Boosting the employee experience: Aramco

Established in 1933, Aramco has a proud history of creativity and resilience, overcoming challenges, advancing knowledge and helping to usher in an age of abundant energy and transformative technology, delivering societal and economic benefits to people and communities around the globe. Headquartered in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, with a network of offices worldwide, Aramco believes in the power of energy to transform lives, enhance communities, accelerate human progress and sustain the planet.

In 2022, its Employee Experience (EX) team introduced an employee listening initiative where every member of Aramco’s 76,000-strong workforce was invited to participate in its employee engagement survey, carried out that October. Using video invitations, desk/seat drops in offices and on company ground and air transportation routes, text reminders and digital/physical banners, the initiative reminded employees, especially in Aramco’s industrial workforce and at remote locations, that their voice is valued, their feedback is voluntary and that as a company, Aramco is dedicated to enhancing their employee experience.

Following a comprehensive analysis of the survey results, Aramco introduced its “How Starts with You” (HSWY) employee engagement initiative.

What is the challenge?

Aramco believes that strategic investment in employee engagement will enable it to achieve higher levels of employee productivity, safety, discretionary contribution and overall business performance. HSWY was introduced as a key component of the company’s people strategy and focused on addressing the following challenges:

• understanding and enhancing the employee experience of its industrial and remote area workforce
• driving leadership awareness and behavioural change to enhance employee experience and engagement
• embedding employee engagement into the fabric of how Aramco does business.

What are the objectives?

HSWY is part of a broader corporate strategy to “establish Aramco as the best place to work and prepare the workforce of the future”. It seeks to do so by creating a culture of employee centricity and improving the employee experience. HSWY connects directly to Aramco’s external brand campaign “Powered by How”, that illustrates Aramco’s commitment to engineer a better future, and to deliver on that commitment by its continual quest to solve the world’s most complex problems by asking 'How?'. HSWY takes this external brand message and turns it internally towards Aramco’s leaders and employees — if Aramco is powered by 'how', then the 'how' starts with 'you', the people and leaders of Aramco. 

HSWY’s strategic objectives include:

1. keeping employees at the centre of everything Aramco does
2. championing employee experience design and iteration of moments-that-matter
3. connecting and embedding employee experience in the business strategy
4. embracing and modelling human-centred experience, design and leadership behaviour
5. partnering with Aramco leadership and extended Employee Experience Champion Network.

These objectives directly support Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 roadmap through “enabling the Kingdom’s businesses to unleash their fullest potential” and Aramco’s national and global sustainability focus area of ‘safe operations and people development’.

HSWY was implemented within the framework of Aramco’s strategic priorities for 2023. These included:

1. driving leadership behaviour
2. tailoring action plans
3. executing HR actions.

What did it do?

The below highlights a selection of the key actions taken as part of HSWY to prioritise and elevate the employee experience of Aramco’s workforce.

Understanding survey results

The most critical part of conducting any employee engagement survey is what is done to understand and respond to the results. At the close of Aramco’s 2022 survey, comprehensive data analysis identified four corporate areas of improvement: Enable, Develop, Care, Recognise. These became the themes that guided activities and campaigns executed in 2023.

1. Enable: Employees expressed a need to be enabled to do the work being requested of them, whether by having updated equipment or the resources to meet the demands placed on their particular function.
2. Develop: Employees voiced a requirement for job-relevant training, focused on helping them improve current job skills while also gaining access to the career paths available to them at the company.
3. Care: Employees stated a need for support in managing stress, energy and wellbeing.
4. Recognise: Employees said that more could be done to acknowledge the efforts of workers going the extra mile, and that more recognition for their contributions would be appreciated.

Aramco’s survey findings were further validated by external research from Gallup and other organisations which indicated that leaders, and leadership behaviour, have the most significant impact on employee experience, wellbeing and engagement.

Employee experience advisory service

In addition to increasing the focus on corporate-level action and response, Aramco’s HR function introduced the Corporate Employee Experience Team and Advisory Service. The remit of this team is to partner more closely with leaders, HR professionals and EX champions in the company to provide tools, training and support. EX advisers are assigned to each business line and administration area to provide best practice guidance, offer support with templates and tools, gather and collect responses to corporate pain points and communicate corporate updates and progress.

Responding to business and employee pain points

EX champions worked with leadership to identify and address areas for improvement. In total, 31 corporate pain points were gathered. Based on this, 14 corporate HR policy enhancements were made in 2022 and 2023.

