We know that our business succeeds when our people succeed. Our employees and contractors provide their talents and time to deliver our products and services while keeping one another, our communities, and our environment safe. We seek to serve the communities in which we operate through our presence, working to understand and address community concerns, and investing in community needs.
We provide competitive compensation packages, including base pay, merit increases, annual bonus programs, and incentive-based awards. We also offer comprehensive benefits to employees working more than 20 hours per week. View the wide range of programs to help foster work-life balance and support working families on our Benefits page.
Our industry relies on the diligent, important work of third-party contractors and suppliers. We manage these relationships carefully to help ensure they align with WES’s vision of being a best-in-class midstream operator. We primarily utilize contract workers for the design and construction of new infrastructure, although our contractors remain essential partners throughout the operational lifecycle.
Before beginning work on our sites, our HSE&S, Risk, Legal, and Operations teams undertake holistic, coordinated reviews of new contractors to help them meet our standards, and we require contractors to participate in a pre-qualification alignment process to help ensure they understand and can meet our expectations.
Our Partner Code of Conduct provides our partners, suppliers, vendors, and contractors with guidance on the ethical practices and ESG and HSE&S standards we expect from those working with us. The Partner Code of Conduct addresses minimum living wages, maximum working hours, and non-discrimination.
We grant contractors the same stop-work authority as our employees, and they are protected by our no-retaliation policy when reporting incidents or concerns.
Developing and maintaining productive relationships with local community members is important to our success as an organization and our ability to deliver value for all our stakeholders. We focus on building relationships and earning trust by conducting our business responsibly and engaging proactively and regularly with community members when executing projects that have the potential to affect them.
We aim to build strong, long-term, and mutually beneficial relationships with Native American tribes in the areas where we operate. We believe in creating economic and social opportunities for tribes while recognizing and respecting the importance of tribal history and culture. We jointly own the Chipeta Processing Complex, a gas processing complex, with the Ute Tribe in Utah. In other states, we consult with the Federally Recognized Tribes on Federal and Tribal lands as part of our project planning and operations processes.
Employees value the flexibility and individualization of our community investment program, which allows them to focus their volunteer efforts on the concerns most important to them. Overseen by our Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, along with our Community Investment Manager, the development of our social investment strategy and volunteer efforts is supported by employee-led focus groups in each of our locations, who are charged with selecting local nonprofit partners to support.
We’ve also established two employee incentive programs – the Volunteer Rewards Program and Company Matching Program – that provide matching funds to nonprofit organizations that benefit from our employees’ generosity.