Shell voted the “best Company to work for” ? Pull the other one.

Huzzah!. Shell is the best employer to work for in the whole country!.

Some very big favours must have been called in to achieve this masterpiece in corporate spin.

After an ignominious retreat out of Cape Town to their main markets in Gauteng, Shell is now a sorry rump of what it once was.

After some initial disasters in trying to persuade staff that “going north are good”, Shell managed to shed at least 40% of its Cape Town workforce in this cunning move. Insiders believe that this was simply a good triple header stratagem to shed unneeded staff while at the same time down-sizing and relocating. And, by the way, everybody that stayed also took hefty pay-cuts because they were “re-graded”. Sounds like win, win, win, win,win for the those weasel-minded boys and girls that print “Human Resource Practitioner” on their business cards.

And then these same really very clever people found that they were unable to replace the lost talent in Johannesburg. So they hired busloads of very, very expensive expats to Johannesburg.It's called a “hardship posting”and that comes with barrel-loads of cash attached. Maybe the research only covered these expats who are laughing all the way to the bank and have every right to be thankful to Shell.

And here’s the kicker: Spigot hears that there are some very senior managers who insist on keeping their bases in Cape Town and who have simply refused to relocate. Result? Some really heavy bills from SAA and a new lifestyle known as “weekender family” life. So much for work-life balance.

With all of this going on Spigot can only conclude that the Shell HR department did a sweet-heart deal with the research house because this really does not sound like such a wonderful place to work.

And it yet again goes to show that if you want to really screw up a company big-time – hire non-productive, devious and value-sucking “HR Practitioners” (AKA the Corporate KGB).