Introduction of wellbeing training

Partnering with independent provider Workplace Options, Aramco launched its “Supporting Employee Wellbeing for Leaders” training programme, aimed at equipping leaders with tools and resources to sustain and enhance employee wellbeing at work. This was attended by more than 600 leaders in December 2022 as part of a pilot group, with an additional 3,000+ participating in the broader rollout by the close of 2023. Similarly, a monthly wellbeing webinar series for employees saw 16 one-hour virtual sessions on a variety of wellbeing topics delivered to over 3,000 participants.

New tools, training and resources

Global consultancy Willis Towers Watson, an industry leader in employee engagement and consulting services provider to Aramco, noted that in high-performing organisations, “leaders visibly champion and support employee experience and engagement efforts.” This aligns with Gallup research which found that “more than 70% of an employee’s engagement can be attributed to their experience with their direct leader.”

With these factors in mind, Aramco developed an interactive set of physical and online toolkits to assist its leaders and EX champions in engaging their people. These included activity sheets, one-to-one and team conversation guides, communication templates and infographics for each theme.

Further, Aramco introduced a 90-minute virtual training programme to provide leaders with an understanding of the linkages between leadership behaviour, employee experience and business performance, providing them with the awareness, tools, and practical steps they can take to improve employee engagement. Workshops were attended by thousands of leaders across Aramco. Additionally, a full-day, in-person training programme was delivered to Aramco leaders from across Europe. This formed part of its continued efforts to harmonise HR activities across its global portfolio of affiliate companies, giving clear visibility of the employee experience to drive stronger global outcomes and business results. 

What outcomes have been achieved so far?

The key results of the HSWY initiative include:

• more than 44,400 responses to the 2022 employee engagement survey received
• a 3%-point increase in its engagement score over the previous survey result
• a 3%-point increase in its Employee Advocacy Index Question: “I would recommend Saudi Aramco as a good place to work”
• 32 new leader and champion tools (digital and physical) designed and delivered; 10,000+ digital toolkit downloaded; 12,000+ physical toolkits delivered
• 4,185 leaders completed the “Introduction to Employee Experience for Leaders” and “EX Skills for Leaders” workshop series, improving their ability to enable, develop, care for and recognise their people
• 55% Employee Experience Pain Point resolution rate
• 14 corporate HR policy enhancements delivered
• 25 corporate organisational excellence assessments for the employee engagement process area conducted since January 2023
• over 100 success stories gathered as part of a corporate employee experience report
• time required to move from survey closure to action planning reduced by six weeks
• 10 monthly, one-hour employee experience webinars for EX champions conducted.

Summing up the impact of HSWY, Aramco’s Director of Upstream Unconventional Resources Exploration and Characterization, stated that HSWY “has proved [an] invaluable benefit for us, from the building of basic capabilities and skillsets, to providing high-quality data sets that enhance the quality of our decisions, as well as ensuring lasting improvements in employee engagement and value creation. Caring for people results in people caring for the business and almost always translates into superior business results.”

Key learnings

Aramco’s EX team learned several important lessons over the implementation of HSWY. They include:

1. Demonstrate visible leadership involvement and sponsorship. Engaging leaders actively champion engagement by meeting their people where they are, asking how they can help, and taking meaningful action. Highly engaging leaders are approachable and transparent, they listen to their people, and they motivate and inspire those around them to contribute more.
2. Get back to leadership basics. Engaging leaders don’t delegate engagement to others reporting to them. Make sure leaders are demonstrating that engagement matters by enabling, caring for, developing, and recognising their people in simple, yet meaningful ways. Engaging leaders help their people succeed and find fulfilment at work by making them feel valued, connected, and cared for.
3. Keep communications, tools and support for leaders brief, yet compelling, practical and useful. By curating and providing the right type and level of support to leaders, the relationship between employees and their leaders can be strengthened, enabling leaders to deliver experiences where employees thrive – driving higher performance and delivering sustainable business value. 
4. Co-create solutions for impact and social connection. The most important designer in any solution, innovation or improvement is often the individual(s) least involved. Involving employees in solution design from start to finish ensures that the right issues are prioritised and addressed. Incorporating social connection as a key design pillar of employee experience and engagement initiatives and solutions amplifies the business impact. Employees are more engaged and motivated to perform when they feel connected to their leaders and colleagues.
5. Never underestimate the power of “you said, we did”. Employee engagement levels directly correlate to employee perception that action is being taken on their feedback. Identify and partner with other corporate entities to ensure ownership, track progress, and communicate back to employees what is being done to address their key challenges and pain points. When employees feel heard and know that action is being taken to address their concerns, their engagement improves.