Most "leaders" in India are extremely narrow minded, with zero personality, abnormal emotional intelligence, especially the senior management, pretty much act like police creating a culture of fear. They are talking about leading behaviours all the time and themselves show none, this hypocrisy is just too much to take.Do the "leaders" have a clue how vulnerable they are to sycophancy and flattery? In my one year at the company I have seen managers favouring folks who have the most coffee with them, or who laugh the most at their jokes, or give them fake complements. Which is acceptable to some extent in all workplaces but here, there is just visibility and politics. Their bloated egos get satisfied when people bow to them and say YES to everything they say. That is the real EM Culture "y'all"! Make your manager and supervisor happy by saying non-sense and smiling and replying on yammer posts and making sure to say something random but non-critical in every interaction on zoom. A smiley will help you go a long way. And like any other EM location, there are few who do this on a daily basis with no actual work contributions or value generation for the company, and no doubt they will be the future "leaders" .The special ones are Indian expats from poor Indian university education who were hired in the US, and then sent back here as supervisors and managers and advisors. They are making 20 times more money than their direct reports and somehow think they are superior because of that. Campus hire students at BTC may not be from IITs but are way more smarter and talented and skilled than some of these "leaders". As a previous BTC post said, there is no motivation or inspiring leaders in BTC, all of them are like police pretty much telling you to watch your behaviour and ensuring an army of YES robots is created. People who raise their voice and ask questions have been ranked lower this year or warned for next year, the hostility against any original thinking and criticism, is suffocating and surprising, no wonder it is failing miserably for the last few years. One of the favourite lines that mangers and supervisors like to parrot off is from the centre manager - we are a 150 year old company we know everything, we know how to deal with downturns, don't tell us what to do. Then why did you stuff 1000 employees into BTC, with no real work? People are sitting idle and seeing folks get ranked lower for no reason and get fired across the world, and you say EM is great? You are liars, and you need to live with that the rest of your life. Another manager once had to guts to say be thankful to us you have jobs, I'd like to say to the expats, be thankful YOU have jobs, because of low cost countries like Malaysia, India, Argentina, Brazil etc.! The worst thing is that they think they are above the locals, that they will bring "EM culture" to the office.Indian college students are hired at $10000/per year vs. US graduates at $100000/ year. It is low compared to what other Indian companies pay in India. And all this is fine, we walked into the trap of "Exxonmobil" brand as most of us are not exposed to oil and gas much. This is NOT a normal workplace. None of my friends have this kind of disgusting office culture. At least give us a normal workplace with actual work to do without STUPID safety, random behaviour non-sense, the feeling of fear all the time, unskilled supervisors, invisible HR, - every effing day! If you don't have work to give us then at least give us peace of mind! Everyday I feel physically unwell especially looking at the dumb Yammer posts, "Culture", "Behaviours", "We are exxonmobil" ,"Leading To Win", "Compete to Win", "Denison Survey" - where is the actual work and accountability!? There is none, zero. Have some common sense please having culture is fineThings don't show signs of changing here and instead trending to become worse, I've decided to quit this horrible company. Even if I don't have a job it's better to get out of here for health sake and do something else and I know for a fact most people are doing that as well. The number of people leaving is rising but no one talks about it, but I guess that is EM culture - to hide you head in the sand like an ostrich and say nothing is wrong. It runs all the way up to the CEO level, sigh. Nonetheless, hope things change and the survivors see better days.
13 replies (most recent on top)
This is an interesting topic and discussions here are worthy of read by all EM employees.
True that what you accomplish is more important than which school you came from. But schools do matter whether it is in India or any other part of the world. If not anything, it reflects the tenacity, and the drive of the individuals which is important for the long term success of the corporation. The context from the OP's post insinuates that BTC has a culture where merit is undervalued and sycophancy celebrated. That is a problem.
To the person posting about universities, I suspect you are a new hire who still relies on college name to justify your worth. Let your work speak for itself. Once you are in XOM, no one really cares where you came from.
Unethical leadership has always been responsible for promoting further unethical leadership, it's a cycle of inbreeding. Funny that someone commented it sounds like EMIT, to me it seems like URC and RTD. Incompetent, lying, backstabbing supervisors & team leads promoted based on who impresses clueless arrogant senior managers with BS. Not singling out any orgs, but then that's what most of UIS is like probably. The root cause is where the managers and supervisors at BTC came from, they are bound to bring their past experiences and ruin things. Eliminating jobs and moving them to BTC - bound to fail with the same toxic leadership culture regardless of cost savings. When will EM learn that employees are ACTUALLY the most valuable resource, not just for the sake of saying it in c-appy speeches.
I don't know what to believe and what not to believe anymore.
In US (at least), EM claims to hire the best and the brightest which is not true (they aimed/hoped to hire the best and the brightest but mud kept sliding in under the doors and the hard workers and intellects were turned away as they couldn't slither down below).
It is time for me to work on impressing my boss by staring out the window, make up a fake observation and spend rest of the way writing safety sharing and highlighting (my) active caring and intervention.
OP and several responses below — it makes sense to me. Hiring from lower schools at BTC seems to be fine. I am on the side of removing hypocrisy, rising up, questioning and exposing the fake leadership that is k–ling our company.
Let’s be real: no customer will love an O&G company. Don’t buy into Pod Boy’s higher purpose BS. He also said no layoffs despite ongoing HW3 studies with the sole purpose of cutting costs and headcount.
To the last post maligning the universities.. please understand that people from these colleges are present in all major companies that have a “good” work atmosphere. So this has nothing to do with where they got their Bachelor’s degree.
You seem to have a propaganda against these colleges as you keep posting the same thing in all BTC posts. The Alma matter from these colleges has done exceptionally well in all major companies. IITs are the best but very few graduates from there want to work at BTC or EMHC or any technical job. Also note that Satya Nadella (and 100s of others) got their bachelors degrees from the lowly colleges u r talking about.
BTC brother/sister. What you have pointed out is a reflection of pervasive toxic work culture of ExxonMobil in USA that was rewarded for over a decade.
You have correctly pointed out that a bunch of expats specially the Indian ones are actually some of he lowest creatures on this planet. They are there in Bengaluru because they have no talent and they are greedy about getting paid expat benefits. They bring nothing of value to BTC and the corporation.
You are also correct about the Indian employees hired and working in US from the worst universities in India. Some examples are Anna University, I.C.T, UDCT, University of Pune .. and many many more. Some of these talentless employees are shameless su- ckers to management and crept up to low level supervisor and manager positions - their narrow dreams lol
(by the way some are so insecure that on Professional Social Media, you want find their Bachelor Degree information - it would seem that their education started directly from MS :) ) .
Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first. The post is very concerning if that is really the culture in BTC. If we attract good talent, we have to give them meaningful work.
This sounds like life in EMIT. The EMIT leadership team only have one trick up their sleeve - labor arbitrage. Do the same stupid inefficient things, cheaper and cheaper. Rather than doing things better or smarter, just hire cheaper staff to do the same things. Sadly this leaves us very slow, cumbersome and inflexible and turned EMIT into a department of overseers rather than doers. Think plantation culture.
Can't imagine this one is part of the best and the brightest. Just a solid chunk of rant with run on sentance structure and no breaks between topics. Thanks, but try again.
This is a great post. It shows how clearly EM culture is flawed. We create BTC’s from scratch, taking smart and capable people and then imprint out culture creating a lower cost version of the same bad behavior. OP thanks for your post.