A Day at Outpost

by Sheila Young

  I’m on my way to Costa to get the team their coffees. I bump into an old friend. We exchange some pleasantries. He asks me if I’m still working for Outpost. I say, ‘yes, I am’ and he goes on to say, ‘you produce that newsletter and organise coffee mornings, don’t you.’ ‘Something like that,’ I reply, smiling to myself at the inadequacy of his description of my work. Yet I don’t put him right. I head off towards the coffee shop thinking about Outpost and how difficult it is to put a price on the value that we add to the company... and then my mind wanders and I start to think about many of the situations I’ve had to deal with over the months and years at Outpost.

  She sits in front of me, this young woman. I listen to her. She’s telling me of her hopes – the sort of job she wants to get here in Aberdeen. She has just graduated and is desperate to find work. We’re in the middle of a recession and it has started to hit Aberdeen quite hard. It’s normally not that hard to find work here as a partner, depending on how fussy you are about what you want to do, but lately it’s been getting harder. I know of a number of partners who have been looking now for more than 6 months. This is not going to be easy.

  I ask her about her past and try to establish how it is she has come to be at this particular place at this particular time in her life. She doesn’t just need to think about the here and now, she needs to consider the future. Has she thought, I ask her, about what will happen when this posting comes to an end? Will she go anywhere in the world? What does she want out of life? What if she can’t find a job? What will she do then? I know that failed assignments are costly to the company and costly to relationships. It’s important to think ahead. As we work through all these thoughts and she carefully considers the questions, she says she feels she needs to work wherever she goes; needs to have a purpose. We talk about how realistic it is to want to work in her particular field in some of the other countries Shell is operating in. She realises it is harder than she first thought. And so I ask her if she can do anything else? It turns out she can. As I listen to her, my mind drifts back 25 years and I see myself sitting in Assen. It’s 1984 and I am fairly recently graduated, searching for work . I’m quite concerned as I’m told by a fairly senior Shell person on a cultural awareness training course that ‘Shell wives don’t work.’ However, in my head I hear the words ringing out, ‘Well this is one who will.’ And in fact, ‘this one’ did. Everywhere. It wasn’t always easy, but now that I’m sitting here I realise that the difficulties I went through put me in a unique position to help others. I completely understand where this young woman is coming from. I have been there. I know how hard it can be, but I have managed to overcome them and I can share this with her. If I can do it, so can she

  After 25 years as a Shell partner I know that there are certain people who can manage this lifestyle and others who can’t. I also know that there are many who can manage one or perhaps two postings, but far fewer who can go the whole haul of a lifetime on the move. I have already decided which category she falls into. It took just a few minutes. She will succeed. She has what Simon Cowell would call the X factor. She is vibrant, enterprising, open to ideas, willing to diversify... yes, she will do well whatever she does.

  I give her some ideas of agencies to register with and off she goes. Once she has gone I start thinking about my contacts. Who do I know with an insight into jobs in her field? I send out a couple of emails and some replies come back suggesting companies and personal contacts. This is what she needs. I send them on to her. I wonder how her story will end. Of course, I don’t know for sure it will end with a job but I am fairly confident it will end successfully. I log off the computer and head for home.

... just another ordinary day at Outpost.

  She talks. I listen. Again, those questions need to be asked. ‘What do you want out of life?’ There are lots of complications. They come from a country where it would not be easy for her husband to find a job in the oil industry. We talk for an hour. In my mind it seems that very little is resolved. I have shared my experiences as a working partner and as a mother. But she goes away feeling happier realising that there is a lot that is good to give up if she gives up now. I’m not sure how the outcome for this one will be, but I think it will be positive.

  Back to my computer screen. Notification of a new arrival. A single employee coming from India. I send our standard welcome email to him and almost instantly get one back. He is happy to make contact and he has lots of questions, mainly about the climate and about how to get involved in sport in Aberdeen. I write back reassuring him that after the initial shock of a North European Maritime climate he will get used to it. I tell him I had to deal with the opposite when I lived in SE Asia. Now I miss the heat. I also reassure him that he will be able to continue his sport here.

  I log his details and add his email address to our email database. We now have almost 300 Shell employees and Shell partners on our email database. We send out regular emails informing people about what’s on, what the current issues are in Scotland. We explain festivals, let them know about new shops and restaurants... We just keep in touch. One of our partners told me one day how much these emails mean to her. She apologised for her ‘poor English’ and gesturing with her arms, tells me our emails are like a ‘warm hug’. She doesn’t feel so alone. There are moments when all of us know why we are doing a job, and this was mine.

  We also use the database to help us answer our enquiries and that was what I was about to do now, because one had just come in. One of our partners was looking for someone to teach her some basic French. I send out an email asking if anyone has experience of teaching French. I never fail to be amazed at the level of expertise out there in our Shell community. Perhaps some replies will come in tomorrow. I log off. It’s time to go home.

... just another ordinary day at Outpost.

  Pleasingly there are several responses to the request for the French teacher, so I follow these up and pass them on. The next email is from an employee looking for information on Malaysia. I get back to him asking some further questions so that I can deal more effectively with his enquiry. He has two children and needs to know about schooling there. It’s a big decision to go and he wants to make sure it’s the right decision. He arranges to visit the Outpost office later that day.

