Over the past few years, oil and gas companies have had to shift their priorities to adjust to economic and geopolitical events directly impacting the industry. Unpredictable global price swings that seesaw revenues have led to cost-cutting across all departments, putting pressure on their ability to compensate and retain their workforce.
As the market starts to normalize, oil and gas companies are shifting away from cutting costs and are looking to invest in initiatives and technologies that enable them to adapt better to change while focusing on improving the long-term performance of their business. The workforce of these companies is a major contributor to both costs and company performance, driving HR departments to play an important role in managing change and costs associated with it.
HR—Keeping Up With the Changes
For HR to keep up with this change we have identified three key areas to bear in mind while contributing to the overall improvement of the business:
Realign compensation strategy
A competitive and aligned compensation strategy has two direct benefits: retaining employees and keeping them motivated, so it’s important to make sure compensation strategies continually align with changing market conditions while also ensuring employees goals and objectives have a direct impact on the overall business goals to ensure optimal individual and company performance. Adjusting individual objectives and compensation strategies for the different roles and markets in your workforce, as often and as quickly as necessary, is critical to flex with these industry changes without risk of losing top talent or negatively impacting employee performance.
Leverage technology
Cost-cutting initiatives in oil and gas companies have led to a low level of IT investment in the past few years, and now HR departments have the chance to catch up. Updating HR technology to digitize, unify and integrate disparate compensation strategies can lead to workforce efficiencies and overall cost savings while still adapting quickly when things do change.
Access to the right data
Digitized compensation processes can leave you access to a wealth of data about your workforce and related industry. Data coming from your compensation management technology can help you to understand how competitively you are paying your employees, what characteristics are best related to high performance or high retention, or whether or not you are paying and promoting fairly across genders. Access to this type of data and analysis is beneficial in moving comp and ben departments away from administrative tasks and more toward strategic actions that can help future-proof their compensation strategies.
Is your HR strategy equipped to adapt quickly to change while improving business performance and remaining competitive relative to the market?
