Newalta

In all my years in the oil patch, I have never heard of company who worked harder to go out of business or who deserved it more. Absentee leadership, nepotist hiring and career advancement practices,  lack of funding for vital upkeep of day to day operations, corporate bullying, demoralizing and condescending treatment of operating staff and a constant "do as we say, not as we do" attitude on safety all played their parts.
Senior management prided themselves on teamwork and respect and building an open culture with little to no proof that any of those things existing in the company.
Under qualified managers and supervisors were promoted based on family/friendship connections and spent the majority of their time with their feet up on their desks or taking 3 sick days a week, leaving operations staff with no management support. 
HR set up a whistle blower hotline to report unsafe or unethical behaviour anonymously. Several individuals reported a manager who was well known for violating company policies on safety and bullying employees into breaking safety protocols and they were all rooted out and fired shortly afterwards. 
Major infrastructure projects were planned out and overseen by people with no engineering background on shoestring budgets, resulting in inefficient, poorly laid out and sometimes totally malfunctioning plant processes (not to mention millions of dollars wasted). 
Good medical benefits, paid holidays and lots of regular days off were the only things that kept most operations staff hanging on, but for me, they could no longer compensate for substandard pay and an increasingly toxic work environment. 
Happy to report that I now work at a job with real leadership and managerial support, better pay and which strives to follow industry standards on engineering and safety.

What is the best part of working at the company?
The best part of working at the company is that you usually are left to work alone so you learn to really depend on yourself to get the job done.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
The most stressful part about working at Newalta was that when the company introduced a new way of minimizing wasted drilling fluid and wasted saw dust used to mix off that wasted drilling fluid by use of what they called the Enviro-max. Which is simply a process used to grind course cutting into sand and the running that fluid through a series of centrifuges extracting literally dry sand from the drilling fluid and returning nearly 95% of drilling fluid back to the drilling rig. The office employees who came up with the process gave little to no support to the field employees who were responsible for bringing this concept to life on drilling rigs where a different process had been used since drilling for oil and gas started. the field supervisor was given no support dealing with disgruntled consultants or operators who just were not interested in doing more work for the same pay.  

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Very Poor.... No field support from office.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
There were several occasions where I was asked to spread out my overtime hours so my time sheet did not show that I worked at times 72 + hours without stopping

The management is very forward thinking and each hire is carefully selected because the company tries hard to be a very long term career for their employees.
Some divisions of the company (especially at the waste management facilties) work long hours but are paid well for it.
The benefits are great with 100% medical paid and christmas week off in addition to a standard 3 weeks vacation.  If you're lucky enough to be in the head office they have a non-profit restaurant (Siftons) that serves an ever changing menu of gourmet 5-star restaurant food at food court prices. Plus, the coffee and tea available throughout the office is free, organic and excellent.
There's a (free) fantastic company gym too that has top of the line exercise equipment, fresh towels and lunchtime exercise classes.
This isn't the highest paying company in terms of cash wages/hour in Calgary, but once you start enjoying the benefits offered you realize that you're getting paid generously in kind, without giving the taxman a share.

I enjoyed my 7.4 years at Newalta. I started in document control where I had to verify all incoming oilfield truck tickets for accuracy and then attach them into SAP for our invoicing team. The high volumes & attention to detail made me develop time management skills, internal / external customer service & important organizational skills.

My last 4 years at Newalta I was part of the invoicing team, I expanded my skills here and developed more internal / external communication, way more exposure to SAP which we used to correct invoices, enter data, update account information & roll out our invoice optimization program. I also worked alongside AR to make sure our monthly targets were being hit and any discrepancies on invoices were fixed.

This role also had me training new staff, keeping track of our KPI's, Task documentation and general administrative work.

I liked it there. it was stinky plant to work but good people. There junior manager was full of himself but ok at times. most management is ok. Co workers are good too. Great schedule, 1 week on 1 week off. Only bad part really was the admins. they were ok sometimes but often full of themselves and looked down on operators, They thought they were same level as management. They made mistakes often on payroll too. Newalta as a whole had a lot of admins and management that got bonus at year end but always short changed there plant operators. Even saying this though it was still a good place to work.

Drillsite Division

Poor Training, No tools when out on site due to guys not putting things back, or no tools at all, get hired to mix and load trucks, but have to load/unload product/ pipe, be the rigs helper for less than lease hand wage, get pushed hard all day having to deal with rig support and what you need to get done. Some days you'd be lucky to get to eat. Can charge by the km but after the fact only to closest hub.(ie: if your based out of Leduc and having to work near Grand Prairie only able to charge from GP. Lots of wear and tear on personal trucks.

A typical day of work would include:

-Entering truck tickets from surrounding Newalta (oilfield) facilitites into SAP software.
-Once tickets are entered into SAP, they are entered into ADP software.

-Sendingout daily load reports to customers. As well as constant contact with numerous customers

-Scanning, faxing, photocopying and filing

-I maintained great relationships with co-workers

-I gained alot of experience working for Newalta. Mostly a side of the oil and gas industy that I wasnt very educated about prior. I learned how to use SAP & ADP software and became very knowledgable in those areas.

A typical day at work included making rounds of the sight.   Unloading trucks and water blasting debris that become fixed to the inside of the tanks of the vacuum trucks.  House cleaning is an all day event no different then an attendant at a car wash washing off the pad or bay.  There was tank volumes to take oil to treat, and water to be de solidified and injected back into formation.  The culture was difficult as employees did more to compete with one another rather than work together.  Met some great people and got along great with the management.

Some days were really busy and more people were needed. I was trained by several good guys and was able to expand my knowledge and pass it on to the many new hires over the years. Management over all was pretty easy to talk too but were a little slow getting things done at times. I worked with a lot of good guys over the years but also some useless ones. I didn't find the job overly hard due to the fact that i am a quick learner, well organized and can perform multiple tasks at once. I really enjoyed the family atmosphere with my co-workers and the shifts.

Responsible for initiating contact with a potential customer, reviewing services that they offer and ensuring they meet the needs of there customers responsible for not only maintaining customer relations but also for ensuring they are competitive with our rates, special projects from corporate office which involved answering to many people working long hours,Working under pressure and High stress on day to day base

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