Performance in Practice

The strategy and structure were designed to empower the people of Schlumberger to perform. Our success has always been built on the spirit of ingenuity and perseverance of our people. In 2020, we witnessed the best embodiment of this spirit.

Our Safety and Service Quality Commitment

Our people rose to the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic, integrating COVID-19 safety into our daily operations, maintaining business continuity, and protecting not only each other, but customers, our families, and our communities. Schlumberger quickly developed standards and practices for COVID-19 safety—which we continue to evolve—and shared them with customers and contractors to contribute to a resilient response across the industry.

We significantly improved both safety and service quality—two strong foundations of our performance strategy. The team achieved record bests in both despite COVID-19 adversity. In fact, this performance proved to be a critical differentiator for our customers, enabling us to strengthen our market position.

Technology helped our people adapt to changing risks across the year, improving safety and results for customers. In a year of restricted travel and logistics, our leadership in digital and remote operations was a differentiating factor.

We significantly improved both safety and service quality—two strong foundations of our performance strategy—despite COVID-19 adversity.

Operators practice social distancing on site in Colombia.

In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed our COVID-19 Schlumberger SAFE app to enable our people to stay connected and informed with the tools and resources they needed. The app became one of the fastest-adopted PowerApps® ever released on the Microsoft platform.

Remote Operations

Connecting people, technology, and expertise has been central to the adaptability of Schlumberger and the collaborative mindset that ignites solutions and delivers performance for our customers. This evolved throughout the years from physical remote operational support centers to live operational support and control from wherever you are—on any device. Remote operations can reduce onsite personnel while improving access to experts, maintaining operation continuity, and reducing environmental impacts—factors which greatly accelerated adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote operations expanded by 25% in a matter of months across a range of services.

By providing better data access to customers and continuing to engage with them, we were able to help them not just maintain business continuity, but in many cases, increase efficiency and reduce environmental impact in a variety of field operations.

For example, in the Gulf of Mexico, secure remote capabilities delivered by OneSubsea® helped BP keep the Mad Dog 2 project on schedule. Using a suite of remote solutions, including remote customer-witness factory integration testing (FIT), a remote master control station, and integrated control and safety systems, OneSubsea was able to provide overviews of system functionality without requiring onsite witnessing. BP is now considering conducting all future FITs remotely, which would result in significant cost savings related to travel and further reduce operational risk.

An engineer stands alongside a truck equipped to provide autonomous wireline logging and the Performance Live digitally connected service.

REAL-TIME OPERATIONS CONTROL— FROM ANYWHERE AT ANY TIME

Performance Live* digitally connected service is an operating model that evolved over years of expertise, resulting in a safer work environment, higher efficiency operations, and improved customer performance.

Today, more than 60% of our operations are supported by Performance Live service, enabled from 21 Performance Live service centers worldwide covering 84 countries and all environments.

Drilling and intervention Performance Live service job statistics for 2020.

Focus on People

People are the pulse and spirit of Schlumberger. They bring our culture to life every day through their actions, and their achievement and growth are the cornerstone of our success. The adoption of the new structure and expanded remote capabilities accelerated several long-term people priorities. We piloted new flexible working models, advanced our goals on gender balance, and focused on developing the skills our people need to realize new strategic elements.

Flexible Work Models

Almost half the company worked remotely in 2020, and we took that opportunity to explore flexible working at scale. We initiated the BlueFLEX program to examine flexibility around how, when, and where we will work in the future, with the goal of enhancing employee experience and productivity, which will lead to improved business performance. At year end, ten pilot programs were ongoing in a mix of operations bases and technology centers to understand how flexible working will become a standard in the new normal.

Diversity & Inclusion

As we restructured, there was a systematic consideration for Diversity & Inclusion. Among thousands of position changes during the restructure—from executives to operations management—27% were filled by women. This helped improve our gender balance by 8% in 2020. Women now represent 22.6% of Schlumberger salaried employees worldwide.

Our current gender balance goal is to have women comprise 25% of our exempt workforce by 2025.

People Development

This year did not halt the growth of our employees. Using technology and evolving our capabilities has enabled our employees to continue their career growth, advance their skills, and continuously learn. Trainees who joined us during the pandemic were enrolled in the COVID-19 Protection Plan that enabled them to progress their training virtually while working from home. This is strategically important to our talent pipeline in the context of a dynamic business environment. Those assigned to new positions were also able to access virtual instructor-led training, online modules, and facilitated networking, accelerating their time to performance.

OUR PEOPLE VALUE

Exceptional people join us from around the world because of who we are—and then they make us what we are. Committed to customers, constantly learning and growing, we thrive on the world’s biggest technical challenges, wherever they are found. This is the pulse and spirit of Schlumberger.