Transmit Your Values Assignment: Where We Make a Diffrence

 Where We Make a Difference!

Saudi Aramco has a proud legacy of corporate citizenship dating back to its inception in 1933. For more than 79 years, the company has been at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s development and continues to play a leading role in creating sustainable social and economic opportunities for the Kingdom’s citizens.

Beyond its commitment to be the world’s most reliable supplier of petroleum is another, equally important to be socially responsible wherever we do business.

This commitment is evident in its vision of citizenship where it aspires “to be influencer leader in creating sustainable social and economic opportunities for the welfare of the Kingdom and any other location where it has operations”.

Our company has been very well-recognized since the early days of the Kingdom for contributing to the development of the nation. This is a very important part of the Company’s history, and something we are very proud of.

We all remember the early contributions of the company to the development of the kingdom infrastructurewhich we have focused on addressing the basic needs of the community such providing water and electricity, improving basic health hygiene, building schools, and introducing the urban planning.

The story of eradicating diseases like malaria and trachoma is quite a compelling one, in which the company pledged to a 15-years research with Harvard to develop a cure to these two pandemics just to protect the health of its employees and their communities.

Not only that it did, it has also dedicated a team of environmental health inspectors, local health promotion representatives and toured eastern province cities and remote villages to educate people and promote health hygiene.

Behind this commitment of stewardship is a continuous strive to excellence by the Company and its people … it was for those who have made an extraordinary use of their time, talent, and energy just to make a difference.

There are hundreds of stories of success driven by a deep-rooted sense of commitment and a genuine aspiration to excellence … a commitment that is made by ordinary people like me and you; front- liners, managers and executives who are determined to make a difference and always aim higher.

Most recently, Saudi Aramco has been undergoing a remarkable up-scaling in how it practices citizenship. As we live in exponential time transitioning to the 21st Century and toward a knowledge-based economy. As such, the Company’s citizenship contributions have evolved toward developing institutions that help the Kingdom transform into the knowledge age. Examples include, the establishment of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the gift of King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture and our CEO’s,Mr. Khalid Al-Falih, sponsorship of iTHRA Youth -ayouth enrichment program that aspire to spark 2 million young Saudis by 2020 and encourage young people to create a bright future.

Our value of Excellence where we drive for best results, and are agile in addressing new challenges as well as our commitment for stewardship and corporate citizenship are part of our proud legacy … and help lead us to a bright future…   where we bring to our community and the world the best the company can offer.. making a deference.

Team Performance Assessment

Team Performance Assessment

I don’t think that implanting model #4 is a good decision to make for following reasons:

Firstly, it is mainly applicable to “blue collar” organizations where more visible, product-oriented outcomes are available to measure organizational performance. It is also better fitted within interdependent work environment where the collective effort of employees contributes to the creation of the final product/service.

“People may take a job for more money, but they often leave it for more recognition.” Bob Nelson

 Secondly, it completely eliminates individual recognition and consider at completion as a negative aspect of working environment - a notion that I tend to disagree with; sometimes competition leads to increase self-confidence and productivity levels – Acknowledgment and reward for individual contribution is important and sometime part of tradition cultures that promote individualism.

Thirdly, the implementation of the Model#4 approach can take significant initial preparation of employees to fully grasp the essence of its philosophy. The cost associated with the need for training people on certain required techniques and development of productivity measures is high. Applying this model may also entail changing personnel systems such appraisal, promotion, disciplinary, etc…        

Finally, in some cases Model#4 conflicts with certain legal/ governmental requirements for performance appraisals and dealing with unacceptable performance.

  

Assignments Related to Teamwork - Part1: How to Make Teams Work Together Effectively

• How would you characterize work teams that currently exist at the organization in study? Specifically, what makes them highly functional?
  
  
• This is a quite large company and there different types of teams with different levels of authority, power and responsibilities. Generally speaking, this company is well known for its ability to deliver on high profile projects that by virtue involves teams- for great part of it, careful selection of team members (right configuration of experts and skills) and clarity about what they have committed to are among the reasons behind the high functionality of teams within this organization.
  
• How have you dealt with dysfunctional teams at organization in study ?
  
• First thing is to identify and understand the root cause for such dysfunctionality for instance,  stepping in when there are unresolved discussions and trying to show commitment toward certain common goal is one way , that I would follow, to deal with dysfunctional team.
  
•  How do you keep teams focused and moving towards common goals?
  
• Focusing on what we can do rather than what we cannot;
• Allocated the right amounts of time to the important topics.
  
• Does the organization in study have a strategy for having “Courageous conversations"? In other words, how does it facilitate employees’ abilities to broach difficult topics and talk about them within teams and how effective is it?
  
• Most of the leaders in this organization are well coached on how to have non-emotional courageous conversation. Some people take it personally, but the common good of the Company is what matters actually. I think it is very effective way to handle the” elephant in the room”.
  
• Respond to at least two of your team member's blog posts.

Refer to my comments on below blogs:

http://otbader.wordpress.com/

http://mromaihi.tumblr.com/

Let’s Talk CSR .. Experimenting with Blogging for MSU AP&CC Program

I’m a public relations representative with BA degree in Translations in the Fields of English Language. Works for Saudi Aramco ( Oil & Gas industry).  This blog is actually my first attempt to get into the blogosphere (never browse one... let alone being a blogger!) To be frank about it – this is part of a certification program that I’m doing in Advance Public Relations & Communication by MSU. So, I’m kind of "forced" to do it in order to pass! On the other hand, I have tried to take more of a positive approach when crating this blog. Well,   SCR is my passion and PR is my profession and I have always found it interesting to try to identify similarities and differences between these two disciplines. So let’s all have a CSR talk where we share and discuss CSR topics and link them to PR & Communication, at least until I finish my MSU program in 16 weeks from now ;-) By the way, this task is supposed to provide me with a better understanding of different types of writing styles (writing for traditional media vs. social media) and hopefully will eventually help me in developing better corporate messaging and storytelling techniques.