Exxon to cut 10% of jobs every year

Exxon Mobil Corp., the American multinational oil and gas corporation, will reduce its workforce across offices in the US, by five to 10 per cent every year, for the next few years. It will do away with low performers, based on an evaluation system, which will apply mostly to the roles in finance, engineering and project management.

It is the usual practice to put the identified low performers on a performance improvement plan (PIP), following which most leave of their own accord if they fail to improve. The impacted employees, post this year’s evaluation, which has been on for a couple of months now, are yet to be informed.

This evaluation plan, the Company claims, is not related to its announcement in 2020 about cutting about 14,000 jobs across its global offices by 2022. At the time Exxon had also revealed that this workforce reduction may continue beyond 2022 too.

As of end of 2020, Exxon had a 72,000-strong workforce, 40 per cent of which is based in the US.

In order to cut costs, Exxon had suspended bonuses and also stopped employee-contribution matches to 401k savings plans when the demand for crude oil had dropped amidst the pandemic, leading to heavy annual losses.

This year, however, global crude prices have spiked 44 per cent, to almost $75 a barrel, which has brought about an improvement in Exxon’s financial condition. However, its debts still exist, to clear which it will require to trim down its workforce and continue to cut costs.