Building huge floating oil exploration vessels is, says Anne Guerin Moens, Group HR Director of SBM Offshore, very close to rocket science. Building an oil refinery on a ship requires a high degree of skill from design through to build and for her company of 7500 people it’s hardly surprising to find that 90 per cent of the workforce are engineers.
The company’s sense of pride in their work is unquestionable, however, the business is also well aware of the challenges that exist in creating, managing and developing this workforce.
Giving employees control and power
According to Moens one issue facing the sector is that workers do not have a good perspective on, or transparency around their career options. To some extent workers are simply putting their heads down and doing the job, and while SBM’s record for employee satisfaction is higher than the industry average, the business believed it could do better, not least in continuing to address the gender imbalance that pervades the industry.
In order to do this, the company decided to move away from the existing more paternalistic style towards something that offered the chance for an ‘adult to adult’ relationship between manager and employee, and across the company.
“We wanted our employees to be in the driving seat of their own careers,” explains Moens, “and to do do that we needed to have a dialogue about the competency and ability of each employee. Through that we could also define and measure the contribution of the employee to the company goals.”
Building a competency structure that works
The answer was to create a competency structure which covered every role within the business. Unsurprisingly, creating the framework alone took more than a year of work, redefining the architecture of how each role related to another, and then working with managers on the functional and behavioural competencies relating to each position.
Having completed that and made it accessible through the HR IT system the company is now engaging in the first self-assessments by employees. During these assessments the employee initially decides how they compare to each competency – are they ‘junior’ or ‘mastering’ the competency – and these self-assessments are then validated by their immediate managers.
The competency structure has also enabled the business to create career paths within each job family. There are now graphic representations – “Metro maps” – depicting career paths within the company giving employees a clear visualisation of where they currently are and where they can go.
A positive mind shift for employees
“The shift has moved our employees from asking ‘what do I need to do’ to being able to assess what they are capable of doing and how they can build on that,” says Moens.
“With that information they can then make their best contribution to the overall business goal. We hope that this will support our position where no-one in the company just comes to work to get a pay check.
