Rhonda Morris, Vice President and CHRO of Chevron Corporation, describes her 31-year career with the company as non-traditional and “portfolio-esque” in the sense that she’s held a number of non-HR roles that have included marketing, running a P&L and working outside the U.S. In this episode of People and Strategy, Morris joins host Mo Fathelbab to discuss topics including the development of strong corporate culture, bringing mental health support to the workplace, as well as how she has leveraged her lifelong love of handwritten letters to engage Chevron’s employees.
Rhonda Morris, Vice President and CHRO of Chevron Corporation, describes her 31-year career with the company as non-traditional and “portfolio-esque” in the sense that she’s held a number of non-HR roles that have included marketing, running a P&L and working outside the U.S. In this episode of People and Strategy, Morris joins host Mo Fathelbab to discuss topics including the development of strong corporate culture, bringing mental health support to the workplace, as well as how she has leveraged her lifelong love of handwritten letters to engage Chevron’s employees.
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Mo Fathelbab:
Welcome to today's episode of People and Strategy. I'm your host, Mo Fathelbab, president of Forum Resources Network an International Facilitators Organization. People and Strategy is a podcast from SHRM Executive Network, the premier network of executives and thought leaders in the field of human resources. People and Strategy is the podcast delivering in-depth conversations with HR executives and people leaders to advance the field of human resources by providing engagement, thought leadership to senior executives. In today's episode, I'm pleased to be joined by Rhonda Morris, Vice President and CHRO of Chevron Corporation. Rhonda has led a storied career at Chevron and served as Chevron CHRO since 2016. She's committed to creating an environment to ensure Chevron employees are equipped to solve the world's complex energy challenges, and at the same time, learn, grow, develop, give back in communities where Chevron operates. Rhonda, welcome to People and Strategy.
Rhonda Morris:
Mo, thank you for having me.
Mo Fathelbab:
A pleasure to be with you. So Rhonda, first I want to start with your journey. Can you take a couple of minutes and tell us about your incredible journey and your career?
Rhonda Morris:
Well, this is a question I have worked very hard to try to condense, so I'm going to start by apologizing in advance if my answer is long, but I'm working on making it shorter. I've worked for this company for over half of my life. I've been here quite a while. I will celebrate 31 years of service with Chevron this year, and all of it has not been in the HR function, and it's been a pretty non-traditional journey. I was not recruited on campus like most of our employees. I'm an experienced hire, but there's a story behind that.
I have not spent my whole career working in the HR function, and when younger employees ask me when I joined the company did I aspire to have the job I have right now, I always tell them, no. I have had a career that exemplifies why I think people stay at this company as long as they do, and that's, I've been able to have a portfolio career. And what I mean by portfolio career is working in the HR function, working in marketing, running a P&L, working outside the United States, working on acquisitions, working on divestitures, and it's just been fascinating and rewarding.
Mo Fathelbab:
Lovely, lovely, lovely. Well, corporate culture plays an important role in driving employee engagement and performance. I know that you're a big believer in the power of culture. What should HR departments be doing to build great culture in today's workplace?
Rhonda Morris:
Well, I learned a lot, and I think everybody learned a lot during the pandemic, but I learned during the pandemic, it reinforced, at least for me, the importance and the value and strength of having a strong corporate culture. And even though it's not necessarily officially in my job title, and even though our culture team reports in to me, I believe I am a steward and I think the HR function can be stewards of any company's culture, but you also have to understand what about your culture is strong and what are the things about your culture that you want to make better, because that allows you to understand what types of things you can and can't do to push your company to be even stronger. And examples of that that I would share would be a part of our culture that I wish we talked about more is what a great corporate citizen we are.
And you mentioned earlier that we give back in the communities where our employees live and where we have our operations. That is one of the main reasons I've stayed here. I used to say that Chevron was one of the greatest corporate citizens in the United States until I was in West Africa several years ago. And one of my colleagues told me, Chevron is one of the greatest corporate citizens in the world, and we're pretty humble about it. We encourage our employees to volunteer with nonprofit organizations. We have a huge focus on STEM education. We have a number of employees who are on boards of nonprofit organizations. I've been on nonprofit boards for probably 25 or more years, and it's supported by the company. I used to think that every company did this and I've learned that they don't. And these are areas where you can use them creatively for employees to learn, grow, and develop and build skills, and it's pretty non-traditional and pretty cool.
