As a values-based organisation, we continue to engage our entire team at Tullow in advancing our sustainability strategy and creating Shared Prosperity through our activities in our host countries.
With a compact team, we rely upon every individual to play an important role in delivering positive outcomes for our business and our stakeholders, and in making our workplace inclusive, empowering and collaborative.
In 2022, we were focused on settling into an optimistic future of development and growth after some turbulent years of corporate turnaround, the COVID-19 pandemic, the discontinued merger plan with Capricorn Energy and changes in leadership. Our aims this year were to drive stability in our workforce and reset the baselines of organisational structure and performance and contribution to our longer-term growth plans. In particular, we supported the transition of in-house operations and maintenance of our Jubilee FPSO, an encouraging development for our team in Ghana, enabling for the first time in the past few years to build the organisation’s capability and bring opportunity to advance our business in the region. We onboarded 50 new hires in Ghana to meet this challenge while also continuing to reinforce our leadership with several senior hires in core business functions to refresh and revitalise our capabilities going forward.
Tullow Values
We are stronger as One Team.
We aim to foster an organisation in which all colleagues are motivated to live our values and support our purpose, while realising value for themselves in terms of meaningful work, professional growth and competitive compensation and benefits. The framework which encompasses this ambition is our Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and it is reflected in our human resources policies and programmes, training and communications.
During 2022, we continued to reinforce the different pillars of the EVP to enhance employee engagement and contribution.
Employee Value Proposition Survey: Our 2022 survey delivered an encouraging result. With close to 90% participation, we saw an average positive 70%, score across the sum of all survey questions, an improvement from 63% and 62% in our two prior surveys.
Tullow Advisory Panel (TAP): Aligned with our values of collaboration and creating a transparent and inclusive culture, the Tullow Advisory Panel (TAP) augments existing channels of communication between employees, senior management and the Board of Directors. TAP’s membership is a diverse panel of eight elected colleagues representing employees from across our different locations. TAP meets quarterly with Tullow’s Senior Leadership Team and separately, with the Board of Directors, to provide feedback collected from colleagues on a wide range of topics from staff development to employee workload to diversity and inclusion and more. In 2022, a focus of TAP’s feedback to Tullow’s leadership was the need to address the remuneration policy in Ghana where currency depreciation significantly disadvantaged those paid in local currency.
We aim to provide market competitive compensation packages which we regularly review to keep pace with local market norms and employee expectations. Compensation is linked to our performance management process to ensure regular engagement between managers and their teams align performance and contribution with variable pay allocations. In 2022, we completed a major exercise to revise the compensation packages of our teams in Ghana. The local currency, the Ghana Cedi, declined by 55% between January and October 2022, among the steepest declines of any currency in the world this year. The impact of this was price hikes across a broad range of imported goods and a cost-of-living increase, leading to soaring inflation and economic difficulties for many. For example, the local price of a litre of milk increased 300% while a 5-kilogramme bag of rice increased by 220%. Our workforce in Ghana was severely affected by this economic development as, being compensated in local currency, salaries were no longer commensurate with a living wage. Action in response to employee feedback was taken to review the impact on our Ghana colleagues and establish a compensation package linked to the U.S. dollar, the currency that drives the cost of primary imports, debt and consumer prices in Ghana.
By October 2022, we had implemented a dollar-linked salary across all employee categories in Ghana which represented an increase of 129% in base pay in local currency, compared to 2019. For 2022, specifically, we delivered a 44% increase in base pay in local currency, protecting employees against local inflation, as a result of currency depreciation.
Gender Pay Gap: Tullow continues to report in accordance with the Gender Pay Reporting set by the UK Government on a voluntary basis, as our reduced headcount falls below the legally applicable threshold for mandatory reporting. For UK permanent employees, Tullow has calculated the percentage difference in hourly pay for males and females for the month of April 2022 and the bonus paid over a 12-month period to April 2022. For more details, please see our 2022 Gender Pay Gap Report.
In 2022, we continued with our focus on professional development offering a minimum of 20 hours of training per employee and increasing our learning spend accordingly. We also reviewed the succession plans for our leadership roles and developed locationalisation plans and targets for critical roles in Ghana. Our Continuous Performance Management (CPM) process drove open and honest discussions about performance, opportunities to improve and skills needed to do so. 100% of Tullow colleagues participated in a performance review in 2022.
In particular, we focused on training for line managers in performance management and updated our processes to support effective evaluations, discussion and shared learning.
Our mentoring programme continued in 2022 with a second cohort of 25 managers being paired with senior leaders to assist managers with leadership and other skills and support them in navigating job challenges.
In 2022, we maintained all formal mandatory training relating to ethical conduct, compliance, health and safety and technical training.
We aim to create a culture of respect, openness and collaboration in which every individual is valued and empowered to contribute to the maximum of their potential. In 2022, we further reinforced our organisational values across all our human resources programming throughout the year.
Inclusion and Diversity: Inclusion and Diversity (I&D) are defining components of the way we work at Tullow, and we are proud of our culturally and geographically diverse team. Our I&D goals aim to drive equitable opportunity for African employees in different parts of our business and we are always seeking to support the development of women in our organisation given the historical challenges of advancing women in leadership in the oil and gas sector.
In 2022, we furthered our engagement with the Government of Ghana around our commitment to local skills development and local hiring. As always, our Shared Prosperity values drive our approach, and we expect to sign a Memorandum of Agreement on “Ways of Work” with the Government which will encompass our renewed commitments to localisation, developing people including internships and apprenticeships and other areas of collaboration to help to build resilience the Ghanaian economy though a skilled local workforce in an essential industry.
In 2022, we continued to support the development of our I&D culture with awareness and training events throughout the year. We commenced unconscious bias training for all employees (which will continue into 2023) and ran a speaker series focusing on I&D during our global wellness week. Further, we have been examining our processes to address barriers to inclusion and develop further opportunities in our hiring and development activities to advance womenalisation, specifically in technical roles. We have adopted balanced panels in our recruiting processes and ensure each shortlist includes at least one diverse candidate.
Women in Finance: Tullow is a signatory to the Women in Finance Charter which demonstrates our ongoing commitment to improving the gender diversity of our workforce, particularly improving women’s representation at senior levels within our finance function. In 2022, we maintained a level of 46% of female representation in our senior finance team in 2021, exceeding our goal of 40%.
Localisation: Our strategy of hiring local nationals and providing professional development for them as we continue to grow our business is one of the most important ways we can meet our commitment to the socioeconomic development of our host nations.
Localisation also serves our business objectives as it opens up a pool of exceptionally talented and motivated people to join our company.
Our objective in Ghana is to achieve 90% overall workforce localisation. At the end of 2022, we achieved 75% overall workforce localisation. Our refreshed localisation strategy sets us on the path to reach our target in the next 3–5 years. developing people including internships and apprenticeships and other areas of collaboration to help to build resilience the Ghanaian economy though a skilled local workforce in an essential industry.
Our Sustainability Report 2022
This Sustainability Report complements our 2022 Annual Report and provides further details of our environmental and social performance over the past year.
