Our shore personnel
Today, shipping is a modern, highly technical, professional discipline that requires a great deal of skill, knowledge and expertise from the workforce both on board and ashore.
Stronger together!
Dedication, expertise and hard-work have characterised our employee's efforts both on board vessels and ashore in 2020. Gearbulk shore staff has put in long hours to keep the wheels turning and have adapted to new ways of working impressively fast.
As an international company, Gearbulk provides several opportunities for growth and collaboration between colleagues across the organisation and with our business partners. Diversity is a natural part of our business, and during 2020 the work force consisted of 18 different nationalities, 30% females and 70% males with an average age of 41 years.
We firmly believe that no person in Gearbulk should be discriminated against based on ethnic background, religion, age, gender or sexual orientation.
Recruitment & Promotions
Gearbulk’s retention rate in 2020 was 93.75% ; 13 new employees were hired and 3 were promoted. All new employees undergo an extensive onboarding program where they are introduced to the Gearbulk organisation, the Heads of departments, their job role and meeting up with peers.
Shore Training
Gearbulk continued to invest in shore training in 2020. Several different initiatives and training sessions were conducted during the year which included identification of training needs, creation of training material, development of learning platforms and implementation of the training. Key highlights are found below.
Covid-19 Remote Leadership Training
The Covid-19 pandemic forced the majority of our employees and managers to work from home since early March 2020. This led to new challenges for line managers as it was necessary to find to alternative ways to keep employees engaged while at home.
To assist managers with this challenge, in April all Line Managers received training on how to manage their team in a remote setting. The training focused on how and how often line managers should be in contact with their employees and how to maintain their health and well-being while working from home.
Annual Performance Cycle Training
Despite the pandemic, Gearbulk continued to focus on building a performance culture.
All line managers and employees were offered training on how to set high quality objectives and personal development goals and how to run effective mid-year and end-year reviews.
Safety Leadership Training
We believe good role modelling is essential in building a good safety culture and that good leadership features are the same both at sea and shore. It is therefore mandatory also for all Shore Line Managers to complete the same 1.5 day Safety Leadership course as our senior officers on the vessels.
Gearbulk ran two Safety Leadership training sessions for shore staff in 2020 where also Line Managers from G2 Ocean based Rio de Janeiro attended.
Innovation Training for Bergen-based employees
In late November all Bergen-based employees had the opportunity to join seven different virtual innovation workshops together with G2 Ocean and Grieg Star. The sessions were facilitated by the Danish company DareDisrupt. The workshops introduced the participants to innovation in shipping and what each individual could do to help drive innovation in their field of expertise. The training was also an excellent opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with our partners in G2 Ocean and Grieg Star.
Global G-Talks
In an effort to bring the organisation closer together, increase knowledge sharing and promote collaboration a new global initiative called G-Talks was launched in 2019.
G-Talks are Gearbulk's version of TedTalks, and are short insightful sessions which are hosted virtually across the organisation on a monthly basis to share knowledge and ideas.
These sessions continued in 2020 and covered a variety of topics from the importance of health and well-being during Covid-19 and proper nutrition to business priorities, main challenges and future opportunities within different areas of the business.
Health & Well-being Campaign
Since the pandemic led to extensive use of home office for our shore organisation, we decided to run a global health and well-being campaign for our shore staff before the summer lasting four weeks.
The intention of the campaign was to avoid a sedentary lifestyle and poor eating habits when working from home and hopefully change habits for the better.
Staff were encouraged to increase daily activity by doing the well-established and researched “7 minute workout”, similar to what our crew were encouraged to do in the sea campaign.
Personnel Handbook
In order to strengthen our Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and to be aligned with today's standards, HR started in early 2020 to review and update global and local personnel policies and procedures. As the Covid-19 pandemic continued to unfold, new local temporary and permanent policies were established in order to take good care of our employees when working from home.
Competence Matrix
The Competence Matrix for Shore employees and line managers was updated during 2020 to include all mandatory and recommended training for all shore staff. This was done in close collaboration with all Heads of Departments and the HSEQ department.
The new updated version will help to increase knowledge and compliance with regards to business ethics (including antitrust and anti-bribery), maritime laws and regulations, vessels safety, cyber security and human factors (how to build good working relations and anti-bulling and discrimination awareness).
In order to strengthen our focus on ship safety, additional training requirements were also added as mandatory before visiting a vessel for the first time or longer than five years since last visit.
