Promoting diversity
Building and maintaining a diverse workforce is essential to our future success. It allows us to:
- attract and retain the best employees
- improve productivity, teamwork and decision making
- reflect and respond to a diverse customer base
- strengthen our reputation
We expect employees to understand diversity, demonstrate diversity leadership and foster a supportive work environment. Our goal is to create and maintain a work environment that respects diversity, including diversity of ideas, talents, gender and ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
What are we doing
Educating employees about our diversity approach
We provide policies, guidelines, and programs that support diversity in the workplace. We offer diversity education programs designed to help managers enhance their understanding of what diversity means, Imperial's expectations and ideas for addressing diversity issues. About 90 supervisors and managers attended our full-day course in 2010. To date, about 1,100 leaders have participated in the training. We also trained more than 470 employees in a new half-day course in 2010.
Tracking designated groups
We have an employment equity program that supports our commitment to diversity with a formal policy prohibiting discrimination in all aspects of the employment relationship since 1990. Each year we carry out an annual review of the number of people in designated groups -- women, Aboriginal people, visible minorities and people with a declared disability -- in our organization, and we look for opportunities for improvement. We have made strides in diversity in part because senior management keen attention to it; we continually monitor the progress of our workforce closely through management reviews and early identification of employees with high potential.
Supporting women's networks
Women make up a third of our managerial, professional and technical workforce; increased from less than 20 percent in 1990. To support women at Imperial, networks have been established that provide for coaching, mentoring and learning from each other. The networks include the Women's Leadership Networks in Calgary and Toronto, the Women's Professional Engineer, Geoscientist and Scientist Network, which encourages mentorship between senior and junior professionals, and the Women in Wage program, which provides support and networking opportunities for those in non-traditional roles in the Upstream. In 2010, the first group for refinery workers, the Nanticoke Women's Interest Network, was established at the Nanticoke refinery in Ontario.
Recruiting and supporting women in the workplace
We are proud of our progress but we also recognize we must still continue to make improvements. We support career progression and advancement through our “grow-and-promote-from-within” philosophy. For many years, for example, we have actively recruited women professionals from university campuses across Canada. In 2010, women represented 35 per cent of our campus hires, a proportion that is greater than the availability of women in the highly technical disciplines from which we primarily hire.
For those with family responsibilities, it is important to provide choices in career development opportunities. We offer a variety of programs to assist all employees in striking an optimal work-life balance, including flexible work schedules, part-time work options and job-sharing arrangements, and leaves of absence.
These different guidelines and programs share a common purpose: we want employees to remain with the organization or the duration of their careers, giving us the opportunity to contribute to their professional growth and benefit over the long-term from their talents and knowledge. We believe that that our guidelines and programs that support work-life balance will help us attract and retain the best people and better use the capabilities of all employees as we strive to obtain superior business results in Canada’s increasingly diverse marketplace.