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Hard Operations General Management Employee Retention Organizational Behavior

High Engineer Attrition at SLS Oil Gas Services

#Oil & Gas Services #Human Resources #Operations
ProHub Comment

The case focuses on diagnosing high employee attrition for Field Engineers in a specific, challenging industry. The provided exhibits (Exhibit 4 and 5) will be crucial for analyzing the 'Level Loading' (time spent offshore) and how it varies by seniority, directly hinting at potential causes related to work-life balance and career progression. The problem's structure suggests a combination of qualitative interviews (to gather context and sentiment) and quantitative analysis of operational data.

Estimated Time 15 minutes
Difficulty Hard
Source Wharton
50 / 100
Our client SLS is one of the world’s largest oil and gas services provider operating in 85 countries and employing about 100,000 people from over 140 countries. They help find, scope and drill as much oil and gas as possible for their clients – which range from major international oil companies to petrostates such as Saudi Arabia and Russia. Of late they are seeing a very high attrition rate among their Field Engineer (FE) population across several offices globally, the Mumbai office in India being one of the most affected. The CEO is concerned and has asked you for advice specifically for the Mumbai office. She hopes that if the problem can be fixed in Mumbai, similar fix can be implemented everywhere else. It is indeed a matter of grave urgency for SLS.

Clarifying Information

  1. What does a Field Engineer do? Field Engineers work with specialized oilfield equipment which they lower inside a well, and then record and analyze data to identify whether and how much oil and gas is buried in the ground. They spend a considerable amount of time working on oil rigs. All oil rigs in Mumbai are offshore i.e. at sea (see Exhibit 1 that shows two types of offshore oil rigs in Mumbai) Most offshore rigs are bad with poor food, poor internet and poor accommodation.
  2. How is attrition rate defined? (No. of FEs quitting in a year / Avg. no. of FEs in that year) %
  3. Where are FEs going? Mostly going to do Masters or moving to a completely different industry
  4. How high is the attrition rate? 28% in 2016 in Mumbai (similarly high in several other offices globally)
  5. What has the CEO requested? Identify the cause(s) of high attrition and make recommendations on fixing it