For the ‘Best of the Best’ hired from top programs, this is no longer a company to plan a career with. If you are stuck with 20/30+ years under your belt, then maybe I can see why to try your luck to survive a few more years. But, for the top talent younger folks 5/10/15 yrs, it would be insanity to stay here for a miserable job year-after-year.
Here are my reasons, what are yours?
1-This industry has no growth ahead and maybe not even a long-term future. Energy change is going to sweep Europe and NA earlier than Exxon would like to admit.
Exxon is going to be the last one to change, and my bet is it will be too late by then driving Europe and NA asset prices into the ground. Will be forced to sell to lower cost operators / shutdown with employees part of sales / closures.
For employees, this means sword of layoffs over your heads year after year, miserable work environment with individual contributors taking the load of 2/3/4 lay-off positions while layers of management are not impacted, or at least stagnated salaries and no growth as compared to already stingy history of last few years.
2- Miserable Forced Ranking. Unless you are in the top-10% consistently, the forced ranking process works with all its might to sideline you sooner or later. This can be 5, 10 or 15 years from now but is inevitable. The magic happens as the ones ranked down gradually from year to year are left to work the less desirable jobs available, which further drives down their rankings, until you are working the most miserable jobs available in the last 10/20 years of your career. People around you know that and treat you like a 3rd class citizen, day-in and day-out. You may still be doing a perfectly fine job for your role, but in the “Relative Ranking” world of Exxon you are considered and treated worthless for your level of experience. Can you imagine waking-up with this miserable feeling every day for the last 10/20 Yrs of your career?
Unfortunately, lay offs and aggressive performance separations in the last year mean that this is even going to be worse going forward! Most are going to drop in future years to find the new bottom 5-8% every year to continue the cuts as the oil&gas business shrinks.
3- It is an understatement that the culture is toxic. Managers are trained to believe that pitting employees against each other is “healthy competition” and in their minds is the definition of driving performance. Ranking / Assessment system drives everything important for you including roles offered, salary, RSUs etc. But most importantly it drives how people behave, talk and treat you....every day!
Your colleagues are driven to be selfish with daily mindset to get ahead in the rat race.
Everyone is focused on getting material for their yearly assessment, which for Managers means steal / take credit of their workforce's accomplishments to maintain their own ranking, and blame every issue on the reporting employees to maintain their ranking.
4-Incompetent Leadership. This company’s current leadership is driving this company into the ground. Competency of this leadership is evident by:
- You have to be a buffoon to handle layoffs and employee separations in a way like our leaders, which has alienated even the top performers in younger age groups. Just please announce a percentage, and within a couple of weeks layoffs maybe the lowest ranked 15%?? Seriously, Singapore employees only told this week who is gone? And now the next assessment cycle starts for next year. How much more stress can you dump on the employees?
- The latest company management has dropped even the previous fake proclamation of caring for employees interests. The employee loyalty built over decades by previous leaders, has been destroyed mindlessly in 1-short year.
- Layers upon layers of managers still exist. Can our executive leaders not spend a day really reviewing all org charts and really making things efficient? No…..just layoff the individual contributors and dump all work on the few left. Then bombard them also with requirements for them to find efficiencies, spin wheels benchmarking, coordinating with offshore organizations with poor quality of work, etc. etc. etc.
- Worst of the worst business decisions, absolutely horrendous investments in Shale and Kearl, inability to buy any capacity at multiple opportunity cycles of rock bottom asset prices in the last 10-yrs, etc. etc. etc.