Oil, gas & energy
Oil & Gas Texting: Every Rig, Crew Change & New Hire in One Shared Inbox
HR, safety, and operations text hands, shop hands, and drivers from your company numbers. Each team sees its own conversations, and none of them live on a personal phone.
Keep your phone system. Just add texting.
“Calls and email don’t work for our rig workers. MessageDesk makes it easy for our HR to send texts for everything from onboarding to benefits.”
Alex S. · VP HR, Energy Services Company
Texting today
Hands, shop hands, and drivers don’t check company email. So who’s texting them, and from which phone?
Texting from a company cell?
The HR phone or the rig phone gets handed from person to person. When it’s off or on someone’s nightstand, nobody else sees what came in.
Texting from personal phones?
Recruiters and coordinators text crews from their own cells, with drafts saved in a notes app. When one of them is out sick, nobody knows where things stand.
Is the yard or office line textable?
Crews have the office number saved, but it only takes calls. So they text whoever’s cell number they have.
Blasting from a mass-text tool?
The update goes out, but replies come back to a tool nobody watches, or to a group text where every hand sees every number.
Rigs & field crews
Every text has an owner, from crew change to the last fuel run of the night.
5:10 a.m. · Crew change
A floorhand texts the rig line that his truck’s down on the lease road. The coordinator on shift holds the night crew over and replies.
10:30 a.m. · Pre-employment
A candidate texts a photo of his signed consent form. The recruiter who owns his thread books his drug screen for the next morning.
12:20 p.m. · Lunch break
A well service hand texts HR about his benefits card. The answer’s waiting when he checks his phone, so he can get back to work.
8:40 p.m. · After hours
A fuel driver texts that the gate at a well pad is locked. A Relay assigns it to the on-call dispatcher, who sends the gate code.
Field ops & crew changes
When a hand can’t make crew change, the coordinator on shift already has it.
Crews text each rig’s or yard’s number, and everyone working that line sees the same threads. Nobody waits on whoever has the rig phone.
Every text on a rig line has an owner.
A Relay assigns texts on each rig’s line to the coordinator on shift and labels them by rig, so everyone can see who has it.
Ops talks it through without the crew seeing.
Internal comments and @mentions sit right in the thread, so the relief plan gets sorted without a side call.
Incident texts go straight to safety.
When a text contains “incident,” a Relay assigns your safety lead and posts the report to your safety channel. See safety & training →
Hiring & pre-employment
Candidates answer texts, so pre-employment stops waiting on callbacks.
Recruiters text applicants from a company number about screens, physicals, paperwork, and start dates. The rest of HR can see where every candidate stands.
Every candidate has one recruiter.
Assign each applicant’s thread to the recruiter working it. When that recruiter’s out, anyone on the team can pick it up.
Appointment texts go out the same way every time.
Save drug screen, physical, and orientation texts as shared templates, with their name filled in and the PDF or link attached.
Reminders arrive the night before.
Schedule each text for when it should arrive, so nobody has to remember to send it at 6 p.m.
“When I started here, it was taking a month and a half to almost two months to get someone cleared through pre-employment. Within four months after I got MessageDesk, I literally had that whittled down to less than 24 hours.”
HR leader · US drilling and well service company
HR updates & benefits
Benefits and policy updates reach the hands who never open email.
Send one update to every rig, division, or role that needs it. The floorhand gets the same message the rig manager does.
Pick crews by rig, division, or role.
Text everyone with a label or saved filter at once. Each person gets their own copy and never sees anyone else’s number.
You can tell who got the word.
A Relay labels every “ACK” reply as Acknowledged. Each message also shows delivered or failed.
Open enrollment runs on a schedule.
Schedule reminders ahead of the deadline, with the plan PDF or enrollment link attached. Questions come back as private conversations with HR.
Lines & access
HR’s conversations stay with HR, and each rig sees its own crews.
Give HR, each rig or yard, and fuel dispatch their own numbers, in the US and Canada. Then set who can see and send on every line, person by person.
A medical or termination text isn’t in everyone’s feed.
Give each teammate Owner, Editor, Viewer, or No Access on every line, so ops never scrolls through HR’s threads.
