Promoting diversity
Our approach
Building and maintaining a diverse workforce is essential for a business to prosper. It allows a company to:
- attract and retain the best employees;
- improve productivity, teamwork and decision making;
- reflect and respond to a diverse customer base; and
- strengthen its reputation.
To achieve these goals, a company must build a supportive work environment.
What we are doing
We provide policies, programs and guidelines that support diversity in the workplace. We offer diversity education programs designed to help managers enhance their understanding and support of our commitment to diversity. It is an expectation that all managers take the full-day program. Close to 80 supervisors and managers attended the full-day course in 2009 and over 1,000 have taken the course to date. During the year, we also launched a program that is available for employees.
Up close:
Supporting a diverse workforce
At Imperial, 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. We have made strides in diversity in part because senior management monitors the progress of our workforce closely through early identification of employees with high potential, annual equal employment opportunity reviews and bi-annual reviews of how women, in particular, are progressing.
Women make up a third of the managerial, professional and technical workforce, increased from less than 20 percent in 1990. To support women at Imperial, networks have been established that provide mentoring and coaching. Those networks include the Women's Professional Engineer, Geoscientist and Scientist Network, which encourages mentorship between senior and junior professionals, the newly launched Women's Leadership Networks in Calgary and Toronto, and the Women in Wage program, which provides support and networking opportunities for those in non-traditional roles in the Upstream.
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. We have hired 200 women from campus recruitment in the last five years, which represents 41 percent 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 child and elder-care and in career development opportunities. We offer these as well as 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 initiatives share a common purpose: we want employees to stay with the organization, benefiting Imperial with the talent and the knowledge they build over their careers. We believe that these programs 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.