Veolia’s VP of Operations shares his experience working with millennials in the energy industry at Calgary Operational Excellence Summit.

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Everyone seems to have an opinion about the millennial generation – positive, negative, or otherwise. Regardless, it is difficult to deny that this blossoming generation grew up in a very different environment than preceding generations. These differences invariably lead to different perspectives, priorities, and practices.

As leaders working in the energy sectors, it is imperative to understand, embrace and leverage these differences to maximize your company’s performance

Matt DiGeronimo, Vice President of Operations at Veolia, will be joining the list of 40+ keynote speakers at the upcoming Operational Excellence in Energy, Chemicals & Resources Summit, taking place in Calgary this June 4-6.

Matt will discuss how to understand, embrace, and leverage the differences with the millennial generation and present suggestions for leading this generation to operational excellence and maximize performance.

Ahead of the conference, our colleagues at IQPC caught up with Matt who shared his experience working with millennials in the military and energy industries and gave an insight into how Veolia is retaining and motivating its millennial employees.

Matt, tell us about your professional background leading up to your current role:

I joined the United States Navy Nuclear Submarine Program after completing a degree in nuclear engineering and deciding I didn’t want to be an engineer. What I thought might be a few years of useful excitement turned in to a 20 year career operating nuclear submarines and in the military. After retiring from the navy I spent 2 years launching and running a mergers and acquisitions firm before getting back into operations in a technical field. I was really drawn to Veolia’s mission as an environmental services company and its willingness to look at energy differently and embrace renewable and green sources of energy. I have since become the VP of operations where I oversee the operation of 15 power plants in central North America.

What are the main challenges in overseeing 15 different plants?

In managing managers who are remotely located it is not really a team. While each general manager reports to me, their mission is to run their plant so it’s not a team with one goal. Therefore, creating a mission and a sense of collaborative work is the most challenging thing that I’m trying to tackle presently.

How are you trying to tackle that?

There are two things that I’m trying to do. One is developing standards so that if I go to Kansas City and watch a particular operation, it will be done in a very similar fashion to what is in Chicago. This requires standardizing processes, which takes best practices from sites and shares them with the other regions. The other side is being more proactive about sharing lessons learned. When a site has an unplanned outage or near miss we are very good at conducting a root cause analysis, but that is usually where it ends. What I’ve been trying to do is bring in people from different regions in the RCA process in hope that they’ll learn and share these learnings.

Read the full interview here >> http://bit.ly/2Hgn9vH

Matt DiGeronimo will be speaking more about leading millennials to operational excellence at the upcoming Operational Excellence in Energy, Chemicals & Resources Summit taking place in Calgary this June 4-6, 2018.

Join Matt and 250+ industry leaders from ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, SaskPower, Enbridge, Energy Safety Canada, Toronto Hydro, Cameron LNG, Suncor, Irving Oil and many more, to learn the latest techniques and tools to increase efficiency and optimize productivity – without compromising reliability, safety, and compliance.

Download the 2018 agenda to see the full event line-up >> http://bit.ly/2qr8Niu

Energy Now subscribers are entitled to receive a 15% discount* on their conference pass. Simply quote discount code ENERGYNOW15 when registering online >> http://bit.ly/2H7h816