Mo Fathelbab:
That sounds cool indeed. So how is leadership development part of building a great culture? And what are some things that Chevron does that our leader listeners can learn from?
Rhonda Morris:
So we just had the twice-yearly meeting of our top 80 leaders in the company in Houston last week, and our CEO Mike Wirth, ever since he became CEO and he started stewarding these meetings he has ended every single meeting with the same phrase, and that is, "People follow leaders and leaders change outcomes". And I believe that that is true. This is probably why we work together so well. And we have with our leaders what we believe, and it's part of our people strategy, that we have to invest in leaders in our company, all of our leaders. We have 5,000 supervisors and investing in them comes in a number of different ways. All of them have access to coaching with BetterUp, for example. And we get huge feedback on the ability to have basically an executive coach dedicated to help you be a better leader and even a better employee.
And as I mentioned, we get a ton of positive feedback on that. We have a lot of internal programs that are stair-stepped as our leaders take on bigger and bigger and bigger roles. And we continue refining them to ensure that the skill development of our leaders fit and are aligned with the constantly changing workforce. So an example would be when I joined the company, I don't think any leadership development program in our company anywhere in the world with a topic of empathy come up or psychological safety. Yet right now, these are things that are top of mind and we are working with our supervisors to be more empathetic and to create more psychologically safe work environments.
Mo Fathelbab:
Well, those are topics that we've talked about at SHRM on many an occasion. And that leads me to the mental health topic, which is certainly a big topic in today's workplace. And SHRM just released a survey that showed that employees today are feeling extremely high levels of stress, burnout, disengagement. Can you elaborate on the specific strategies Chevron has implemented to support employees mental health and well-being?
Rhonda Morris:
I'd be happy to do that because I'm proud of what we do to support them mental health and well-being not just of our employees but also their families. We have had, and a lot of people are shocked when I share this fact, we've had mental health and substance abuse resources available to our employees for over 50 years. This is not new. Our company is over 140 years old, but we've had what we call our employee assistance program in place for half a century, and it is used frequently by our employees. I have used the resources from EAP and I'm very open telling our employees that I have done that. I continue to do that. So we have those resources available. And again, I mentioned that's not new. We've started serving our workforce more frequently. We've done employee surveys again for quite a while also, but we've moved to a more frequent cadence.
And there are questions about psychological safety. There are questions about burnout and fatigue and what we do with the survey data, we monitor whether or not the sentiment is going up or it's going down and it's shared at an aggregated corporate level. It's shared at a operating company level. It's shared at a business unit level. And we even ask our employees, there's a question about whether or not has the leader of your organization talked to you about these issues? Yes or no? So we can monitor whether or not the conversations about what data are we getting from the workforce, what sentiment are they sharing with us? And then that leads to what exactly are we doing about it? And I mentioned earlier we are trying desperately and hard to build the muscles of all of our leaders to manage a fatigued, tired, stressed out workforce because what's happening in the outside world has entered the workplace and we have to address it.
Mo Fathelbab:
I could only imagine. So what role do the managers at Chevron play in supporting employees' mental health?
Rhonda Morris:
So all of our managers understand what resources are available. I think it's become much more normal in the last several years for people to have open dialogues about our mental health resources that are available. I also believe leaders are doing a lot more with a simple question of how are you. And a long time ago, how are you, that question was a euphemism for hi, and now you ask someone how they are, it's highly likely they're going to tell you how they really are. And sometimes how they're doing, they're struggling. And so spending, I think it's important for leaders not to turn this back, turn how are you into euphemism for hi. But really to listen and to engage and to support the men and women that work for them.
Mo Fathelbab:
So that leads me to a big part of a strong workplace culture and for that matter, employees mental health is the level of civility among coworkers. And America's divided right now, as you could imagine with the election coming up. What does Chevron do to facilitate civil conversations in the workplace and to help employees build emotional intelligence?
Rhonda Morris:
So I believe we are very fortunate, and the reason I think we're fortunate is we've had employee networks, or in some places they're called employee resource groups. We've had them for over 20 years. And as part of that, we have a women's network, a black employee network, a veterans network. And those are just examples of, we have over a dozen employee networks, but we've been using the networks for many, many years to learn about people who have some attribute of their life that is different than yours. So anybody can join any network. There are all kinds of different programs, celebrations, etc. What I discovered after George Floyd was murdered in 2020 was the strong foundation that we had built to have difficult conversations. And it started with a partnership we had with the Catalyst organization, the nonprofit that's based out of New York City that's focused on the progression of women in the workplace.
