Pros
Shell is trying. It's been on a "journey to world class" for a few years now. Keep trying, Shell because we're not there.
Cons
- Politics - It is never enough for your work to speak for itself here. Shell is built on a culture of being the most rewarding to those who can stroke the egos of their stakeholders, and will run around blabbing about their achievements for "visibility"; which you will struggle to accomplish on top of the 101 tasks dumped on you on a daily basis in a downsizing company. Your ability to network and stroke those egos matters more here than anything else. Your leaders recognize this and will be busy doing the same vs actually putting the success of their teams and their people first. They say the loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room. Not so at Shell. - Job security issues - There are "transformations" about every year now, which is our fancy term for figuring out which of our staff are expendable. If you're not let go, you're forced into another role, and there is little to no change management happening along the way, leading to many teams being understaffed and/or not knowing what they're doing. Our ambition to cut our carbon footprint by 50% is admirable, but the sacrifices and changes we will need to make are massive, and no one knows what to expect until they’re staring redundancy in the face. - Flawed Performance Review Process – You’re measured against people that have a completely different role than yours, and by a panel of judges that have to thump their chests and fight over who among their staff gets the bigger bonus/raise. It’s quite primitive, and the results seldom paint an accurate picture of an individual’s actual contributions. We’ve implemented a new review process but there is little to indicate this culture will go away. - Silos – Less staff means more people running around chasing deadlines and it has created silos within silos within silos. - Hypocrisy – Shell’s values and culture look great on paper. The reality however is that we’re hiring more outsiders than ever before in a desperate attempt to inject new thinking and innovation – people that haven’t been in Shell long enough to have those values ingrained and to truly embody our ideals. You will mostly feel that our talk about the importance of diversity and inclusion is lip service while you’re putting on a mask and keeping honest feedback to yourself on a daily basis in order to play the political game Shell requires you to play. I have never been in an environment with so many people willing to stab you in the back to get ahead while smiling at you through their teeth, with leaders so often making generalizations about your character based on how you look and sound in a meeting. This is NOT an environment that encourages you to be yourself which is quite contradictory to what the company goes around saying about itself. - Work-life balance - Look elsewhere. Shell is hell bent on getting more done with less people because of its need to desperately generate income while transitioning out of oil & gas.