Each rig sees only its own crews.
Custom roles limit each teammate to the lines and labels their job calls for. Managers can see every line in one place.
HR can run in its own workspace.
When HR needs separate contact lists and reporting, keep it in its own workspace under the same company account and switch without signing out.
Systems sync
Crew lists stay current when hands change rigs, phones, or companies.
Sync employees from your HR system with custom fields like rig, division, position, and status. Saved filters pick up the right crew every time.
Nobody texts a hand who’s already gone.
Keep a status field like Active, On leave, or Terminated. Saved filters only pick up the people who should get the text.
New hires get orientation details on their first day.
When a hire’s status changes to Active, a Relay texts where to report and what to bring, with their name filled in.
Your HR system stays the system of record.
MessageDesk keeps only the fields your team needs to text the right people, and can send each conversation back by webhook.
Records & compliance
When someone says nobody reached out, the thread shows who did.
Pull the whole thread.
Export any conversation as a PDF with timestamps, internal comments, and photos inline, or export message history as a CSV. No more pulling texts off phones.
Opt-outs are tracked for you.
When someone replies STOP, MessageDesk records it and blocks texts to that number in the background.
The history stays with the business.
Texts stay on your business numbers when people leave. Only teammates with Owner access to a line can delete messages.
For your IT team: MessageDesk is a SOC 2 Type II-certified platform with role-based access controls and Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on. See security & compliance →
Phone numbers
Add texting to the numbers crews already have saved, in the US and Canada.
Most crews already have the yard or office number in their phone. Text-enable it, and calls stay on your phone system.
Texting US numbers starts with our guided carrier registration, and we review it before it goes to carriers. Canadian numbers can text Canadian crews before you register.
Landline or VoIP number
Turn on texting for the numbers you already use for calling.
Google Voice number
Port it to MessageDesk and keep texting on the same number.
A new number
Pick a local number in the US or Canada for a new rig, yard, or HR line.
Your Twilio account
Connect your existing Twilio numbers to MessageDesk.
Teams in oil, gas & energy
See the setup for the team you run.
Additional resources
More on texting rig crews and field hires.
How Oil and Gas Companies Text Field Crews Who Don’t Use Email
How oil and gas teams handle recruiting, scheduling, and HR updates by text in one shared inbox.
Read more
Employee Text Messaging System: A Guide for Operations & HR
Guide to using employee text messaging systems to communicate with employees and staff.
Read more
How Staffing Teams Use Text to Apply at Scale
Guide to texting software for recruiting and text to apply, plus recruiting text message examples.
Read moreOil and gas texting questions.
No. They text your number the way they text anyone. No download, no login, and no company email needed. Your team works the texts from a browser or the MessageDesk mobile app.
No. Your phone provider keeps handling calls, and MessageDesk handles texting on the same number. Nothing changes for the people who call you.
Yes. Give HR its own line and set who can see it, person by person. If HR needs its own contact lists and reporting too, run it in a separate workspace under the same company account.
Yes. Text from US and Canadian numbers in one workspace. Canadian numbers can text Canadian crews right away, and texting US numbers starts with our guided carrier registration.
The text waits and arrives when the phone reconnects, often at camp or on a town run. For sites with no coverage at all, radio or satellite is the answer, not texting.
Sync employees from your HR system or a sheet with a status field like Active, On leave, or Terminated. Saved filters only pick up the people who are still active.
Yes. Bring employees in through Zapier, webhooks, or a CSV import, with custom fields like rig, division, and position. Your HR system stays the system of record.
Every text shows delivered or failed, and you can export the thread as a PDF or CSV with timestamps. Delivered means the carrier confirmed it, not that it was read. Only teammates with Owner access to a line can delete messages.
Once you submit our guided carrier registration, approval typically takes one to three business days. Getting your website and privacy policy right first keeps a resubmission from restarting the clock.
Not yet. WhatsApp is coming soon to the same shared inbox. Today, MessageDesk sends and receives texts, photos, and PDFs over SMS and MMS.
Get every rig, crew, and new-hire text into one inbox.
See your rig lines, HR line, and crews set up in MessageDesk in a 20-minute demo.
No annual contract on Team or Pro. See pricing