- You have to understand the corporate culture is very firmly rooted in Spain. Repsol is the only "game in town" in Spain so there is no pressure from other oil and gas companies to poach the employees. The turn over is nearly 0% in Spain. You should not read that as people are happy at the mother ship, they don't have any options. When this is combined with no one ever getting fired, you create a Union like environment where employees try to game the system and Managers take advantage of employees with no options. Repsol managers have been brought up in this system and know how that game is played and are good at it (they became managers). They are the least incentivized to change it regardless of the steady stream of initiatives that have a culture focus. The Spanish employees get a lot of benefits such as most of August off, generous number of holidays plus summer hours from June to Sept where you leave every day before lunch! The Spanish culture prioritizes family and off time so they put up with low pay in the trade off. You can't find that system anywhere else so people stay.
- Extremely siloed - main focus of average employee is to obtain their goals for the year. These are rarely aligned across groups so you get extreme silos and a place that feels like people are working against you because they could care less about your goals or goals above their own.
- Repsol has one operating system and will put Spanish employees in key roles both in operated and non operated assets as a way to promote the Repsol way. Training systems to teach the Repsol way to new employees is severely lacking so the system becomes predictable....expatriate more Spaniards to drive the model.
- Majority of Spaniards are not good with English so you have a lot of meetings, side bar conversations and communications in Spanish, which alienates the non-Spanish speakers. The language barrier creates some crazy communication channels in the company with Spanairds largely sharing info with only Spanish speaking colleagues.
- Managers put a significant weight on loyalty over talent and especially high value on if they have worked with a person in the past.
- Repsol has the lowest score on building connections with other operators. Very insular thinking with external networking abysmal.
- A very interesting aspect of the culture is that no one wants to admit they made mistakes or could have done something better. Ask an employee what are their weaknesses or conduct a Lesson learned session....crickets!
