It’s late October and no sign of a DWW or MC town hall?
7 replies (most recent on top)
MC is Management Committee, the group of senior folks at the apex of the pyramid.
Who is MC? Do you mean NC?
@1mnj+1jnVfWQT is spot on. Rational companies do layoffs and pay severance to long-term employees not because "it's the right thing to do" (although it is), they do it because shadow layoffs over multiple years makes the work environment extremely stressful and destroys the morale of anyone who remains.
A large one-time RIF is brutal for both severed and retained employees, but you get through it, and then you start rebuilding. A five-year shadow RIF based on "performance" avoids a big restructuring expense on your financials, but ends up costing you more $$$ in the long run from regretted attrition, lost productivity, and employee engagement. So even if all DWW cares about is the all-in cost, what XOM is doing is stupid.
But it's not surprising - every single capital project decision I saw during my time there was optimized for one single metric to the exclusion of many other important quantitative and qualitative factors. You get what you measure.
This should be a surprise to no one. They came out publicly on a June 2021 article and said 5-10% layoffs for next 3-5 years. They backed this up with 8% layoff July 2021, December 8%, 5-8% July 2022, and so you can expect 5-10% layoffs through July 2026. If you started with 100 people today in 2022, that means 65 to 80 people will remain on average in 2026 if they don't adjust the % layoffs (PIP) higher in July. This does not affect the HiPos and protected ones, but if you are the old middle 1/3 or lower, you need to have a plan in place. Of the 70k or so people we had in 2018, we now have maybe 55k left with probably a goal of shrinking down to 30-40k globally. Additionally, I watched someone ranked excellent in 2021 get laid off (PIP) in 2022 (and supervisor told him no way possible to make it through PIP). Make no mistake, if you are an employee you are nothing more than a lower paid 12 month consultant. If they are making these cuts with oil at high prices, imagine what they will do at lower ones. There are several other operators in the US hiring, some near oil and gas type companies hiring, green energy/mining, defense, manufacturing and many other companies that would love to have every single hard working individual Exxon will provide. Several of the big tech companies even specifically poached my engineers this past year. While big tech has slowed hiring, certain areas, especially if you are an engineer are still a great fit. Make sure to maintain your network and realize that your worth as a person is not determined by the company. If they were honest about shrinking the company things would have gone much better, but when integrity goes, then of course morale and trust suffers. We have early, mid and late career all leaving. I heard we are even cutting our people out in the field annually, just mind boggling considering those are the people showing up in person daily to support our operations. These bad news articles you see now coming out regularly never used to happen because we actually valued our people, these articles come out when you do the opposite.
Here is your town hall if you slipped in some truth serum……most American jobs will move overseas in the next 3-7 years. We have a commodity business that will do well or not do well based on the price of oil/gas. The best analysts/engineers will only make marginal impacts on this equation, so we will ship all those jobs off to low cost locations. It’s been a good run folks, but we are switching gears to an LCS world to make our investors happy and keep us out of political doghouse. We can do this the east way or the hard way, but start your timers for 2030 being the finish line for most of you in this room. We will start doubling the minimum requirement for NSI starting next year until everyone is forced out that doesn’t quit on their own accord.
Maybe he will delegate it to TG or the EMIT VP, both outstanding examples of how to treat employees
Much like the town halls held in politics, I’d rather they not have a town hall if they plan to insult us all and stand up and lie through their teeth. They are never held accountable and they do not have our best interests in mind. Really. What’s the point? I have too much to do to waste my time with a show.