Thread regarding Chevron Corp. layoffs

Whatever. I'm just waiting for the next package. I was counting on getting out of this nut house by the end of the year, but looks like the Hess thing is going to keep us in limbo for a while. Oh, well. That just means I can drink more coffee, take long lunches, and attend meaningless meetings for another year, probably.

@4hbj nailed it. I also used to be a company man who had a positive attitude towards Chevron. But my attitude has completely soured after a decade of worthless reorgs and expensive, time-consuming, counter-productive initiatives. I am totally fine working from the office. I am well paid so I will work wherever I am told to work. But spending money to convert functional, private offices to cube farms that will further reduce already low morale is a perfect illustration of how mo--nic management has become. Only a bunch of blithering id--ts would think this is a good idea.

@5gqw+1sDQhw94
Amen! So many examples of complete and total wastes of money & resources

Do you remember the millions spent on remote meeting rooms with fancy equipment to make remote parties “feel” like they are in the same room? Set up all over the building and largely unused because the equipment never really worked and was not maintained. What about the huge data caves with 3D monitors that it were used for a few executive gee wiz meeting and then forgotten? What about the previous generation of high wall cube farms in HOU150 unafectionally call gopher parks (because every time there was a noise all the heads would popup above the barrier). Who thinks up this cr-p? All we need is enough workstations with big monitors for everyday work and enough meeting rooms so that they are not always so overbooked that you can never extend a meeting 15 min to resolve the issue at hand. While we are at it let’s reduce those safety and culture “moments” to like a minute, so that we can move on to discuss the real issues of meetings and then get some real work done.

@4xpc+1sDQhw94: I was not always combative like this. I used to be supportive of our initiatives and believed that leadership made mostly sound decisions. However, after years of utterly ridiculous consultant-driven strategies and flavor of the month changes that adversely affected our workforce morale and working environment, I am not playing along anymore just because it’s expected. If what leadership approves is nonsense, we have a right and a duty, I might argue, to speak up. Otherwise we are just little sheep going along with whatever garbage they toss our way.

@4vma, Agree, but on the other hand, would that be any different than what people think of you and always have when you show up now?

@4mlh+1sDQhw94: You have hit it on the nail. But they don’t know how stubborn I can be. I am not letting go of my hard-earned pension that accelerates the most in the years right before retirement. If they want to get rid of us old timers, it will take more than a miserable work environment, and don’t forget that I can show up to work and be a complete a$$h0l3 to hinder whatever delusional collaboration they are forcing down our throats. Two can play at this game. 🤷🏽‍♂️

I am sure there are some positions, like maybe IT support and office staff, who can happily work on little laptops, but many petrotech jobs require 2 to 4 large monitors to get the work done. If you set up appropriate workstation cubes what keeps other worker from occupying these spaces just because they like to build their PowerPoints on big monitors. The problem with “office design” folks is that they reduce everything to some standard “average” worker without much consideration of folks with jobs that require more resources.

Eventually everyone will realize the Houston Modernization Project is a demoralization exercise. It has nothing to do with cost savings or collaboration. If it was about saving money, they wouldn’t have hired the most expensive designer and waste all that money on tacky furniture. If they really wanted people to collaborate more then they wouldn’t mix everybody up, making it impossible to predict where people will be.

HMP is designed to demoralize and demotivate workers. The older generation will get so flustered with the deracination that they’ll quit earlier than planned. No severance needed. The psg 24-26 log jam will clear itself out.

FYI @2qai+1sDQhw94
BA and Manila hot desk between day/night shift and with IT/Finance. Each function is in the office half the week.

@1ijy If it was up to the bootlickers, then those of us in the office would only have to work half a year. I would be down with that. They don't see the hypocrisy in their stupid posts.

@1qqf Wait until you here that a significant portion of our employees only work half a year. You're going to flip out.

@1qds I'm in my office from 6:00 AM until 7:30 AM when I go to a meeting that lasts until 8:00 AM. I get back to "my office" and some slack a$$ that just showed up took it over.

Yeah, he gone catch these hands.

You can always find a quiet spot on another floor. This is small potatoes.

It comes down to where folks feel their main office is, where they store their technological reference materials, where they keep their important work documents, and where they focus their primary work efforts. If Chevron wants us to all act like independent consultants who happen to do work for Chevron, then yes only provide touchdown office space for when we are working for our “primary client.” If they want us to feel like Chevron employees, with our focus centered on Chevron workplace enhancement, then it is in her best interests to give us real offices. Such mixed messages: It is key that you spend more time in the office to foster employee interactions, but there is no need for you to maintain an office here…WTF?

