Chevron Corporation – The Chevron Way: Engineering Opportunities for Women (Practices)

Chevron’s initiative, The Chevron Way: Engineering Opportunities for Women, is designed to strengthen the organization by increasing the company’s focus on people, in particular by attracting, retaining, developing, and advancing women throughout the company.

The values associated with The Chevron Way—integrity, trust, diversity, ingenuity, partnership, protecting people and the environment, and high performance—underlie both Chevron’s business rationale and its talent management strategies, which include attracting and retaining diverse talent, identifying and developing high-potential leaders, and fine-tuning succession plans to ensure a diverse leadership pool.

The Chevron Way is the primary driver of the company’s diversity strategy and comprises a variety of programs, processes, and tools to facilitate gender inclusion, such as targeted recruitment, leadership development, employee networks, and mentoring/sponsorship. Chevron offers a number of corporate leadership development programs that support women’s advancement, including the Emerging Leaders Program, Chevron Leadership Forum, and Chevron Advanced Management Program (CHAMP). Chevron’s 12 Employee Networks each have an executive sponsor and a yearly plan linked to business objectives, including a return on investment component. Furthermore, the Employee Networks and some of Chevron’s leadership development programs provide opportunities for formal and informal mentoring. The Women’s Network features a global mentoring program with an extensive matching process. Finally, the initiative emphasizes accountability by tying diversity goals, which include gender, to performance for nearly all employees. Specific accountability mechanisms include:

• Diversity Action Plans (DAPs). DAPs are a mandatory piece of the performance evaluation process for most of Chevron’s 62,000 employees. DAPs are written as measureable objectives that can be tied to compensation and are critical to ensuring that Chevron achieves its diversity objectives.
• Personnel Development Committees (PDCs). Each major business unit or strategic job family, as well as sub-teams within these units, has its own eight-to-12-person PDC responsible for talent development. PDCs monitor diversity by tracking workforce metrics, documenting all hiring and advancement decisions, and addressing barriers to progress for diverse and under-represented groups. The PDCs report to an overarching global PDC known as the Human Resources Committee chaired by the CEO.

These processes, which put accountability for creating an inclusive culture in the hands of every Chevron employee, as well as the company’s broader talent management strategy, have led to many positive changes. Since the start of the initiative, women’s representation in leadership roles across levels has increased, and the proportion of women hires in the United States has grown from 24.5% in 2011 to 28.6% in 2013. At senior leadership levels, women’s representation has increased from 16.0% in 2007 to 19.3% in 2013 and from 15.1% to 18.7% at mid-level leadership levels during the same time period.