Shell used to be a good place to work when I first joined. There was care for people and the benefits were really good, aside from some bad apples here and there. There were tons of cool projects and work was interesting.
However, the perks, benefits, culture, job security steadily declined as time went on after I was hired. Plenty of bad decisions were made by the CEO Ben van Beurden and the leadership, and things got steadily worse. There were endless reorgs, AKA layoffs. 2015: Reorg. 2016: Reorg. 2017: Shell/Motiva dissolved. 2020: Reorg. 2021: 2 reorgs. After the CEO Wael Sawan took over in 2023, everything has taken a nosedive. He is ruthlessly (and that is the word he used) “cost-cutting” with yet another “reorg” AKA layoffs affecting almost the whole company. A large portion of the company is making employees post for their own jobs or compete for whatever jobs are left. They are ruthlessly laying people off left, right, and center. I think Wael would be happy to fire everyone so long as he can claim he cut costs and get himself a nice fat bonus. Pretty soon, there’s just going to be a skeleton of a company. This reorg was done in such a massive scale and is being super rushed, with little to no thought about the work that will need to be done but won’t be done because they’ve removed those positions from the new organization. That work is not going to disappear. Who’s going to be doing the work? Or are they going to pile all of that work on those who are left, and thus annihilating work-life balance? Once he is done destroying the company, I’m sure he’ll jump out of the aircraft with his lovely golden parachute.
When our VP came to discuss the 2024 layoffs with our group, he seemed intent on humiliating our group and actually seemed to relish in it. This is the type of leadership that is in place now. I have observed that the worst ones are the ones who survived, while a lot of the good ones were left without a job.
What I have also observed is that many women leaders and employees were ousted from their own jobs and replaced by men, mostly white men. Those women were highly qualified. This is a very troubling trend.
Merit is also not valued or rewarded. Favoritism is rampant. Promotions are based on boot licking (what they refer to as “networking”) and who you know and who likes you, not the quality of your work or how much you sacrificed and how much good work you did. I expected better from a company with the prestige level of Shell.
In this reorg, they also removed a ton of management positions, so opportunities for advancement are slim, unless you are one of the chosen favorites.
This is not a good place to work anymore. The culture is atrocious now, there are limited opportunities for advancement, what advancement there is is based on favoritism, and there is no job security. They are planning to cut more jobs next year. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is another “reorg” in 2026. I do not recommend anyone to hire on with this mess of a company. I would advise you to look elsewhere.
