Prós
Real community feeling, management work hard to build community and team feeling, to communicate, to spread best practice and learning, and to express appreciation and recognise good performance. Senior leaders really support communication, give regular webcasts and travel extensively to put a human face to this global business. Compensation and benefits are excellent as you would expect from the Shell group, training and development are well supported. A friendly and supportive environment.
Contras
The business is struggling in the current environment, leading to a recent reorganisation and job losses, and renewed efforts to simplify processes and reduce costs. While necessary, this has inevitably resulted in stress and frustration for employees bombarded with change programmes. The London office went open plan in 2008 to a call-centre style which is noisy, has inadequate meeting rooms and a major re-building project in Shell Centre leads to constant irritation for employees such as lifts not working, power cuts, false fire alarms etc. Currently a stressful environment to work in. In addition, Shell has notified employees that an unspecified number of employees will be relocated during 2011 or 2012 to a new office, possibly in Docklands.