The Feminine Touch

While many sectors are feeling the effects of the credit crunch, the oil industry is in rude health. However this doesn’t mean that challenges don’t remain in the HR department. Total is a leading multinational energy company with 95,000 employees and operations in more than 130 countries. Together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, it is the fourth largest publicly traded integrated oil and gas company in the world. That’s a great deal of diversity to manage.

HRM. You have a fairly unusual job title, what are the main duties and responsibilities of your role?

CF. The root of everything we do is reporting. We are in charge of all the social and CSR reporting tools, which means that we try to see everywhere in the world where we recruit people or we educate them or we take care of their health, things like that. This monitoring is key because it allows us to develop global HR policies, to monitor the implementation of these policies and to understand what works and what doesn’t, and when things don’t work it helps us understand that.

Our second responsibility lies in diversity. At Total, we have decided that diversity complements our business issues. One aim is to promote women and non-French people in the management chain. The second is to secure global opportunities for all the employees in the world. So these are the two challenges. For each challenge we try to have key policies, key statements, key reporting and measuring tools, and then some operational links with the HR departments and with the branches and affiliates to make sure that everybody progresses.

The key risk in diversity is over-promising. We give global statements, we have clear policies and indicated objectives, but at the same time we know that when we speak about diversity we deliver messages where everybody has something individually to find. You must match the progress and the messages and hopes you raise with good policies. The best way to manage that is to reduce communication and never over expose yourself. Instead, give priority to action instead of communication.

Education is also something that Total is pushing. We have educational programs in place that we use to give young leaders or good students in producing countries the opportunity to have an educational record in France. At the moment in Paris we have about 80 young students who are either young executives of national oil companies or third cycle students. They receive a scholarship in France for a year, and by that time they have improved their knowledge as well as building a network between international young people. It’s fascinating. We give them the opportunity to better know Total, France, and even Europe. They have a trip to the European Institution in Brussels, for example, to better understand Europe. With all of this we hope to make them ambassadors for Total when they go home.

We are also in charge of a specific part of benevolent actions, that covers education, health, and also what we call solidarity. The idea of this specific division is to have global visibility on HR and CSR commitment. It’s a new way of seeing classical fields like health or education, and then trying to build new transverse partnerships internally and externally. In all the fields we explore, we try internally to put together people from different branches, nationalities and backgrounds. Externally, we try to share our experience of projects with different bodies, with government, NGOs, other companies, educational bodies both in France and in the other countries in order to see where our added value is in the social projects we develop.

HRM. In regards to education, is succession planning important and something that you look to do?

CF. Succession planning is key to diversity management. After four years of extensive work on diversity we understand its core: if we do not give specific attention to international people or women we will never progress significantly in the diversity of our top management. We know that if we want to improve diversity in the medium and long term, we have to improve our recruitment process to recruit more high-potential non-French people or to recruit more high-potential women. This is something we can do, but the problem is that now we don’t have the pipeline of high fliers with good potential, we just don’t have enough “diverse” people to feed our top management objectives. This is because 10 years ago we didn’t recruit enough of the good women and the good international talent with the capacity to be top management after 15 years. Now we have to see how to correct the fact that our pipeline is not sufficient.

We have to bring some succession plans in to give possibility of faster paths to some people from other countries, younger employees, or women. This is not really positive action, but at the same time it looks like it is. At the same time, what is very important is that we don’t destroy the hope of the classical French engineers who were recruited 15 years ago with very good potential, and who are eligible for top positions. This kind of vision is important for us, it’s key to our success, and we have to develop tailor-made succession plant and career management plans. Each case is specific.

HRM. Talking more about women in business, do you feel that the role of women in business has changed over the past few years?

In the last few years at Total we have seen a deep-seated cultural change in this area, not for reasons of political correctness, but for operational need. Everybody knows that we need women and that gender issues are key. But today we don’t find the talent we need in the classical profile of young French males coming from French engineer schools. We need the talents of women in these schools and everywhere in the world because men don’t offer us enough possibilities.

Women have specific talents, which it is important to develop. For example, in Africa we see that women are very good at finance, quality and financial management and control. So in a lot of African subsidiaries there are women at the top in finance management, in human resources and also in law. In Africa women are very important in all kinds of financial management, domestically too but more globally. They are recognized as having those skills so it is important to have women at these key positions.

So there are many operational reasons on top of the socio- political reasons to promote women. Everybody now is conscious of that. The problem is that there is always a gap between what your mind knows and what your heart decides. We are now in that context, where it’s still difficult for men to trust a woman in challenging operational positions.

Increasingly we have women who are successful on platforms, managing platforms and so on. They perform very well, for example, in safety management. Of course, I know I am addressing stereotypes. There is another challenge to balance stereotypes which are bad for women and to see into the stereotypes which what is really culturally rooted.