Performance Management, Training and Development
Why It Matters
Our performance management system, along with our focus on learning and development, contributes to our overall philosophy to support our people to develop not only the skills they need for their current job but those that will benefit them throughout their career.
Vermilion is committed to engaging and supporting employees as they identify and achieve career and development goals.
Our performance management program supports two-way communication between leaders and staff, and we aim for 100% participation for permanent employees.
Overall, the process includes:
- Setting clear expectations for performance
- Creating and communicating performance and development goals, and career aspirations
- Identifying opportunities to learn and grow
- Providing ongoing feedback
- Evaluating results and how they were achieved, and
- Recognizing accomplishments.
Individual performance goals are tied to our long-term business strategy’s six Matters of Importance, ensuring that employees know how their work supports the company, and how they contribute to our success:
- Extraordinary People and Culture
- Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) – Everyone, Everywhere, Everyday
- Financial Discipline
- Robust and Profitable Portfolio
- Business and Operational Excellence, and
- Integrated Sustainability.
Supporting our people helps us to retain and attract the best talent in the industry.
KPIs include both standard industry metrics and internal measures of performance, and are discussed annually in the Information Circular.
The management-by-objectives process begins at the start of the year, when our people identify their performance and development goals, career aspirations and mobility interests through our Driving Excellence – Plan Forward process.
Feedback is provided via ongoing conversations throughout the year between leaders and staff, a mid-year checkpoint, and the Looking Back – Performance Review process at year-end.
Our leaders are evaluated on an additional set of leadership attributes, including achieving results through teamwork, HSE leadership, managing and setting priorities, and demonstrating Vermilion’s values.
Our approach to includes:
- Work experiences – on-the-job training through varied projects and roles
- Relationships – coaching and mentoring from others and connecting with external networks, and
- Formal training – specific training courses and conferences.
We take a lifelong learning approach, combined with annual identification of specific performance and development goals for all permanent employees.
We have programs in place in several business units that provide rotating terms of training and exposure across various engineering disciplines for early career engineers.
In Ireland, the Vermilion Energy Apprenticeship Program includes both on-job training at our Bellanaboy Gas Terminal and off-job formal courses through the Education & Training Board, Ireland. In 2023, we had two four-year apprentices working toward becoming fully trained Technicians.
Our international presence also provides selected staff unique opportunities to work on assignment, helping to broaden their operational expertise and understanding of our global operations while sharing key specialist expertise among our locations.
Prioritizing career development and succession planning for our female employees fosters a more diverse senior leadership team in the future, which is a strategic objective for Vermilion, and supports employee attraction and retention. In 2022, 8.5% of our employees were involved in this program.
Specifically, it provides four foundational pillars (LEAN): Learn (foundational leadership training, self awareness, situational leadership, navigating difficult discussions, cohesive teams, emotional intelligence); Elevate; (leadership exchange, mentorship, book club); Assess (360 feedback); and Discover (awareness of self and others in the workplace).
It is critical for us to provide relevant information that supports our leaders whether they are an existing leader, new to the company, or recently promoted into a leadership role. This includes helping them to understand roles and objectives, and how to support their people.
Ultimately, this provides strong leaders who are able to set the right direction, lead by example, inspire and develop others, and deliver the business and operational results that allow us to deliver energy production on a daily basis, along with long-term value to all of our stakeholders.
Ensuring that all of our leaders have a similar foundation from which to lead their teams helps provide a common language for expressing challenges and solutions, and supports equitable treatment of teams across the organization. In doing so, it supports employee satisfaction, attraction, productivity and retention. In 2022, 21% of our employees participated in this program.
We use strong workforce and succession planning processes that identify company needs for skills, knowledge and experience, cross-referenced to our performance management process.
This creates an opportunity for us to identify potential career paths for staff within Vermilion, and areas where we may need to recruit externally for specific positions. The Great Place to Work and other staff survey feedback also provides input to our training and development activities.
Over the past several years, we have strengthened training offerings in such areas as HSE courses, and expanded our lunch and learn program to topics
such as reserves, investor relations, Indigenous relations, and employee benefit programs. In addition we have had a strong focus globally on leadership development, including HSE leadership development.
We track answers to the question “I am offered training or development to further myself professionally” in every business unit through the Great Place to Work survey. This question provides a clear measure of employee engagement and satisfaction. We are also able to compare these responses to the training and development funding per business unit.
In addition, our ongoing evaluation has allowed us to target increased communication on key performance management topics.
