December 5, 2020
ExxonMobil Logo
"Great when times were good......2020 showed a real ugly side"
Former Employee - Project Engineer in Houston, TX
Doesn't Recommend
Negative Outlook
Disapproves of CEO
I worked at ExxonMobil full-time for more than 10 years
Pros
A lot of opportunities, educational matching program (if you donate to your university, 3:1 match for years, changed to 2:1 in 2019 but wonderful program and much appreciated), very structured and thorough work processes, well compensated with good benefits, wonderful colleagues, great technical information available and a lot of teamwork opportunities, incredible safety culture and safety performance, good "extra curricular" activities like networks, recruiting
Cons
Culture = some locations have a very uptight/all business work culture that is very tough for certain personality types. The ranking system is terrible in many ways: it makes people afraid of disagreement with management, it makes people focused on pleasing their bosses vs. performing their jobs to their best ability (those might sound like they align but they don't align in significant ways), fear of failure, downplaying/hiding failures, people will help each other but general "head down, self focus" is encouraged vs. being more altruistic and improving others vs. yourself. Lack of transparency (especially in 2020 regarding changes in performance evaluation that resulted in a larger number than typical colleagues being dismissed for performance issues, people felt this was a "disguised layoff", it probably was all above board but lack of transparency about the change led educated rational people to jump to the "disguised layoff" conclusion so I would say there is something base case wrong with perception of management and management needs to change approach). People in higher level management feel unapproachable and you need to run ideas up the chain.
Advice to Management
Up to 2020, I would have give ExxonMobil about 3.5-4 stars depending on work location/assignment (not a big fan of uptight work cultures). In 2020, I give the company 1 star, they should be ashamed of themselves. They had to make some tough decisions but did a horrible job making people feel valued/comfortable and made stressful times an order of magnitude worse.