession planning with the same rigor that we apply to our business strategy. We seek to attract, develop and retain employees through a combination of on-the-job learning, formal training, and regular feedback and mentoring.

Employee Feedback Surveys

Taking steps to measure and assess employee satisfaction and engagement is at the heart of long-term business success and creating a great place to work for our global workforce. Since 2019, the ConocoPhillips Perspectives survey has become our primary listening platform for gathering feedback on employee sentiment and strengthening our culture. Leaders analyze the survey data and comments and identify focus areas for action, striving for incremental year-over-year progress on results. Our employee feedback strategy is comprised of an annual engagement survey and shorter pulse surveys as needed.

We launched our latest survey in January 2023. We asked 25 questions on topics relevant to the health and long-term success of our organization, such as engagement, DEI, SPIRIT Values, company strategy, career development, leadership and well-being. We had a participation rate of 84% and received over 15,000 written comments from employees around the globe. It’s encouraging to see all our scores improved year over year, including employee satisfaction (eSat) which increased from 75 to 79, and is higher than both the oil and gas and global benchmarks provided by our third-party survey provider. Leaders will analyze organizational results and set key focus areas for relevant actions for their groups.

Career Development

We empower our employees to grow their careers through personal and professional development opportunities. Employees can identify opportunities for growth through a series of career management tools that help an employee plan out their short and long-term career goals and enable meaningful career conversations with their supervisors, such as individual development plans and 360 assessments.

In the 2022 Perspectives engagement survey, we asked for and received feedback from employees on career development at ConocoPhillips. That feedback has been a launching pad for a multi-year project designed to redefine the critical career development pathways for employees in achieving their career goals at ConocoPhillips.  In order to attract, retain and develop the workforce of the future, we are setting out to transparently address the most important career choices for employees to help them maximize their career potential.

Last year, we also hosted a three-week development series across our U.S. locations, featuring 39 in-person and virtual presentations, panel discussions and networking opportunities and attended by more than 4,000 employees. Employees participated in live and virtual workshops, panel discussions and training sessions that touched on key topics related to life, career and the company.

Talent Management Teams

Skills-based Talent Management Teams (TMTs), made up of senior representatives from business units and corporate functions, guide employee development and career progression by discipline (e.g., Geoscience, Finance and Global Production) and location. TMTs help identify our future business needs and assess the availability of critical skill sets within the company. They also play a vital role in ensuring the integrity and equity in our talent practices and succession planning. Since 2021, a number of steps have been taken to further embed DEI into our core talent processes and bring TMTs together across disciplines to share best practices for engaging and developing key segments of our workforce:

• TMT leadership is reviewed annually to ensure that the teams are diverse (e.g., gender, location, race/ethnicity) and authentically represent the broad discipline employee population.
• TMTs engage in an annual cadence to review the depth and diversity of succession benches to ensure consistency and equity in our succession strategies.
• Dashboards of demographic metrics are utilized by TMTs to mitigate bias.
• TMTs are aligned to common DEI goals that are reviewed and updated to ensure continued progress on equitable talent strategies.
• TMTs across all disciplines come together on a quarterly basis to knowledge share on common talent challenges and spotlight best practices and approaches to developing their talent pipeline.

Succession Planning

Succession planning is a top priority for management and the board. Leaders at all levels review Individual Development Plans, provide feedback and facilitate career conversations on an ongoing basis to ensure that employees can reach their full potential. Annually, business leaders and TMTs meet to review succession benches, calibrate talent and provide recommendations to executive leadership and the board to ready our succession candidates for future leadership roles and promote business continuity.

Formal Training

In 2022, our employees completed more than 175,200 hours of virtual and in-person training on topics ranging from technical to professional development (an average of 18.4 hours per employee). We provide numerous training and development offerings to equip our workforce, our hiring managers and our leaders with the skills, knowledge and self-awareness to advance our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. In 2022, employees completed approximately 1,400 DEI courses. We also offer all global employees access to LinkedIn Learning.

In 2022, our eight-month-long, early-career PetroTech Academy training program concluded with 70 global participants convening in Houston for an asset development simulation and week-long discipline school. Additionally, a Technical Learning Council was formed, bringing together a team of top leaders across technical disciplines and digital skills to help guide learning strategy with an emphasis on critical skills. Lastly, a new, enterprise-wide competency management system was implemented with more than 2,500 users on the platform. The system supports assessment and tracking of operational and regulatory-required competencies and is being piloted for technical skills competency development.

Leadership Development

We recognize that supervisors play a key role in talent development, so we offer a robust supervisor development curriculum to help leaders effectively engage and develop their employees. Global courses focus on proactive communication, employee development and building trust.

Our Leader of Leaders program brings together the company’s top senior leaders from around the globe in small virtual cohorts to create an opportunity for leaders to connect on key business drivers influencing our corporate culture. Every fall, our senior leaders come together in person in Houston for our annual Leadership Forum meeting to align with our Executive Leadership Team on priorities related to company strategy, technology, DEI and topical employee engagement strategies.

In 2022, we took an opportunity to explore a number of external and internal leadership curriculums and conferences in service of enhancing the skills, capabilities and leadership readiness of our employees. This work will continue as we refine our core and targeted leadership development needs as an output of the broader career development strategy work.

Performance Management

We use a performance management program focused on objectivity, credibility and transparency. The program includes broad stakeholder feedback, real-time recognition and a formal “how” rating to hold our workforce and our leaders accountable for behaviors reflective of our SPIRIT Values and Leadership Competencies. Our leaders are equipped with guidelines and reference materials to assist with their assessment of key “how” performance indicators. 

Recognition is important to our employees and core to our culture. Our supervisor- and employee-driven internal recognition program, The Mark Award, enables employees to recognize their peers for individual accomplishments through monetary and non-monetary awards (Instant Thanks). Within our monetary program, our peer-to-peer recognition program enables employees to acknowledge and extend real time recognition to colleagues for going above and beyond in their day-to-day work or completing project milestones. In 2022, 73% of our global employees received awards, and nearly 16,500 monetary awards were shared and 2,500 Instant Thanks messages were sent.