Boosting the employee experience: Aramco
A case study on how Aramco introduced an employee engagement initiative as part of its commitment to improve employee experience and wellbeing
A case study on how Aramco introduced an employee engagement initiative as part of its commitment to improve employee experience and wellbeing
Employee experience is about creating a great work environment for people and helping them to be their best. This is built on the premise that engaging work environments foster happier, healthier and more fulfilled employees, which in turn drive productivity and innovation. Employee experience looks at approaches to enable people to have a voice, and considers other factors like employer brand and the way communications channels are used.
Aramco, one of the world's largest integrated energy and chemicals companies, has a strong commitment to employee engagement and wellbeing, believing that its people help define its success. From a detailed analysis of its employee survey, it introduced a new initiative to boost employee experience.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The key results of the HSWY initiative include:
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.”
Aramco’s EX team learned several important lessons over the implementation of HSWY. They include:
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