Ready for Shareholders Meeting
Overview
Photos
June 27, 2013
On June 28 Gazprom will receive the most important guests – on the last Friday of June the Company’s shareholders will traditionally gather at the headquarters for the annual meeting. The Company will report to the shareholders about last year’s operating results and discuss with them the plans for the next year. Gazprom is making very careful arrangements for greeting the shareholders. Apart from preparing numerous speeches and reports, much attention is paid to improving the premises. In this photo essay we will tell you how employees of Gazprom’s branch in charge of the Company’s corporate buildings are getting ready to receive guests.
The Gazprom headquarters occupy the territory widely spread over almost 81 thousand square meters – the total area approximately equals the size of eleven football fields. Half of the land is taken by seven office buildings.
The remaining 40 thousand square meters is covered with flowerbeds and lawns as well as pavements and parking lots taken care of by a total of 120 gardeners and yard-keepers.
The employees engaged in land and site improvement are busy all year round, but on the threshold of the General Shareholders Meeting there is a lot more work to do.
People who are in charge of cleaning and improving the territory start their working day earlier than other Gazprom’s employees.
For example, the gardeners (they are called groundskeepers at Gazprom) start their shift at 8 am. The groundskeepers take care of all the lawns, flowerbeds and flower gardens at Gazprom’s premises.
Evgeny Ivanov and Stanislav Sedykh are the jacks-of-all-trades. They plant flowers, mow lawns, trim bushes, remove weeds and protect plant from diseases…
… and water flowerbeds. A team leader assigns daily tasks to gardeners.
Today groundskeeper Sergei Zhurkov is busy mowing the grass.
He has been engaged in improving Gazprom’s premises for five years already and has tried all kinds of jobs: mowing the lawns, trimming the bushes, planting and replanting the shrubs.
Following Sergei is Elena Solonichenko washing the rest of the cut grass off the flowerbed fences.
Meanwhile, their colleagues Irina Tkachyova and Alexander Tarabarin are shaping barberry bushes that form the hedge, weeding the flowerbeds as well as gravel paths connecting them and watering the vegetation.
Evgeny Ivanov whom we have already met is in charge of the sprinkler system. He selects a suitable location to set up the sprinkler equipment depending on the size of the lawn and the types of plants that need watering, and sets the relevant operation mode. The simulated rain is pouring down on the lawn for about an hour, and afterwards Evgeny relocates the sprinkler equipment to another flowerbed.
Unlike lawns, flowerbeds and coppices are watered manually. However, watering pots are not used anymore at Gazprom.
They were replaced by more advanced technologies – hoses connected to a 500-liter water tank enabling the gardeners to water several lawns without the refilling.
Special hose caps turn a water spray into the lightest water cloud making it possible to pour even the most fragile flowers.
Tractor driver Igor Anachko helps the gardeners water the flowers in the daytime and washes pavements during his night shift. In winter tractor drivers remove the snow from pavements instead of wet cleaning.
Broad pavements and access roads provide enough space for large sprinkler trucks.
The street cleaning fleet is rather diverse.
A whole team of landscape gardeners works on the landscape design of Gazprom’s premises. They define the style of lawns and flowerbeds for the next year.
The layout changes every year, but the style is always the same. Landscape gardeners favor bright small petunias, New Guinea balsam, marigold, cineraria and roses. They easily adjust to the Moscow climate and bloom till autumn if properly taken care of. In spring the flowerbeds are adorned with tulips instead of summer flowers, and barberry bushes serve as a hedge.
Gardeners come to work both in summer heat and winter frost. In fine summer weather they shape bushes and do the watering; when it is raining they remove weeds.
In autumn gardeners plant tulips for beautiful spring blooms, in winter they help the yard-keepers clean the snow and winterize the bushes.
The site improvement team helps the gardeners keep the premises clean and tidy.
Every day Nadezhda Khruleva washes the banisters, polishes up the handrails, cleans the stairs and doors of the buildings removing dust and dirt.
On the threshold of the General Shareholders Meeting, a crew of plumbers was also engaged in the site improving activities. On weekdays Valery Makarov and Dmitry Kulagin maintain water supply systems at the Company’s headquarters; but now, before the guests arrive, they help paint hatches to ensure protection from corrosion.
Here is another ‘employee’ at the Gazprom headquarters :-).
Painters are also hard at work before the forthcoming General Shareholders Meeting. In order to save time Olga Ishutina even takes a bite without getting off the rolling tower.
A day before Gazprom’s milestone event of the year Olga and her colleagues Tatiana Korotkaya and Valery Ivshin were given a task to renew the paint on the staircase the shareholders would walk on to the Meeting hall.
Another team working near the painters is assembling a layout of Gazprom’s Olympic sports and infrastructure venues in Krasnaya Polyana.
At the Shareholders Meeting the layout will be publicly displayed for the first time. It is planned that the layout will stay at the Moscow office of Gazprom till autumn and three months later it will be displayed at the International Forum in Sochi. The Olympic capital will then become the place of its permanent residence.
It took the architects three months to create a layout 4.5 meters long and 2 meters wide: a month to collect the detailed data and two more – to reconstruct the exact land topography. Another difficulty of this work was that the architects had to glue 7 thousand firs and other trees to the layout by hand.
Delivering a 400-kilogram layout to the place of the Meeting even by taking it to two pieces was not an easy task either – it didn’t fit in the door, so it had to be brought in through the window.
The window sash was unhinged and after the layout was brought in, they put it back in its place.
The cleaning ladies also work in a state of red alert before the Shareholders Meeting.
They wash walls and columns inside the buildings and clean the carpets.
One floor up the registration for the Shareholders Meeting is already underway. Right now there are not so many people who would like to register. The main rush is expected on the day of the Meeting, of course.
Gazprom engages professional climbers in window cleaning – not everyone is able to clean the windows of the Company’s headquarters.
A 135-meter tall 35-storey building once was considered the tallest one in Moscow and received a nickname ‘the tower’.
Cleaning ladies are the first to come to work in Gazprom not only on the threshold of the Meeting, but on weekdays as well. Their shift starts at 6 am. And while the majority of Gazprom’s employees only start waking up, the cleaning ladies are already getting their offices ready for the working day: they dust the tables, mop the floor in the offices and clean the carpeting in the corridors.
Lyubov Kolbasina is responsible for cleaning the eighth floor in the sixth building. Two colleagues help Lyubov make it in three hours’ time – the majority of employees come to work at 9 am. When the office is filled with employees, the cleaning ladies keep staircases, rails, utility rooms, toilets and elevators clean.
Lyubov considers cleaning an important task – her thirteen-year experience shows that sometimes people absentmindedly forget or throw away valuable things, that’s why she is mindful of her work. Her devotion to duty didn’t even let her take a day-off on her anniversary – she celebrated her 50th birthday at work.
Although all the Gazprom’s employees are very busy on the threshold of the Shareholders Meeting, the life of the Company is in full swing. When we were shooting our report on June 26, the winners of the corporate contest among PR services of the Company’s subsidiaries were honored here. We dropped by the Conference Hall during the full rehearsal of the awarding ceremony.
In the evening the announcer will put on a black tuxedo and a bow-tie, and now he may take the liberty to wear a more relaxed outfit.
This is a picture from the ‘future’. The jury chose the contest winners in different nominations. Alexey Miller, Chairman of the Gazprom Management Committee awarded the best ones.
In this photo essay we told you about the work of only a part of those employees who are responsible for site improving activity at the Company’s headquarters. Electricians, plumbers, mechanics and many others also contribute to it. Their meticulous work is hidden from the eyes, but the results are evident for everyone.