(Employee) Anxiety deepens as reality sets in at BP

[Robbien]

At BP's sprawling campus in suburban Sunbury-on-Thames and even in the elegant halls of its corporate headquarters in St James's Square, Mayfair, the realisation that the company was in deep trouble set in only about a week ago, two months after the deadly explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite a barrage of news stories and internal e-mails from Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, who almost immediately left for Houston, and meetings led by the long-time chief financial officer Byron Grote, employees felt relatively unaffected "like ostriches with their heads in the sand", as one person described it.

But that sentiment has been replaced by one of fear and shock following BP's recent announcement that it was cutting three quarters of this year's dividend payments and establishing a $20bn (£13bn) claims fund. That quantified for the first time the magnitude of BP's problems. Members of one BP team well versed in the challenges of raising finance wept when they heard the news.

In the following days, anxiety has grown about possible job cuts. Decisions over discretionary spending on anything from laptops to hiring contractors have ground to a halt as middle managers wait for direction from higher ranks.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/363dfbd6-7d97-11df-a0f5-00144feabdc0.html

Their thought process probably went something like this:
What's one more spill. We had them before, we have them again. Where's our bonus?
What, you are cutting the dividend?
You mean we have to clean up our mess? Why? We've never had to do so before.
Huh? It's just a spill, what's the fuss all about. We're BP for goodness sake.