My observations about returning to the Houston office for the first time since 8 years ago: Holy moly! People are really milking this flex work schedule. Not only are you only required to go into the office three days a week, but I went downstairs for a meeting in the other building around 1 o’clock, and the elevator was full of people getting ready to leave for the day. By the time I was done with my nine hour workday the parking lot was almost completely empty at 4 PM. This is very different than it was back then. I can’t imagine that all of these people are going back home and continuing to work for the day. No wonder we are in Dire Straits and need to change the culture. This is the culture that needs to change. Nobody wants to work, but everybody still collecting their full paycheck. It would be easy to handle the layoff selection process with badge data to see how many hours somebody actually spent working in the office. Just a thought!! We can’t get anything done, but it’s like nobody’s even trying.
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Already got the next excuse for the company su-kage. Employees are not working long enough hours in the office.
who cares? as long as the deliverables are done and completed
clocking and staying for the time for the sake of it?
how low can OP go?
Who cares if the all the employees leave by 4pm. They were in the office which made them uber-off-the-chart productive.
"@fe, Leadership has also discovered that when employees are allowed to WFH they are more likely going to be F-ing Off from home mostly and getting little to no work done so it's not a big surprise to the person with more than one brain cell why they want you in the office."
A worker who is useless working from home will be equally worthless in the office. They just will be distracting other productive workers when they are in the office or surfing the web or who knows what. Most people are task oriented not time oriented. They work to complete a task by a deadline. For most good employees, WFH is a huge productivity boost because they have more time and more energy.
What will be our excuse when we bring all the workers back to the office and we still get our a$$e$ kicked by Exxon. At some point, we need to address the root cause and stop blaming things that are clearly not related to our underperformance.
@fe, Leadership has also discovered that when employees are allowed to WFH they are more likely going to be F-ing Off from home mostly and getting little to no work done so it's not a big surprise to the person with more than one brain cell why they want you in the office.
What's your Point?
I get in around 6:15 in the morning. You darn straight I'm out of there by 4:00 at the latest.
Leadership has discovered that WFH is the ultimate double-talk talking point. 'We have proven that remove work can be done so let's move jobs to drastically different geographies.' 'WE NEED MORE COLLABORATION, so let's make more folks go in the office in the US'
By this time IT Forensics already have a lists of employees who will not have a job. They've been asked to actively monitor these people to ensure they're not stealing data they can take with them at another job at another company. It's a standard practice every time there's a layoff since the company had in-house Big Brothers.
Chevron management acting like the uncompetitiveness is a result of WFH and not due to their complete lack of strategic leadership is the real LOL
Yea, lemme get this straight, the company is not profitable, and the overpaid employees can all get their work done in a fraction of a time at home compared to full time employees and they all insist that working from home unsupervised like during Covid is WAY more productive than any other way.
Nothing to see here, move along CVX management. ROTFL!
@ag, that's because he wasn't in your mommies basement in the woodlands.
@d3
Just so you know I love the return to office plan. I am happy to return and when I asked to come back five days they told me they don’t have desks to sit in. Just because someone is not inside the buildings does not mean they are not working. Have you ever heard of remote work? You’re a mo--n….
“Why would people who do not know they have a job, come to work all day? “
They come to work because that’s what they are paid to do. The fact that you needed to ask that is exactly why this company has gone to cr-p. Chevron has been soft on this, but I believe that is coming to a screeching halt very soon.
If I get in later than 7:15, I have to park on the 7th floor (or higher!) in the garage- and it only has 10 floors! 9 hours later, I'm not surprised that the lower floors are nearly empty: those people who got in early enough to park there will have completed their working day already.
I take a 6AM-7:30AM call from home and then catch the woodlands bus. When I get to the office, I can’t find a place to sit! I even had to work on my laptop from the break room one day when even the wall-less cubicles were full. OP doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
perhaps the superficial analysis you have done here, equating Facetime with productivity, is the reason for our dire straits. Output and value-add should be an objectively measured metric, even if you get it done while doing a dump. Of course, the typical CVX bosshole has no idea how to define nor measure it effectively via the PMP process, so lets just devolve to platitudes with the few remaining brain cells we got.
“ @a8 you have no clue what you’re talking about. There’s all sorts of public transportation options for Downtown and it’s central”
Lol! Public transportation in Houston is a complete joke! I use one of those horrible options daily. The only folks with a decent commute live near the office in places that families do not want to live.
We must be going to a different office. The place has always cleared out at 3:45 for bus and carpool people. In the before times you could never schedule meetings that went to 4 and expect folks to stay. And I was downstairs around lunch to 1pm and it was a shoulder to shoulder madhouse.
Of course it is empty. Many employees have reduced output, show up to work as little as possible and just put up the pretense of they are actually working remotely. This is why the company and the consultants know it only needs half the workforce to get the work done and they need to ensure workforce returns to the office.
OP, I didn’t see you here at 5:30 this morning.
@a8 you have no clue what you’re talking about. There’s all sorts of public transportation options for Downtown and it’s central. You think moving our office to the Woodlands or Katy or Pearland would make peoples commutes easier? Don’t know what you’re smoking.
OP you need to know that a significant portion of the HOU workforce is still working in alternative spaces after the derecho destruction last year and ongoing renovations. Also all work groups don’t work 3 days. And lastly 8 years ago there were way more people including contractors in the building so please spare us your anecdotal judgment
8 years ago we didn’t have Teams, and people scheduling Teams calls all afternoon and evening.
I don’t need to be in the office all day if most, if not all of my calls are on Teams.
"I remember when I started at Chevron 18 years ago being surprised at how hard it was to meet with anyone in Houston after 1 pm in San Ramon. Lots of people who had to catch busses or just left early to beat traffic."
I guess thats why they moved all the San Ramon folks to Houston.
Houston traffic is completely unbearable if you leave after 4pm. If its not urgent then yes I am leaving before 4pm. Chevron sc--wed up by not moving out to one of the suburbs like our competitors. The commute to downtown is getting exponentially worse.
OP if I see you in the elevators I'm going to give you a wedgie.
I remember when I started at Chevron 18 years ago being surprised at how hard it was to meet with anyone in Houston after 1 pm in San Ramon. Lots of people who had to catch busses or just left early to beat traffic.
This isn’t a new phenomenon.
I don't know why people are risking it. We're about to enter heavy layoffs and they are tracking days in office. Why give em an edge to work against your employment?
Long term, I like hybrid but not leveraging it successfully is just going to send us to office full time once they layoff a third of us and suddenly space is no longer an issue
I leave early as many meetings are still set up for work from home hours when we did not have concerns for commute times … say after 3pm with San Ramon. I then take the call from home.
Also I will be on a call later with the other side of the word tonight, do not get that time back. But this is an international company so it is part of the job, but giving me a pre- traffic commute help even the score.
I think you are reporting on recent information after the announcement of transferring the Houston and San Ramon jobs to the ENGINE in India. You are not reporting on the past 4 years when we were working 10 to 12 hours a day from home so we could meet with Manila at night US time so we could keep the place running. After the layoff announcement, people are "shell shocked". I think many are thinking if their job positions are moving to India what difference does it matter. Once the people who are selected to have jobs know they have confirmed letters of employment those people will show up but the people are being told to created documentation, work flows and be ready to train people to take our jobs. I think it's funny the managers don't even know the process to perform the work in their teams.
My question to you is, Why would people who do not know they have a job, come to work all day?
I am still working (not a confirmed job in the layoff) and I am writing my documentation because if I can write documentation then I understand the work I perform so I can get a job somewhere else. Either way I know the work I perform. God Speed to everyone!!!