SLB reviews

Safety preaches one thing and management does another. If the employee does what is unsafe he could be fired, but if he doesn't do what management asks, even if it goes against the safety rules, they will start looking for a reason to get rid of that employee. There are a lot of uneducated people in operator positions with big egos just because they have a high paying job. If they worked anywhere else but here, they would not make the kind of money they are making and probably wouldn't have such large egos. Spending half of your life with these people can be hard to do for many people.

There is a culture in Schlumberger to continually improve processes and limit mistakes by keeping track of mishaps and hazards no matter how small. While this is a good thing on the surface, this generally leads to policies and standard procedures to be changed without enough thought on how the changes will effect other areas. This tends to lead to continual modification of polices that counter each policies' effectiveness. One oddity that this has led to is a company wide requirement that all employees back their cars into parking spaces when parking. No joke, there was a problem with people backing out when leaving and not paying enough attention so they force people to back in, or at least pull forward when leaving. In addition to having parking policies, everyone in Schlumberger is required to pass a 'Commentary Drive' driving test that requires employees drive a car around with a trainer and tell them what they are doing the entire time ( like: "Im looking in my rearview mirror, there is a car behind me that may be following to close" ). This would make sense if it were require of individuals where driving on company time, however, it applies to everyone that has a drivers license.