We keep hearing about high attrition with no desire from EM to stop the flood of folks leaving. Seems like they positively want attrition.
EM will only do something when; it’s impacts the bottom line. Have anyone seen where we have had to lay down rigs or not been able to operate a plant due to the low numbers of people. Keep hearing about Baton Rouge being impacted but nothing more. If no impact on bottom line, EM won’t care.
As long as it doesn’t hurt Senior Leaders, it doesn’t matter. Pain points at plants and projects will be eased by contractors.
This is part of the EM plan - Mgmt doesn’t want the attrition to stop - they need to lower headcount to < 50k. Keep it up.
But everything must be ok since the company can afford more advisor and other PowerPoint engineering roles in Technology!! Just take a look at the org charts!
Nobody is hurting. DW knows best :-(
It’s a downwards spiral; a high percentage of NSI after years of layoffs; a flood of retirements coming; and expect more attrition… this will just heap more cr-p onto everyone else..eventually something will break or people will leave. Downwards spiral here we come.
As someone who left recently, I don’t think management can stop it. At the margins there are certainly some who would stay for more $$, a different role, etc.
But many are leaving because the energy transition is in full swing, jobs for engineers, IT, and everyone else really are abundant. And if you’re more than a few years out from retirement, it’s a lot more appealing to work for a company with a credible energy transition plan than a traditional O&G.
Management can’t stop that, the same way coal execs couldn’t stop the exodus from that industry that started 10-15 years ago.
Management wants attrition in HC10. Hiring lower cost workers in India. The plan is working! P.S. If they didn't want attrition they could stop it. The fact that they haven't done anything speaks volumes.
In Beaumont there have been so many people quitting they are bringing in annuitants and contractors to backfill engineers, while we scramble to hire and onboard an army of new hires. No we have not shutdown the refinery… true… but it’s hurting OPEX and we now focus on just keeping the plant running, no profitability improve items etc.
Exxon will be able to pull their retention levers when they feel the time is right
Paraphrasing the old adage, “learn from history, don’t repeat it”, the attrition is causing us to have to solve the same problems over again because all the experience is walking out the door. And since all documentation the past 2 decades is all PowerPoint presentations, there is nothing useful to prevent us from doing it all over again. Extremely costly and wasteful.
@aqa is correct. Senior engineers at the plants spend even more of their time fighting fires. The younger folks who should be getting ready to step up into those senior roles keep quitting and going into stuff like consulting. Then the even more senior folks in EMRE/EMREC/Technology are retiring, creating a pretty tough squeeze on those in the middle soon.
Yes, money is being lost due to mistakes.
Time of more experienced folks is also being lost, as they try to head-off others mistakes.
It is a really sad situation.
Early last year the question came down from MGMT, "What are we not able to do because of attrition?" (Mind you this was a while ago when attrition wasn't as bad as it is now.
My response was, "You are asking the wrong question. You should be asking what we will not be able to do 2-10 years down the road because of the quality experienced people and young talent that are leaving".
On the Operation side it is a grey area. The question is, "how much money is being left on the table due to lack of knowledgeable staff?". I have visibility over 600+ kbpd and I'll say it's substantial. Too few knowledgeable people stretched way too thin. The spin doctors will never let that message escalate since it would be politically incorrect.
On the EMIT side, you’re seeing some increased reliability issues and A LOT of projects either not being able to be staffed or that run longer than expected. Reliability is what most people track, which makes sense. It’s also the last thing to be affected, since people will drop their project work to fix issues. It also takes some time for the reliability to really go down hill, you have to get 1-2 upgrades into it for when you start to see problems with inexperienced/depleted teams handling things. But where you can see the effects now are projects. So many projects the business wants that we can’t staff (which is someone good, because damn does the business have some just stupid ideas). A lot of audits and security work is also not getting done as well as they should. More exceptions being asked for due to it not being feasible to have someone implement the fix because it will take too long. When before that was not an acceptable answer in most cases. If you want a prime example of a project that flopped because of staffing issues (and also massive issues with the budget, thanks business for requiring we migrate and then giving us no money) look at ServiceNow. There were so many things that got slashed from the project because of lack of resources, so many teams that migrated the bare minimum in a clunky way because they didn’t have capacity. It was dogshit. I’ve seen other companies implement service now before, it went smoothly and actually was a good tool to use.