Curiosity and innovation fuel Shell’s evolution

After 27 years with Shell Canada Limited, Kirsten Sauder can sum up in a single word why she has made her career there: people. “The great people I’ve worked with and the very empathetic leaders I’ve worked for, who helped shape my own leadership style,” she says, “are the number one reason.”

The resulting workplace culture – supportive, flexible and innovative – has been a hallmark of Calgary-based Shell throughout her time there, says Sauder, manager, supply and commercial fuels. “I learned that very early on in my career when I lost my father. It was a rapid set of circumstances, and I had burned through most of my vacation by the time it happened. But my line manager was highly supportive, and management helped make sure I had the time I needed to deal with the loss. That meant a lot to me.”

“Our core values are honesty, integrity and respect for people,” says Shell Canada president and country chair Susannah Pierce. “The ability to be mentored, to get feedback and feel like you’re learning, brought me into the organization back in 2009. Ever since, each role I’ve had, I’ve been able to stretch and grow.”

Shell strives to foster a culture where employees feel that they can speak freely with their colleagues and line managers, Pierce says. “Having safe conversations and working together to advance business outcomes while leveraging our current skills is a key differentiator for Shell and how we get stuff done moving forward together.”

Safe workplace conversations include those about health, both mental and physical. “Mental health is absolutely a focus of ours, an area where we are constantly re-evaluating how to give people the support they need,” says Pierce. “The work I’ve been doing with our chief health officer and our HR lead is a systemic look at mental health, to better understand what are the right conditions to maintain it, so we’re not just supporting those suffering, we’re dealing upfront with causes.”

When the workplace offers opportunities for career advancement and the sort of support that buoyed Sauder in a difficult time, Pierce says, it has the core ingredients for a strong two-way loyalty. “Employee engagement and workplace culture are key to being a top employer,” she says, “and we will certainly not be on any such list if we don’t get that right.”

Part of getting it right is an acceptance of constant change, Pierce adds. “We continue to innovate in terms of understanding what drives the most productivity and what drives the best employee engagement.” Shell is something of an outlier in its industry, as Sauder points out, in maintaining a hybrid office schedule. “It’s working well for us,” says Pierce. “While it might not work for every company, here it’s based on employee engagement, and I think it offers the best of both worlds.”

A similar commitment is also what the company seeks in its new hires. Individual employees will need to be as innovative as Shell strives to be, Pierce says. “We have our values, but we’re also looking for people who acknowledge that we must be constantly open to change. The context of our business, our competitiveness, will be challenged through the continuing evolution of the energy sector,” she says.

“We need people who will be curious, willing to accept that change will happen, and lean in on it while accepting that they might need to change too – to learn, grow and do something new.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Canada's Top 100 Employers winners, published November 15, 2024 in The Globe and Mail. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.

Shell’s core values support new ways of thinking

In a recent Shell Canada Limited leadership meeting in Calgary, says Maria Paquet, vice president of human resources, those present spoke about times when they felt included at work and times when they did not. “People shared stories, and it became a conversation about how to have real conversations in the workplace,” Paquet says.

“Being open yourself and starting with a bit of vulnerability goes a long way, we realized. Otherwise, you’re never going to get that openness from your employees.”

Safe spaces and real conversations are a bedrock for a workplace based on Shell’s core values of honesty, integrity and respect for people, says Paquet. When it comes to employee mental health, she continues, the company has supports, notably a $1,900 wellness spending account and bringing in experts to speak about mental well-being. “But creating trust and a feeling of safety comes from having real conversations about how our real selves are feeling,” says Paquet.

“Shell’s values and practices together support both our authentic selves and the mindsets and behaviours the company and its people need to manage the changes we are seeing as a society and as individuals.”

Tim Duncan, production unit manager – chemicals, easily agrees. “Shell’s values, and the way they shape the workplace, make it easy to come to work and do the right thing. We’re inclusive and really supportive of developing new skills and new ways of thinking,” says Duncan, who is based at the company’s Scotford Complex northeast of Edmonton.

“We have a good history at Scotford of testing a technology and then scaling up. We installed a five-megawatt solar farm here to help power our chemicals facility, found it was working well, and recently joined with a partner to start up a 58-megawatt facility to provide the refinery with solar power. We don’t just talk about change, we affect it,” Duncan says.

“I always tell young engineers starting out, ‘If you want to change the world, come work for Shell – but you’ll need a learner mindset, because that’s how we will discover the solutions.’”

Shell is committed to fostering that mindset through its leadership development programs, education reimbursements and the high value it ascribes to mentoring, Paquet says. Some of the latter is formal and not location-bound – Duncan is currently mentoring an engineer in Sarnia, Ont. – while informal mentoring is a constant at work sites. Shell also provides abundant opportunities to move between roles in different parts of a global business, adds Paquet.

Duncan, who started a four-year stint at Shell’s Hydroprocessing Centre of Excellence (COE) in Amsterdam a decade ago, can attest to that. “It was fantastic opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds in the industry, as we designed new units across the world,” Duncan says. “A lot of Canadians have spent time in the Netherlands, including our president Susannah Pierce and the new head of the Hydroprocessing COE who came in towards the end of my time there.”

The training, the opportunities, the open conversations on everything from inclusion to health to artificial intelligence, and Shell’s core values, work together, Paquet says, “to foster the skillsets and the mindsets to deal with an uncertain world.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Alberta’s Top Employers winners, published January 28, 2025 in the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.