Respect employees and protect employee rights and interests

Business development relies upon employees and wealth cannot be created without employees, and therefore, it is a matter of course to share the results of business development with every employee. Over the years, in the course of reform and development, we always put employees first and effectively ensured their rights and interests are not jeopardized; we made employees feel they are the owners of the business, and actively pursued mutual beneficial development of the organization, employees and the wider society.

Build harmonious and stable labor relations

Harmonious and stable labor relations are essential to creation of a harmonious business, and minimal personnel turnover is critical to sustainable development. As an enterprise, we are duty-bound to respect employees and protect their rights and interests. At Sinopec, employees are treated with dignity and equality. Discrimination of any form is strictly prohibited. We respect the freedom of belief and diversity of employees and provide equal career opportunities to all employees, regardless of nationality, race, country of citizenship, sex and age.

We fully implement labor contract system according to the Labor Law of the People’s Republic of China, Trade Union Law of the People’s Republic of China and other relevant international laws and practices. Currently, all Sinopec companies maintain written labor contracts with all of their employees on the principle of equality, free will and mutual agreement. Meanwhile, Sinopec formulated specific labor contract administration procedure to ensure labor contracts are rigorously performed without compromise. In 2009, strictly following the Labor Contract Law of P.R. China and the Implementing Rules for Labor Contract Law of the P.R. China, we formulated a company policy “Labor and Personnel Management Improvement Policy” and further solidified the harmonious and stable labor relations by improving labor contract management practices, refining the work rules and regulations and ensuring full compliance with the same.

Sinopec strictly implements all national policies on social insurance and pays its contributions to endowment insurance, medical insurance, unemployment insurance, occupational injury insurance, maternity insurance and housing fund for the benefit of its employees in time. All Sinopec people are covered and all these contributions are paid exactly as required by the national laws and regulations.

In 2009, the workforce of the company totaled 1,037,000 people.

Create an enabling work environment where democracy, harmony and hard work matters

Democracy is one of our serious commitments to employees. Over the years, we planned and did everything in power to protect the democratic rights of employees and called into full play the role of employees in democratic management and supervision, in an effort to create a work environment where equality, democracy, hard work and harmony really matters.

We keep employees fully aware of the latest developments of the organization and involved employees in managing the company by various means such as workers’ congress, bulletin board and employee suggestion box, thus upholding employees’ right to information and enabling employees to exercise right of supervision. By making the employee engagement campaign a permanent arrangement, we continuously deepened communication with employees and made their voice heard, effectively safeguarding the employee rights and interests while ensuring harmonious business development.

Maintain a career path equally accessible and available to all employees

From the very first day of his or her employment with Sinopec, we shoulder the responsibility for his or her personal growth and professional development. By establishing scientific outlook on talent development, maintaining a career path equally accessible and available to all employees and building and completing a system for recruiting, cultivating, engaging and drawing together talents, we provide intellectual support and a desirable pool of talents for sustainable development of Sinopec. On the other side, employees continuously improve their competency and capabilities through training and field practice, making both intellectual and physical contributions to the development of Chinese oil and petrochemical industry.

An obstacle-free career path

We respect labor, knowledge, talents and creation and maintain a career path that is open to anyone capable. We regard talented employees as the primary driver behind the business development, always take a holistic and coordinated approach to talent development and business growth strategies, implement medium and long-term talent development plan and constantly solidify the fundamental and strategic role of human resources. We always believe that everyone can make a difference, pursuing comprehensive, scientific and efficient development and effective utilization of human resources.

Our guideline is to respect the individual characteristics of every employee and provide ample career opportunities to every employee, for the purpose of building and completing a career path for all employees. We set up high-level technical positions, such as chief expert and technologist, and formed three career cascades in the fields of management, technical expertise and technical operation. With these efforts, a unique career path system that is vertically obstacle-free and horizontally integrated has taken initial shape, which allows every employee to measure him or herself without restriction in the organization.

Choose the right people

In line with the strategic business objectives of the organization, we choose right people from both inside and outside and optimize the structure of our personnel. With the national talent introduction strategy set in motion, we built a green channel for foreign talents to join Sinopec, implemented Sinopec overseas talent introduction program, established dialogue with 22 foreign executives and brought in three technical experts from abroad. We also implemented talent development and succession program that places equal emphasis on talent introduction, development and cultivation. We brought in outstanding university graduates in support of the organization’s sustainable development.