Some manager somewhere is looking at the cube farms in BA and Manila and saying to herself, "Why can't we do this here?"

I use hot desk all the time at a consulting office. About 30 desks in a large room. It's not a big deal except when it gets busy and Some People think it's okay to have a noisy phone call everyone in the room can hear. Then it's time for the headphones.

1qql: You are not considering basic human nature in your assessment of office usage. Sure, in some idealistic cyborg world, when I get up from my desk to eat lunch it would be more efficient if my office became available for someone else to use. In reality, however, I would need to pack up all my stuff, clean up a bit for the next user (assuming I not the a$$hole), and then unpack everything and take time to settle in after lunch. I can easily imagine this effort shaving an extra hour of my work time per day. Considering Chevron pays me about a half million a year (with all benefits and extras all in), does it really make good business sense to focus on minimizing empty office space, rather than maximizing employee effort?

Looks like the boot lickers are out in force. If you have a field job and want to work in the office since it's cushy then go get an education or move to a different field. Supporting management over employees is insane. If it was up to you all we would live at the office working 24/7. Get out of th3 1800s mindset.

Check out the trading floors in 1500. I was worried about a lot of the things some folks have mentioned here. Now when I visit 1400 it feels claustrophobic.

7-4 is the new work hours? I guess you count lunch in there so you must bring it and eat at your desks. I need a cushy job that includes lunch in my work hours. Don’t forget your hour in the fitness center and walking the tunnels. All billable to Chevron!

Oh, and puzzle time! Lots to do on the company time.

I wouldn’t mind having cube farms just as long as the cube walls were those high ones that we used to have back in the day. The problem was when they replace the high walls with those short walls and you could sit there and see people walking around you all day.

What was even worse is when they did that open concept cr-p to where we’re all sitting at picnic tables.

I get it. There’s not enough private offices with doors for everybody that wants one, but there’s plenty of space to have cubes for everybody with high walls.

This is one of the problems I see quite often at Chevron (and I’m sure it’s the same at other large companies, so I’m not trashing CVX). We fail to consider basic human psychology in our new initiatives and processes. Most people like some degree certainty - how much uncertainty an individual can comfortably tolerate will vary considerably. For every employee that is fine with not knowing where they will sit each day, there will be another employee for which this scenario leads to a very significant degree of anxiety and stress. Most folks will lie somewhere in between, but I hazard a guess that a clear majority will prefer to have their own space just to reduce uncertainty and that ignores the practical considerations such as preferring to not share equipment from a hygiene perspective; wanting to set up sit/stand desks, chairs and other ergonomic devices; and wanting to personalize their space to combat the drudgery of the 7-4 grind. We need to instigate a rule that every new initiative needs to be screened against basic human psychology.

@1qds, in your "efficiency model", you forgot to utilize office space on Saturdays and Sundays - 40% more potential "efficiency"! Maybe add in 2nd and 3rd shifts - your prima donna Ph.Ds would love that!

@1klp: The trust is to be more efficient with space - not putting everybody in cubicles. You can increase the utilization of a space even without moving people to cube farms. If you have 80 private offices on a floor that is empty half the time, you can assign more people to the floor but remove names from offices (an unassigned model) so that employees can use whichever office is free. This works because every single one of us are not in the office sitting on a desk every single minute of every single work day - you could be going to a meeting in another floor, you could be at the cafeteria eating your lunch, you could be out sick, you could have left the office at 2PM to drive home to Katy or pick up your kids or take the bus to the Woodlands, you could be on vacation, you could be on business travel for the week in San Ramon or attending a meeting in another office in Houston, you could be in a classroom training or you could be at home enjoying you hybrid work model privelege (it is not a right) - my point is that unless you tell me you have your butt parked in your seat from 7AM to 4PM without ever leaving and just clicking away at your keyboard non-stop and staring at your screen, then you are not fully maximizing your assigned office space. Heck, you don’t do this even when you are working from home unless you are a senior executive who has meetings the whole day. This fixation with equating the Modernization project with moving people all to cube farms is a fallacious argument and a red herring being used by people with closed mindset or those who are fixated with having an assigned office (as the movie says “Let it go.”).

