Investing in our employees

At Devon, we listen to our employees. We value our people and invest in their success. Devon focuses on providing personally and professionally fulfilling careers, meaningful benefits and compensation, and a sense of belonging and inclusion. Our workforce is central to and drives our long-term success. We are at our best when all employees are heard, valued and included.

Employee-focused learning opportunities

One of our values is to keep learning and challenging ourselves and each other to be the best and deliver results. In recent years, our employee development was focused on coaching, mentoring and ongoing conversations to help employees focus on what they need to do to make an impact every day.

To build upon these actions and incorporate feedback from employees, in 2022 we refreshed our professional and leadership learning strategy, and corresponding offerings. Feedback was gathered through two all-employee pulse surveys and a learning needs assessment with a representative group of leaders and employees.

Our refreshed strategy directly responds to employees’ desire to develop a variety of professional, technical and leadership development skills, and different ways to develop them. Devon’s learning ecosystem provides individualized learning paths that balance learners’ needs with the company’s business priorities. For effective learning, it provides externally supported content and facilitation. Devon leaders support learning with coaching, feedback and on-the-job application.

Devon’s learning and development approach allows employees to develop a variety of skills through different ways of learning

Partnering with Harvard Corporate Learning, Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma, our development opportunities are focused on:

  • Leadership training to build and reinforce fundamental leadership skills at the front line and mid-level, and inclusive leadership awareness and skills.
  • Professional training to build business and financial acumen and technology skills.
  • Executive coaching with specific development objectives for improving individual and organizational performance.
  • Employee and 360-degree feedback to equip leaders to interpret and take action on feedback.

A key component of the ecosystem is the Learner’s Network, which supports employees’ two most preferred ways to learn: in-person, instructor-led delivery and one-on-one conversations with peers. Learning and development specialists and technical subject matter experts in the network assess and meet employees’ ongoing variety of learning needs related to technology, engineering, business analysis, environmental, health and safety (EHS) and other skills.

Listening to employees and acting on their feedback

Devon surveys our employees periodically to understand their work experiences and continuously improve how we support team performance. In a survey conducted in early 2023, 84% of our employees responded to questions on engagement, culture, career development, inclusion and diversity, psychological safety and work/life balance.

Overall employee engagement was 82%, seven points higher than the global benchmark. Employees gave the highest scores to leadership commitment to building an inclusive workplace, their understanding of our priorities and how they can help their teams, and confidence in receiving mental health support. The lowest scores related to career advancement.

We take this feedback seriously and provide dashboards to help team leaders review, share and act on team-specific findings. Our human resources group is also reviewing the results to identify companywide trends and opportunities for improvement. We plan to survey employees in fall 2023 to compare results on baseline items, gauge our progress and keep enhancing the team experience at Devon.

Meaningful compensation, benefits and work practices

We value employees who are open and honest, take ownership and contribute to our company objectives. To cultivate a workforce with these qualities, we start with offering equal opportunity in all aspects of employment and providing competitive compensation and benefits.

Devon offers equitable pay. Salaries of female and minority employees are, on average, positioned equivalently (+/-2% relative to the applicable pay grade) to those of male and non-minority peers. All Devon employees make more than $19 an hour. We encourage a sharp focus on results by giving every employee an equity stake in our business through annual stock awards and the opportunity to receive an annual cash bonus based on meeting corporate goals. We measure our performance, benchmark against our industry and look for ways to further align our compensation practices with our aspirations.

In 2022, with record-high inflation, we took steps to ease the financial strain facing many of our employees and their families. Halfway through the year, Devon increased salaries 2% for all employees below the vice president level and offered a medical premium holiday through 2023.

Devon takes a values-driven approach to meeting both the company’s business objectives and employees’ personal and family needs. Our comprehensive benefits include wellness programs and an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) that provides confidential support on a wide variety of issues to employees and their family members. We offer flexible work schedules, an alternate work schedule (9/80), part-time work, telecommuting and parental paid leave. In 2022, we enhanced our practices by updating our paid time off policy to help ensure our employees take the time to care for themselves and others in their lives. We added four weeks to our Paid Family & Medical Leave (PFML) Policy, for a total of up to 26 weeks of paid medical leave, for an employee’s own medically certified health condition and eight weeks of paid maternity leave for the birth of a child. In addition, under PFML, employees are eligible for up to a maximum of 160 hours of paid leave each calendar year for parental leave (including adoption and long-term foster care placement), leave for care of family, bereavement leave and compassion leave. We’ll continue to adjust our practices and policies as needed to care for employee needs.

Employee wellness

Devon believes in supporting the well-being of our employees, who balance multiple roles and responsibilities in their personal lives, while delivering results for the company. We consider these expectations when developing programs that can meaningfully improve our employees’ physical, mental and financial well-being.

Since establishing our wellness program in 2012, Devon has focused on prevention, convenient tools and high-quality programs. This has contributed to strong productivity and engagement, low absenteeism and high retention rates. Additionally, employee participation in wellness programs has been the driver in holding the company’s health care cost inflation well below the national average.

Employees tell us that our offerings help them improve their health and make healthy lifestyle changes. This is why we’ve maintained the most effective core programs, even during years when we cut costs across the company.

Tools and strategies for financial wellness

Concerns about debt, retirement and other personal finance issues can affect an employee’s sense of well-being. Our financial wellness program offers confidential and unbiased financial guidance and resources at no cost to employees. These include third-party financial assessments and webbased workshops. Employees can also meet one-on-one with a third-party financial expert once a quarter. By keeping employees informed about the importance of retirement savings, Devon has reached the top of our industry for 401(k) retirement contributions (99.4% of employees participate) and the percentage of paycheck contributions (6.5% of paycheck contributed).