Our Approach to People
Our Approach to People
Our staff are key to achieving our operational and business goals, so our approach to People begins with our values: Excellence, Trust, Respect and Responsibility. We are focused on building a team of diverse, talented and engaged people who work together to achieve superior results and make Vermilion an exceptional place to work.
Because we view our strong culture as the foundation of our success, it influences everything we do, which is why we prioritize:
- Collaborating and having fun working together, sharing ideas and best practices
- Rewarding high performance and celebrating our successes
- Investing in career development and promoting wellness;
- Working flexibly and balancing our work and personal lives; and
- Valuing a diverse workforce that reflects the communities in which we work
We are committed to maintaining Vermilion's position as a workplace of choice, to enable us to attract and retain high quality staff. This includes offering competitive compensation and benefits packages, providing a safe and respectful work environment, and sustaining our strong culture.
We look internally to fill job postings wherever possible, to provide our staff with career advancement and/or development opportunities. When we recruit externally, we hire employees with strong technical skills and vision who want to work in a highly collaborative and dynamic environment.
Our onboarding process is designed to make our new team members feel immediately welcome, connect them with their immediate team and key colleagues, and integrate them quickly into our culture. This includes reviewing our People, Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, Anti-Corruption and HSE policies, explaining compensation and benefits programs, ensuring IT systems are available, and providing key information about our company and culture.
Our compensation philosophy and program objectives are the same for employees at all levels, with details in our annual Information Circular and Proxy Statement. All permanent employees are offered a competitive base salary, short- (bonus) and long-term incentive plans, and a pension or retirement-like scheme. Short- and long-term incentives are associated with both individual and company performance, and are linked to specific corporate metrics. These include sustainability and HSE performance indicators, supporting our priorities of safety and environmental protection, market performance compared to peers, strategy delivery, and financial and operational success.
We strive to foster workforce well-being through competitive health and wellness benefits. In Canada, for example, these include a taxable lifestyle account and tax-free health care spending account; health, vision and dental plans; short- and long-term disability benefits; basic and dependent life insurance plans; critical illness and "best doctors" insurance; parental leave; and company-paid access to an employee family assistance program. 401-2 401-3
In many of our business units, staff have the option to purchase additional vacation days. The Vacation Purchase Policy was introduced in response to employee feedback requesting additional flexibility to support work-life balance and family life.
This includes the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Not Myself Today initiative, a confidential online program open to all staff globally that offers information, tools and activities to help understand the basics of mental health, have better discussions, increase emotional intelligence, address stress and build a generally more supportive and productive work environment.
We also host an annual Mental Health Week with activities that include staff-suggested music playlists, taking time to chat with each other, mindfulness workshops, gratitude sharing and even virtual yoga.
Works Councils can be established by employee elections in France and The Netherlands in companies with more than 50 employees, and in Germany with more than five. Works Council are in place in France, and in Germany for our field staff. In the Netherlands, the Works Council is eligible to form whenever employees wish.102-41
Our Discrimination, Harassment and Workplace Violence Policy ensures that all staff are provided with the opportunity to work in a supportive environment within which individuals are treated with respect, provided with equal opportunities, and kept free of discrimination, harassment and violence from other staff, and that they understand the different reporting options.
Our Discrimination, Harassment and Workplace Violence Policy ensures that all staff are provided with the opportunity to work in a supportive environment within which individuals are treated with respect, provided with equal opportunities, and kept free of discrimination, harassment and violence from other staff, and that they understand the different reporting options.
Complaints or concerns can be raised via a staff member’s supervisor, human resources, any member of senior management, or anonymously via our Whistleblower page which is available 24/7 online.
All complaints are reviewed, documented and resolved as per the process in our Fair Culture policy. In accordance with the Fair Culture policy, we respect the confidentiality and fairness of the investigation process. In order to protect both, we do not report on numbers of complaints, investigations and confirmed incidents of specific types of complaint. In a smaller company such as ours, this reporting could lead to being able to identify outcomes for those indirectly involved in the investigation such as witnesses, which would not be appropriate.
Our formal recruitment process for Board members provides a candidate screening step that includes reasonable efforts to secure qualified women for at least 50% of applicants and the interview pool. Our intention is to broaden each search process to ensure qualified women candidates are available for consideration. 102-24
We continue to prioritize career development and succession planning for our female employees to foster a more diverse senior leadership team in the future. For details about our female mentoring program, see the Performance Management, Training and Development section.
We are also pleased to sponsor and attend events such as the Calgary Influential Women in Business Awards and “The Only One in the Room” board diversity panel discussion with DiliTrust, The51 and Board Ready Women.
Fair culture is about understanding human involvement in relation to events in a way that:
- Encourages organizations to learn from their mistakes
- Identifies the underlying causes of events involving human error
- Fairly assigns responsibility and consequences to individuals and leaders following an event
- Rewards behaviors that meet or exceed expectations, and closely examines and addresses non-compliance, and
- Identifies appropriate organizational resolutions to address the underlying causes of events.
Our Fair Culture policies create a balanced approach to assessing organizational, leader and employee accountability, helping to align Vermilion with industry best practices and positioning us as a leader in creating a balanced and transparent culture.
We have a culture of open, two-way communication. Members of our senior management team make regular visits to our field and international business unit locations. Through the Great Place to Work survey, our people often tell us that they value the approachability of our leaders at Vermilion, and that they feel heard.
Our corporate intranet (VETnet) is a key communications channel, offering both global and local news in English, French, Dutch and German. Content generation is shared amongst stakeholders from across the organization, focusing on corporate news, shared learnings, HSE and community investment activities in all our locations. Every VETnet page features a Suggestion button, which staff can use to make suggestions or raise concerns.
We ensure that learnings are shared via our Global Operating Best Practice team, which provides a company-wide communication platform to share insights and connect our staff, along with peer assists for our technical teams.
These meetings are recorded and archived globally on VETnet so that staff can access them regardless of location and time. Confidential pre-surveys provide opportunities to raise questions and make suggestions to the senior management team, who participate regularly in a Q&A panel. A confidential post-survey provides a forum for feedback on the effectiveness of the town halls, interest in the topics presented, and suggestions for future content. These components are an excellent way for questions, concerns and suggestions to be raised, as staff feedback is incorporated into ongoing company strategy discussions.
Vermilion uses Workday, an integrated, web-based people information system that enables employees to easily and quickly manage their personal information online 24/7, including payroll information, while providing leaders access to required information on their teams.102-49 We use a variety of checks and indicators to ensure that our People programs are achieving our goals:
- Voluntary turnover rates
- Ease of finding qualified candidates
- Results from Great Place to Work and other staff surveys, including department and team workplans that respond to staff concerns and suggestions
- Monitoring and acting on staff suggestions
- Market surveys to ensure we remain competitive
- Evaluating changing legislative or regulatory requirements, and
- Gap analysis for performance metrics
We reinstated the survey in 2022, earning recognition as a Best Workplace in Canada, Germany, United States and Australia, and gaining important insight into areas of strength and opportunity globally.
The rankings are based on the Institute’s two-fold approach, which includes an independent assessment of our culture along with our employees' confidential responses to the Institute’s survey. In part, we attribute these results to the importance we place on reviewing and addressing the staff feedback through the surveys.
These results also tell us what our people value about Vermilion — including competitive total compensation, opportunities for growth and development, and pride in how we give back to our communities.
We adjust our People policies as needed to ensure we remain competitive with our peers, align to changing regulations, and respond to staff requests.
