How Valvoline’s CPO maintains company culture amid major transformation for the automotive services business

“You’ve changed.”

It’s not just a cliché you’ve heard in hundreds of coming-of-age films, when the protagonist’s bestie inevitably feels left behind on their journey. It’s also a sentiment in corporate America, among employees who feel their employers have transformed beyond recognition.

Companies are always changing, and maintaining what makes their organization unique is a challenge that’s attracted interest from the likes of HR leaders, researchers, CEOs, and more.

Valvoline, the automotive services chain, is familiar with change, and not just because it specializes in oil changes. Since selling its product business to Saudi Arabian petrol behemoth Aramco in 2023, and focusing on growing its remaining retail operations, it’s kept its attention on maintaining its corporate culture amid a period of significant change for its retail business.

Maintaining traditions. The Kentucky-based company’s 2023 split ignited significant restructuring upheaval at the company. Many executives and employees went with the products business, which accounted for more than half of its annual revenue stream.

According to Jon Caldwell, Valvoline’s chief people officer, the remaining business had to fill several C-suite positions, while some executives retained their roles, including himself. Around one-third of top positions were filled internally, and another third were filled externally, Caldwell said. This upset employees, some of whom quit, Lori Flees, Valvoline’s chief executive, shared at a 2024 Fortune conference.

Caldwell, in an interview with HR Brew, said the company’s leadership tried to manage worker unrest by focusing on communication. He said Flees established and communicated the company’s three-pronged business strategy for employees: strengthening the core business, accelerating network growth, and preparing for the future.

“Sometimes when people have those moments of uncertainty, and you get new leaders that come on board, you’re just looking for foundation again,” Caldwell said, adding that employees want clarity on the company’s vision during a period of upheaval. “One [priority] was setting that clear vision, and the other was communicating around what wasn’t changing”—core values and many traditions, including referring to the workforce as “Vamily,” a term he said came up organically, and hosting its annual “Oilympics.”

Each spring for the past 25+ years, Valvoline’s Oilympics has challenged teams in the US and Canada to compete for the distinction of quickest oil changing service. It serves as a way to re-train employees on Valvoline’s specific processes—which judges look for during the competition—and is also a way to identify top talent for development. Employees on winning teams are often promoted to service center managers, or even regional or market leaders, Caldwell said.

“Traditions like that matter,” he said. “Those sorts of things that have been in place for a while help you maintain that culture, even though we’re growing and adding team members every year, and like any retailer, we’ve got turnover.”

Managing growth. Valvoline currently has 2,100 locations with plans to grow to 3,500 by 2030. But Caldwell told HR Brew the company also wants to maintain, what he considers, a strong sense of culture through this growth. Valvoline hopes to do that in large part by focusing on its approach to developing talent.

“A key aspect and enabler of that growth is our people and our culture,” Caldwell said.

One critical aspect of maintaining culture through growth is through Valvoline’s development of people leaders. Of the 11,000 employees who work in its retail locations, roughly 1,200 are frontline managers. The majority (95%) started as technicians.

“We offer not only a great job, but, I think, a great career in that you can come in and start as a technician, and very feasibly, within a couple of years, step into a role, be as a service center manager, and then even move up beyond that,” Caldwell said. That helps maintain Valvoline’s culture amid expansion because there’s a focus on constantly developing the next generation of leaders.

While Valvoline has some formal training programs for supervisors, including first-time and tenured managers, Caldwell said many of the most critical lessons for rising talent are learned simply by being on the job. Much of that comes from trusting each manager’s own individual approach to developing their employees.

“HR practitioners can say all the right things, do all the right things, have all the right programs and formal learning in place, and those are necessary and helpful. But I’ve been doing this now for 26 years, and I’ve just come to realize the value of the people leader,” Caldwell said. “If that people manager believes in developing talent and investing time and ensuring we’ve got the right internal mobility, and they’re growing the careers of their team, it will happen whether or not you have the right formal learning programs in place.”