Go read on the Chevron board—-looks like they are going to have to be in the office 4 days/week beginning January 1st.
Will Shell in the US follow? I think there may be space issues in the UK, so I don’t think they can implement it there,
19 replies (most recent on top)
3 days RTO globally
Already do 4 days a week in the office - never stopped (aside for some of that 2020 year).
Shell makes up its own definitions. "Energy company", "net zero", "inflationary", "Russian oil embargo", "leadership", "World Class Finance" just to "make your job more interesting", "inclusiveness", "good corporate citizen", "gender".
So how would Shell define "days", "week"' and "work"?
It is all too Cliquey. Those people in the GOM... they must have a secret society. They look after their own and consider everyone else outsiders. There is very little staff rotation in and out. They keep people that they should fire, and let people outside the clique leave Shell rather than upgrade. The treacherous people in Oman are even worse but they do bring in people to use, abuse and discard. India is a fiefdom, as you say, and it is also really caste discriminatory. There is no "one Shell" pulling together, there are groups acting in their own interest.
@ps territorially and fiefdoms exist and are a terrible drag on a company. Wael stated he hates PowerPoints and demands simplicity. What does Shell do? Creates a 200 deck PowerPoint full of complex information and nice colorful images and charts
I feel like I had 3-years off 2020-2023. My team was a "centralized team" and was distributed across 3 continents. ( Ironic to be centralized and distributed) We performed internal services for other Shell teams. During the reorgs following the pandemic the teams we were supporting were too busy to want the internal product and improvements we might bring. So we were ignored and didn't have enough work to do. My manager , bless her heart, discouraged us from finding/doing other useful work as she was constantly negotiating and failing to get other teams to let us help them. But she insisted that she was about to get a yes "next week ", so we couldn't start anything else her orders. So I did very little for three years and barely went into the office. In the 4th year, I started supporting another internal team. Our whole team got disbanded after 5 years of doing nothing, it was the right call, except that it should have been earlier. The manager should probably have been punished, but was promoted instead... brilliant leadership. But yeah, you can do nothing for years and still get "strong" ratings for years! Working with diverse groups spread across the world meant that the need to be in the office was non-existent... We were vocal that we were trying to support other Shell teams but were getting rebuffed, if we tried we could have hidden and continued for longer.
@j0
Imagine that the supervisor was also inventing their job. Unclear roles and responsibilities and a bit of empire building. There are vestigial roles in Shell or roles that are supposed to create their own mandate. The Very senior leaders create these for the people that they identify as SEG potential, some are real some are placeholders, some are holding patterns, stepping stones and resume filler. Remember when you are pre-selected that you are treated differently and may or may not be required to do actual work. Some of them just practice giving speeches, rewriting policies ( and never sharing them), and travel to visit and get to know teams. Please remember that there are the SEG potential folks who are allowed to learn from mistakes and still get promoted.
That's part of why there are folks who can get away with doing nothing but paper-shifting
From what I understand the in office mandate will be different by lines of business, not a blanket mandate that is the same for everyone.
@fh if this is true, its a pretty damming indictment on their magagers that they are so detached for their people this could go on. I am not sure which part of the business or functions you have seen this, in my part its pretty obvious due to workload if people are not pulling their full weight
Nah, Shell follows BP's example, not well run companies.
5-years after the pandemic... If you're given an inch, then take a mile! Pretend to work from home vs hiding from work and passing your work to someone else at the office.
The trouble is that too many people see way too many other people getting away with hardly working and collecting a fat pay check. The moral is too low for Shell workers to actually do work. The non-workers collecting a paycheck need to go. Some of them are still collecting two pay checks, one from a job they work at and the other from Shell. Why be the one working when all the people around you are passing the buck and hiding from work? 25-50% of Shell staff need to be fired. Then, see who really does work. Hire workers and fire people just collecting a pay check. Most Shell folks I know are just coasting and passing work to someone else.
Going into the office isn't going to fix it. You've got to get rid of the grifters!
question - if we need to be in the office to talk to people actually pulling energy out of the ground in order to do our jobs, how can those jobs keep going to india?
either you need to talk to people pulling energy out of the ground in person or you don’t. can’t have it both ways, complete contradiction
Good. Need more people in office at Woodcreek.
1 day remote is more than generous
i always knew this day would come so i didn’t do anything radical like move far away
but - you don’t get me on my phone and laptop at weird hours if we went to the office that day. work takes place in the office and not before or after i leave. that’s also how it’s always worked.
so if they expect me to overwork due to lack of boundaries just like covid they can think again. remote work has benefits for employers too. no double dipping.
Shell employees do work in the UK? News to me…
Shell has significant number of women boses and HR types that hate working in the office. They dictate the rules not the CEO. That why we have India working backstop
Nothing wrong with an employer’s requirement to be in office as a condition of employment.
You can throw out all the reasons you want as to why you shouldn’t have to - but your only real decision is whether you want to continue working for that employer or not.