The viable option is to configure the floor so that it provides multiple work options i.e. unassigned private offices, some cubicles, some collaboration space, some project-type work spaces, some informal spaces etc…But the key point here is that moving to an unassigned model will be needed to drive utilization and space efficiency.

People also use the threat of leaving because of this latest “oppression” by the Company. Are you really willing to leave over workspace? If something as trivial as this would cause people to leave, I’m surprised we still have so many people around….

@1gco: Not sure where “poorly constructed” comes from. A lot of buildings in Downtown Houston have been damaged - does that mean all of them are poorly constructed too? Have you seen what the Hyatt or Total building looked like after the storm. Hasty generalization…

Spoiled employees: I only want to work from home where I can do as I like in my pjs.
Management: you don't seem to be actually getting anything done there, how about coming back to work?
SE: I want a dedicated window office with walls for my decorations, a locking door for naps, and free coffee.
M: How about we compromise with a couple days per week in exchange for a hot desk so we can save millions on poorly constructed offices with lots of smashed windows?

@1euy, There are plenty of better options than cubes to improve space efficiency.

If 40%+ of employees are not coming to the office then perhaps some of them dont need a dedicated office. Some employees dont even work with anyone in the Houston office so why not tell them to WFH. Some companies have gone to a shared office concept and reduced to 2 days a week. Any of these options would have been preferable to a Office Space soul crushing cube farm.

“Modernization” my a-s. The open fluid office concept has been tried again and again since at least the 1990s, when the model was all the rage based on watching the behavior of rapidly growing Silicon Valley startups. It worked great in companies with a few tens of young folks in huge rented warehouses, where space between desks and abundant group work and play areas were a reasonable substitute for walls. When HR in big companies take on the model, space shrinks to packed micro cubicles to save money and common areas for eating and talking get squeezed into the edges of the cube farm. Meeting rooms also shrink and are reduced in numbers, causing further delays in having productive working interactions (productive, rather than wasteful pro-forma checkins, which are designed only to make managers feel important and not to help workers get their work efforts aligned). There are never enough workroom areas where specific projects can actually work for extended periods. The result is always a disaster! Folks avoiding the cube farms to take personal calls and wearing headphones the rest of the time to reduce noice distraction makes the workforce more disconnected than any walls. All those little annoyances from you cube mates just keep getting magnified, no matter how many diversity and inclusion training sessions HR makes employees sit through. Combine that when all the managers insist they need “real offices”, and you end up with a cast system that breeds resentment. Ask me how I now: After 35 years in the workforce I have seen it all before more than once. Put me in a rotating cube farm (with someone else’s fa-t stains already covering my temporary chair) and you can expect me to run for the exits anytime I am not directly needed in a meeting (and even then, I will probably phone in from the lobby, cafeteria, or nearby coffee shop). Disrespect always leads to resentment: Always!

The occupancy rate in the two Houston Towers is about 95% which means almost every space (private office and cubicles) have been assigned to an employee. And yet, the highest attendance ever gets is around 60% (even with management's push to bring people back into the office) - and this happens only on Wednesdays, The place is a ghost town on Mondays and Fridays. Employees now get two days to work from home AND still want to have assigned offices when or if they do come into the office. If you're the owner of a business, would you continue running your business like this or would you look for a more efficient way to use space? And when the Hess deal gets approved, would you maintain underutilized office towers and still retain their Hess building? Or would you push for consolidating into as few buildings as possible to save money? As long as you get paid your salary, is fighting for your own office space really THAT important to you?

" If their" ???? It is possible for any current Chevron employees to use proper grammar or is it just a given that minimum GED level literacy is standard and this is a sub-standard company from here on?

MW, RM and the rest of the pathetic leadership of Chevron are dumping the company straight into the toilet. What a joke...

Why don't the people who are always threatening to leave over pettiness like having to work for their paycheck just leave already?
Buh-Bye.

The collaboration in office is the most important thing after our undying love for our shareholders. MW says the collaboration and us making sure the field workers don't have their feelings hurt is very important so get in the office and like it!

Sad state of affairs at Chevron. This type of move will result in losing our better employees who have options. That's what happened the last time this failed idea was tried. No one wants to work in a cube farm especially when you won't have your own assigned cube. Seriously, who is the id--t who thought this was a good idea.

I already told my boss that I don’t plan to except the new desk sharing scheme. Let’s see what she says.