Cenovus reviews

Salary: Salaries were pretty good when I started with the company 10 years ago, but Cenovus employees have not seen a cost of living increase to their salaries in the past 5 years. Consequently, for your average “worker bee” the salaries cannot really be considered to be that great or competitive with our peers any longer. There are also a lot of rumors that after the looming 2018 layoffs that salaries and bonuses will still need to be cut to reduce the G&A to the level promised to shareholders by the previous CEO. These rumors were for the most part rooted in the very negative message to employees via INC. (Internal Company Website) by the COB earlier in 2017. L.T.I.’s: In reality, these actually no longer exist. The multipliers for our PSU’s have been so small in the past few years that these are inconsequential. Benefits: When employees say that the Benefits are good, I don’t think they have had to use them since July 1, 2017, as the Benefits were slashed to the bone at that point. We are now at the lowest benefits tier that Sunlife offers and the few benefits we do have, we pay dearly for. The ability to buy vacation with “Cenovus Benefit $” is now so expensive that for a lot of employees the purchasing of additional vacation is no longer an option. A few years ago, I was able to purchase 2 weeks’ vacation, the Enhanced Benefits and both Life and Disability insurance and still have some of my “Cenovus Benefit $’s ” go into my contribution portion of the Company Savings. As of July 1st, 2017 to purchase 2 weeks’ vacation, the barebones Basic Benefits and minimal Life and Disability insurance cost me over $3000.00, so no, the benefits at Cenovus are no longer even close to being good. Work/Life Balance: Not as great as some people would lead you to believe. Cenovus has a 30 minute longer base workday than most of our peers. The Calgary Cenovus staff are required to put in a minimum of 40 hour/week base + and additional 2.5 hours for our EDO’s for a total of 42.5 hours/week. Whereas our peers at CNRL, Suncor and Husky put in a 37.5 hour/week base + 2.5 hours for their EDO’s for a total of 40 hours/week. I think for a lot of the senior professionals, the term “Worklife Balance” should be replaced here at Cenovus by the term “Work/Life Integration”. We have lost so many staff to workforce reductions (3 rounds of layoffs @ 600+ so far, with another 700 looming in early 2018) that the workload for most has increased dramatically; leaving the only way to get it all done is by working from home using the MyVPN connection. Cenovus traded our 1st and 3rd Fridays (which we worked back 100%) for a summer schedule of Fridays off and an extended Christmas break. I for one still do not like this arrangement. The company said they had to do this to restore faith in the Investment community because the shareholders wanted the employees to suffer along with them. I think what the Investment community would have preferred is to not have their investment dollars squandered by the Cenovus Executives on the Conoco deal. Work Environment/Employee Morale: The morale of the average Cenovus employee has suffered irreparable damage. The work environment can be summed up in a single word, depressing….and getting worse. This is a direct result of the looming staff reductions of yet another 700 employees. Do not believe for a moment that these additional staff reduction are to be blamed on current commodity pricing, these reductions are a direct result of the crippling/horrible Conoco Deal. What is very disheartening to me is that the previous CEO got to keep his pride in tact by being “Retired Off” with a very lucrative package while making life very stressful and difficult for the average employee. I feel shame should be put everyone on the Board and the Executive team that had anything to do with the extirpation of Cenovus, it used to be such a great company.