Baku, Sept 12.
When a former deputy vice president of SOCAR publicly questions the direction of the company’s reforms, it deserves attention.
In a widely shared LinkedIn post, Rovshan Fatullayev contends that headcount in the state oil company’s HR curation unit at headquarters now exceeds – by several multiples – the number of people working directly in production. For a firm whose core mandate is to extract national resources and generate value for the economy, he argues, that ratio is hard to defend.
Fatullayev’s critique is pointed: in his view, you don’t increase output by expanding HR oversight; you increase it by investing in rigs, maintenance, and field reliability. Spreadsheets and performance reviews, he suggests, are no substitute for wellhead performance.
This is not an indictment of HR as a function, but of a reform trajectory that, in his telling, fattens bureaucracy faster than it strengthens operations.
Why does that matter beyond office politics? Because SOCAR is not just another employer; it is a pillar of Azerbaijan’s fiscal and industrial architecture. If administrative layers multiply faster than barrels, the company risks higher unit costs, slower decisions, and talent misallocation – with fewer manat flowing from the wellhead to the state budget and the wider non-oil economy.
Every extra approval in Baku can translate into a delayed workover on a platform, an extended outage at a gathering station, or a missed drilling window. In a volatile price environment, those frictions are expensive.
What clarity would look like. SOCAR could quickly settle the debate by disclosing headcount by function and showing how those numbers have changed through the reform period. If the corporate center has grown to enable the front line, the link should be demonstrable in performance data.
The metrics are standard across the industry: operating cost per barrel of oil equivalent; production per field employee; unplanned downtime; drilling and completion cycle times; and HSE leading indicators such as near-miss reporting and total recordable incident rates.
If those KPIs are moving decisively in the right direction, the case for a larger headquarters becomes stronger. If not, Fatullayev’s warning looks less like nostalgia and more like diagnosis.
Lean where you can, strong where you must. There is a practical path to trimming bureaucracy without weakening essential controls: digitize routine HR (payroll, timekeeping, training records, recruiting workflows) so a smaller team can manage a larger workforce; map processes to cut redundant approvals; and cap the ratio of headquarters staff to field personnel so overhead grows only in step with operations. The point is not to declare war on HR, but to retool it as a quiet enabler of the people who actually move molecules.
Governance matters, too. An independent efficiency review – looking at spans of control, procurement lead times, and the true cost of compliance – would give SOCAR’s board a baseline and the public a benchmark.
Incentives should do the rest: tie a meaningful share of senior compensation to field KPIs, not just paper compliance or budget absorption. If production reliability rises and safety improves while costs fall, everyone wins. If they don’t, leadership should feel it first.
Fatullayev closes by reminding readers that this is not only an internal debate. SOCAR’s performance is a matter of state interest; its reform story is, in effect, a national productivity story. Azerbaijan does not need a company that looks modern on paper but tries to lift output with spreadsheets. It needs reforms that show up in the field – in fewer shutdowns, cleaner safety records, faster turnarounds, more efficient wells.
Attribution & right of reply. This analysis is based on Fatullayev’s public LinkedIn post; we have not independently verified his headcount claims. SOCAR has not publicly commented on his assertions. If the company issues a statement or publishes updated metrics, we will update this article.
