GRAND PRAIRIE, Alberta – Engdie Resources (EDR.TO) saw its stock surge by nearly 27% in early morning trading on the TSX after the Calgary-based company announced that it will ban its engineers from visiting the field, effective immediately and indefinitely.
The company implemented this precedent-setting human resource policy after it conducted a 6-month study that evaluated the interactions between subsurface head-office engineers and field staff and equipment.
2P News field reporter Rodecker Smith sat down with Dr. Harry Mangina with People Surveil Inc., the third party consultant hired to conduct the research.
“We’ve been in the business of secretly evaluating the interactions between various work groups for over 40 years and I’ve never seen anything like this. It is beyond me how this client has been operating for the past 17 years with engineers regularly visiting their field offices and operations. Between us and the fence posts, Rodecker, it took us only hours to conclude that productivity in the field would jump many-fold without allowing engineers out there, but we were hired for a 6-month contract, so we basically just sat around collecting data for interactions to support our case studies and report.” – Dr. Harry Mangina, lead researcher, People Surveil Inc.
Dr. Mangina’s 420-page report submitted to Engdie’s executive management team cited a number of situations that put at risk the company’s assets, personnel safety, and the environment. 2P News was given permission to publish only a few of the tamer incidents below.
- A Staff Senior Reservoir Engineer was observed on no fewer than 7 occasions to be turning arbitrary valves within batteries and other facilities in very arbitrary manners. “A valve? What? I thought this was a steering wheel where the fields guys just pretend to play Pole Position,” was the reason given to Dr. McKeckern’s team.
- A junior Data Science Engineer repeatedly hit the ESD button on pressure vessels and in one case he shutdown the entire plant. When asked why he did this, he replied, “Oh, I thought that was the help button, because I couldn’t find my way out of this building.“
- On a drilling rig, two junior pipeline design engineers were observed trying to zip-line down the a derrick’s steel supporting cables using nothing but safety gloves.
- A number of engineers from the office were observed measuring their hard hats for safety clearances and protection efficiency by passing under immovable equipment at speed.
- The exploitation engineering manager took it upon himself to interview and survey field staff about their home lives in an attempt to understand normal people. When asked why he responded, “I just wanted to show them that we care.”
- Every office engineer who visited the field was observed repeatedly asking field staff why they only had one manager, not at least 14.
- The VP engineering disrupted natural gas and water services at their 10-23 battery field office by actually trying to tow it with his rented Ford F-150. When asked why, he simply replied, “The guy at the rental counter told me that my truck is equipped with a tow hitch. I took this as a mandate to use it, and the only thing at the battery that I could hook up to was the office trailer. What’s wrong with that?”
“The report submitted by People Surveil does not surprise us. We had been hearing for quite sometime from the field staff that the office engineers are nothing but liabilities while out in the field, but we had no reason to believe them, because they make-up shit all of the time. We now have reason to believe them,” said Engdie’s COO, Margie Flatbush. She continued, “So it was a no-brainer to implement policy that effectively bans all of our office engineers from visiting any one of our field operations, and even prohibit them from being within a 1.5km buffer of any such operation. We simply can ill-afford the risk of having them out there fiddling with this or that, and giving the field staff a hard time.”
According to an internal memo sent to all staff, Engdie’s HR team will next start looking at banning its geoscientists from all office kitchens and company team-building events.