Greater educational and training efforts across the board

Putting people first, tailoring training programs to employee training needs and formulating employee career development plans is an important part of our responsibility to employees. Over the years, we integrated education and training into every part of employee development process and conducted vocational (occupational) qualification training, on-the-job training, skills training programs and continued education encompassing professional ethics, employee code of conduct and corporate social responsibility in different categories and at different levels, in order to enable employees to grow both personally and professionally and become more aware of social responsibility. We focused employee empowerment efforts on workers along the production lines and in the field, conducted various activities including basic skills training, on-the-job training, technical innovation and QC workshops, and encouraged all employees to benefit from field practices. We periodically held skill contests, where a large number of participating technologists stood out. Sinopec won many awards at skill contests among state-owned enterprises over the past years.

Build and continuously improve staffing mechanism

We always believe that the purpose of talent development is to place the right talent in the right roles and only when employees are given the best possible career opportunities can the organization realize sustainable development. This is a win-win situation for the employees and the company.

We choose people who are aggressive, creative, hardworking and recognized in the field. We built and completed recruitment and appointment policy, performance appraisal procedure and incentives and disincentives, identified and promoted talents with outstanding capabilities and performance, thus greatly motivating employees to work and create. We established a comprehensive competition-based appointment mechanism following the principle of transparency, democracy, competition and meritocracy to ensure the right talents are placed in right roles. Through improvement of talent performance appraisal system, the qualified personnel was further motivated.

In 2009, facing the grievous impact of global financial crisis, Sinopec people worked as a team to maintain production and operations of the organization on the right track by improving management practices and expanding the market. All Sinopec people learnt lessons, and improved both personally and professionally from responding to the crisis. Experiences suggest that Sinopec people are a team strong enough to withstand any test and challenge and it is this team that fundamentally ensures the sustainable development of the organization.

Continuously improve talent retention system

We endeavor to retain and draw together right talents with competitive pay and incentives.

We provide effective incentives. By reforming the compensation system and readjusting in-house distribution relations, we explored and built a pay system corresponding to talent development path. Meanwhile, we made greater efforts to publicize the achievements of company-recognized experts and technologists, and conducted publicity campaigns to make employees more emotionally attached to the organization.

Put people first and make employees feel at home

Employee care and harmonious development is our permanent commitment. We always think what employees think and endeavor to make every of Sinopec people feel at home while at work.

Employee health and wellness

We always believe only when the living standard of employees continuously improves, results of business development are shared with all employees, every employee is taken good care of and an enabling and stimulating environment is maintained can employees rest assured and work with pleasure and in good health.

We always endeavor to make our employees feel at home and emotionally attached to the organization by feeling empathy with employees, integrating employee care seamlessly with counseling services, exploring effective counseling mechanism and conducting psychoanalysis for employees in order to keep employees truly happy at work.

Employee care means giving the top priority to employee health. The healthier the employees, the more prosperous the business and the more vigorous the wider society will be.

We worked to ensure employees feel that the best meal of a day is in the company’s canteen by providing a wide range of nutritious and appetizing meals. This is one of the areas where we honor our commitments to employee care and also the most practical and effective way to preserve employee wellness.

We do whatever we can to help those employees in need and provide them with peace of mind, both mentally and financially.

We built a multilevel assistance system consisting of temporary and long-term arrangements as well as everyday assistance and policy support, providing financial assistance to those employees in need with respect to daily life, medical treatment and tuition reimbursement. Throughout the year, 242,632 employees received financial assistance.

Take good care of retired employees

Retired employees dedicated most of their careers to Sinopec. We ensure that retired employees are sufficiently recognized for their contributions to the organization and live a better life. Meanwhile, we do everything in power to help them out of difficulties and problems encountered in daily life and continuously enrich their spiritual and cultural lives.

On the eve of the 60th National Day celebrations, we paid a visit to all Sinopec retired veteran cadres, veteran workers and Party members who experienced the war of liberation before the founding of new China. While bringing them warmth and care, we were all deeply moved by their dedicated, hardworking and indomitable spirit.

Care for overseas employees

As Sinopec goes global, growing attention is paid to overseas employees and their career development, daily life, health and wellness.

In 2009, to meet the need to implement the go-global strategy and expand overseas market, we established Overseas Human Resources Management Department to foster executives with international background and achieve coordinated development of overseas human resources. We recruit local employees and pursue global diversity and inclusion whenever possible. At the newly acquired Addax Oil Ltd., for example, only a few of Sinopec executives were appointed to the board, while the former management and technical specialists were all retained.

Personal safety of overseas employees is also one of issues of great concern to the company, especially in high-risk regions, where the company took every measure to ensure personal safety and health of local employees. In addition, we actively improved the living environment and conditions of overseas employees and tried every means to provide them with peace of mind.