Why Hilcorp partnered with Great Place To Work
A key piece of Hilcorp’s business model is the acquisition of legacy oil and gas assets. They acquire large, mature, and often overlooked properties and maximize the value of these properties by modernizing and optimizing systems and equipment.
Hilcorp’s investment in these properties and the empowerment of its employees extend the life of aging fields.
Growing through acquisition creates a challenge for maintaining a consistent employee experience. Hilcorp must ensure that incoming employees feel as valued as legacy employees, while not neglecting tenure employees in favor of new assets.
Hilcorp uses Great Place To Work tools such as the Trust Index™ and Emprising™ to survey both existing and incoming employees and then isolate those demographics in the results.
“It's been a great partnership with Great Place To Work,” says Mike Brezina, Senior Vice President of Human Resources with Hilcorp.
“We love the survey. We think it is the best one out there. But more importantly, the system and the Emprising tool have been extremely helpful and having the consulting to leverage that tool to its fullest. It is a true partnership.”
Challenge
Maintain the employee experience post-acquisition
Since 2012, Hilcorp has managed to maintain Trust Index scores in the high 80s and low 90s. After tracking results over time, however, Hilcorp noticed a pattern of dips — each one lasting about two to three years.
These dips, they realized, were further magnified by major acquisitions.
Managing new employee experiences is nothing new to Hilcorp. The company hosts a town hall as soon as possible with all potential new employees, providing them with a detailed framework of the process and an in-depth understanding of Hilcorp’s unique culture. These townhalls are attended and led by the CEO and other senior leaders. In two 30-minute interviews, these potential new employees are asked a wide variety of questions, including the most important question: “What could be done to make the asset(s) more efficient?” And new employees are often encouraged to make it happen on day one.
The result is high levels of excitement immediately after an acquisition; however, the data indicates that excitement dips about one to two years later.
This realization was Hilcorp’s call to action. The company knew that if it wanted to reduce the length and depth of those dips, it needed data that could help pinpoint the demographics and reasons behind them.
Solution
4-year customized data collection
Four years ago, in partnership with Great Place To Work’s Culture Coaching and Consulting teams, Hilcorp wanted to explore what more could be done with survey customization and began digging even deeper into Great Place To Work’s Emprising software.
“We wanted to ask a thousand questions, but we couldn’t,” says Mike. “So, year one was how do we look at our people and how do we know that we’re being consistent across all categories?”
Hilcorp’s team includes a mix of field, technical, and office workers. And while Hilcorp found the company was mostly consistent, the field workers, who make up 70% of the company’s employees, were a potential outlier.
Hilcorp’s field workers have a wide variety of roles and responsibilities, which creates obstacles in communication. For example, some Hilcorp employees work two weeks on/two weeks off, and many work in isolated locations with small teams.
In year two, Hilcorp added two custom questions within the demographics to assess the quality of communication across different groups:
- How frequently do you have a one-on-one with your supervisor?
- How useful is your one-on-one?
The results showed that for employees who found their one-on-ones “almost always useful,” almost 95% also stated that Hilcorp was a great place to work. Hilcorp expected this would be the case, but now they had the data to prove it.
The company then dug in further in year three, adding 17 custom demographics based on which acquisitions employees came from, so Hilcorp could monitor those employees’ experiences over time.
Finally, in year four, Hilcorp added five more custom demographics, focused on the usefulness of their Lifting Cost meetings (which are similar to town halls).
All of this data customization gave Hilcorp a more robust picture of the employee experience. Rather than lumping all employees together for a single score, Hilcorp was able to identify and track trends among specific demographics and experiences.
“It’s just remarkable to me that you can use this survey to really pinpoint key elements of your company and your culture,” says Mike.
Outcome
Improved communication and trends tracking
As Hilcorp worked its way through the data each year, the company was able to become increasingly targeted with its solutions.
“If you do a survey but don’t dig into the data and get very intentional with demographic questions and other questions specific to your organization, you’re missing out,” warns Mike.
For example, based on the year two data about one-on-ones, Hilcorp found that some employees – particularly those out in the field – said they never had a one-on-one meeting, despite having had one-on-one time with their managers during “ride-alongs” on their routes. This marked a clear opportunity to work with the managers to ensure that the one-on-one time employees had felt more valuable.
Hilcorp also took a fresh look at its Lifting Cost meetings to ensure they’re more meaningful and motivating, with transparent sharing of company goals and progress, and the opportunity for teams to talk about what they’re achieving.
With most of Hilcorp’s field employees working split shifts, such as two weeks on and two weeks off, consistent communication is hard to achieve, but essential. The data showed that employees who found these meetings useful were 95% more likely to say Hilcorp was a great place to work.
Hilcorp was able to create a clear employee experience timeline for each category of employee (field, technical, and office) and determine the points at which each might experience a dip in enthusiasm during their tenure. This gives Hilcorp a clear baseline for optimizing future acquisitions