  At 1pm a newly arrived Shell partner calls in for a chat and a coffee. She has just returned home to Scotland from Malaysia. Some minutes later the employee arrives. I see a great opportunity here to put these two people together. After all, she can give him up-to-the minute information and can share her own experiences. I check first that each is happy to speak to the other and I also check that she has enjoyed her time in Malaysia. I know from experience how off putting it can be if someone has had a bad experience in a location. They meet. I sit back and listen. I learn a lot. He learns a lot. He feels reassured that this posting will work out for them.

  They leave, hopefully satisfied, and I turn my attention to the next enquiry. A teacher qualified to teach in Australia wants to know if she will be able to teach here. If she can’t, they won’t come. I find the relevant website for the Teaching Council and send this off to her. It explains very clearly the steps she needs to take to teach in Scotland. I also tell her that she needs police clearance from where she has previously lived if she wants to work in this field in Scotland.

  I take a phone call from a partner in Norway. Their children are at the British School there. She wants to know the differences between the ‘British’ system and the Scottish system. I explain those differences . One child is the same age as one of mine was when we moved here. We talk about the adjustments my child had to make moving from the NZ system to the Scottish one and how preparing one’s child for ‘gaps in knowledge’ helps a lot. I wish someone had told me that at the time. My son went from being very able in his Maths class in NZ to feeling he was stupid here. In fact, he just had some gaps in his knowledge, knew more about some things, less about others. It took about 3 months and with extra help from us and his teachers, he readjusted. I tell her to read the education section of our website and encourage her to call back if she has any other concerns. Time to go home.

... just another ordinary day at Outpost.

  I give a talk about Outpost on the Welcome to Shell Week for new graduates. I talk about Outpost and how we help them for the duration of their time here in Aberdeen and also how we assist their partners. At the end a young man comes up to me and asks if it matters that his partner is not here with him in Aberdeen. I tell him that it doesn’t matter to us where she is and that if she is important to him then she is important to us also. He tells me that she has just graduated with a degree in Biological Sciences, wants to be with him but fears she won’t find a job in Aberdeen. I give him my email address and tell him to ask her to contact me directly. I tell him I can’t find her a job but I can point her in the right direction. He thanks me and says he doesn’t think he’ll be happy here if she doesn’t join him. This transports me back to Assen and my own search for a job. It took me 6 months to find work there and I was on the point of going back to Scotland. Commuting was the last thing we wanted but I knew I couldn’t sit there doing nothing all day every day. It is very tough. It has got harder I think, since virtually everyone I see now who is under 35 wants to work.

  Back at the office a call has come in from a partner whose husband has just secured a job in Brunei. She wants to come and talk about it as she has never lived abroad before and knows that life will be very different there. One of my team has lived on a camp before so they get chatting about that. I come in when she brings up the subject of maids and drivers. I tell her I had a maid and a driver in Bangkok and we talk about the mistakes you can make as a ‘westerner’ by trying to befriend your maid and driver. I made the mistake of trying to bring my egalitarian Scottish principIes to bear on a highly hierarchical South East Asian society and it just didn’t work. As a result we lost our first maid and driver very swiftly. However, our second maid and driver stayed with us till we left.

  A call comes in. It’s from a partner. She thinks they will have to move and her children have already lived in three countries and gone through three education systems. She fears that another move will be detrimental to them, particularly in terms of their education. I have had exactly these fears. I watched with some degree of envy as my children’s cousins moved from primary school to secondary school in the same city with apparent ease, while my daughter moved from an Australian pre- school, to a Montessori system in Bangkok, then on to complete her primary education in New Zealand, and then a further move to Scotland for her secondary education. I wondered what effect all this would have on her. Surely it couldn’t be good? I don’t think it was until she filled in her UCAS form for university entry that I, and in fact she, understood what this lifestyle had been able to give her. Her exam results had been good, possibly not as good as they might have been had she had educational stability, but it was her personal statement which set her apart. What an amazing life she had lead. It’s very easy to think of the deficit all the time, to think what you’re taking away from your children. Sometimes we need to focus more on what we’re giving them and stop beating ourselves up over it. She agrees and goes off feeling better.

... just another ordinary day at Outpost.

  A new team member starts. The next few weeks will be ‘slow’ as I train her. The most important part of the training is not learning how to operate our enquiry database, nor yet learning how to answer the many questions we are asked. No, the most important part of the training is learning how to respond to the people who we come into contact with. If you adopt a ‘treat others the way you would wish to be treated’ approach you cannot go wrong and that’s what I try to instill into everyone who has ever worked at Outpost. The person in front of you is vitally important. The enquiry they bring to you and the set of problems they present with are vitally important to them and should be to you too. You need to take time with people. If you do so, the rewards are very high.

Just another ordinary day at Outpost? I don’t think so. There are no ordinary days at Outpost, only extraordinary ones and that’s because we deal with extraordinary people.

Please note: Outpost Aberdeen deals solely with enquiries from Shell employees and their families, worldwide.  All information provided by us is based on the personal experiences of Outpost's worldwide client base. While we take every care to make sure that the information is up to date and correct, we cannot accept any liability for damages directly or indirectly resulting from our services.