We sponsored an initiative with Catalyst called Men Advocating Real Change. The acronym is MARC. And we would have these sessions with members of our women's employee network and male leaders and have conversations and dialogues about issues women face in the workplace. And these were not always comfortable conversations, but we'd been doing this, I don't know, maybe starting in 2016 or so. So there are several years of this, and we still have these dialogues right now. And we were shifting the discussion from MARC to what we called Elevate, which was a similar structured discussion about race. Well, when George Floyd was murdered, we were able, because we'd had this foundation we'd built with MARC to have an infrastructure to have conversations about race and racism in America. It doesn't mean the discussions weren't difficult or painful. It meant we had a mechanism in a manner to do this in a way that was civil. And so you can pivot and just change the topic because again, these weren't muscles we were building at the time. These were muscles that were already there that we were trying to make stronger. And we'll continue doing that.
Mo Fathelbab:
And do you mind sharing one or two of those tools that ensure a civil conversation?
Rhonda Morris:
I can share one that struck me the most. You'll have in some cases, we would do role playing, where in the role play, and it's not a real discussion, but you practice with someone with an audience, how do you have a discussion about what is it like to be a black employee at Chevron, for example, a black female employee at Chevron, and what your work experiences have been like? So what you're listening to is the lived experience of a person who is different than you are, which is not something that, you can't really tell someone their lived experience was wrong because it's what their lived experience was. You learn how to ask questions. So a lot of people don't want to have these conversations Mo because they're afraid of offending someone. But if you get to practice it makes it less difficult and it's taught us not to be as judgmental or punitive if someone does say something that bothers you for whatever reason.
Mo Fathelbab:
I think that really hits the nail on the head, what is your shared experience? We can't argue with that. I think too often we get caught up in opinions and rhetoric. So that is beautiful. I love that. I want to end on a lighter note. So you write a regular column on the back page of SHRM Executive Networks People and Strategy Magazine, and the column is called People and Life. And you wrote an interesting piece in the spring issue about how your lifelong love of handwritten letters led to a unique promise to Chevron's 40,000 employees. Can you tell us about that?
Rhonda Morris:
Yes. So I have written letters pretty much my entire life starting with my grandmother. I was the only one. My grandmother was a principal of a school in a small town in Louisiana, so I only saw her in the summertime when we would go visit. But she had beautiful handwriting, and I don't even know how it started, but starting when I was five, and she was about 65, I started writing to her, and I almost wish I had these. I cannot imagine what a five-year-old letter looks like. But I was writing them and she would write back to me and I cherish these letters that she wrote to me.
When I was in college I had friends who went to university in different parts of America, and I wrote letters back and forth with them, those letters I still have. And even with my daughter who just turned 21, my entire career from when she was an infant, I wrote letters to her, especially when I traveled and I wrote the letters to her when I was traveling outside of the United States, and I'd write about where I was, what I was working on, what her life was like.
And we actually haven't even opened all of these letters yet. Our agreement was we would open them when she was 18, but there are a lot of them, and it's very emotional for both of us in a good way. So we're still in the process. We want to make dedicated focused time to sit down and read them together. What happened with the workforce, and my husband told me this was one of the craziest ideas I ever had. I was sharing this with them, what it feels like to receive and to write a handwritten letter. I find it therapeutic and cathartic at times. And so last year I shared a message with our workforce that if they sent me a handwritten letter, I would write them back and I'm still responding. So that's all I'll say. But it was wonderful. It was wonderful. It still is a wonderful experience.
Mo Fathelbab:
What a lovely story. My wife lost her mother a few years ago, and as we were driving to the funeral, she had a whole lot of letters from her mother, and what a powerful and meaningful and emotional experience that was. And so I can completely resonate with what you've said, and I love how you've impacted so many people at Chevron with that. That is just delightful. Thank you.
Rhonda Morris:
I appreciate that. Thank you.
Mo Fathelbab:
Yeah. Well, Rhonda, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. We've really appreciated your perspective and thought leadership. So for those of you listening, you can follow People and Strategy podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, podcast reviews have a real impact on podcast visibility. So if you enjoyed today's podcast, leave a review to help others find the show. And finally, you can find all our episodes on our website at shrm.org/podcasts. Thank you again for listening, and have a great day.