#layoffs

Friends, I've been at ADP for about 20 years. I've noticed that the most common time for them to do layoffs is the last two weeks of June (right before the start of the new fiscal year). So if we make to July 1, we're probably ok, at least for a little while.

The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week ~ NYTimes.
June 22, 2026

When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full time and have banned remote and hybrid work.

Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.

Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind of a big deal. We found that the higher chief executives scored on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by becoming chairmen of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. These were the chief executives who made the most negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the first two years of the pandemic.

The connection between narcissistic personality traits and wanting people in the office full time is not coincidental — it’s causal. In one experiment, we got leaders to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs as Apple’s chief executive and Larry Ellison as Oracle’s. After participating in that exercise, leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.

None of this is to say that individual leaders who reject remote work are necessarily egomaniacs. Many factors influence workplace policies around flexibility. But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a dr-g — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.

When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control. Leaders can’t intimidate by hovering over cubicle desks and slamming doors. They can’t establish their dominance by summoning people to a conference room and pounding their fists on the table. They can’t even make direct eye contact to stare people down.

Remote work also prevents leaders from basking in the glow of employee reverence. Instead of standing out in the corner office, leaders are lost in a sea of equal squares on a screen. Instead of rapt attention, they’re met online with boredom, fatigue and interruptions from partners, children and pets. Instead of being showered with immediate gratification, they get glitchy facial expressions and delayed replies. Sycophantic reassurances from employees just don’t have the same effect if they’re on Slack.
Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on site five days a week.

Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.

There are limits to the benefit of flexible office policies. Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week. They can use a day or two at home to focus on individual deep work and reserve the rest of the week for communication and collective problem-solving. It’s well documented that too much togetherness breeds groupthink (not to mention germs). When we spend some time apart, we actually generate more innovative ideas and make smarter decisions.

Hybrid work does have its own challenges for leaders. It’s not fun to try to inspire through a recorded video message or lead a brainstorming session on a digital whiteboard. But to maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly flexible world, it’s time for leaders to put their egos aside and master the art of managing from afar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-bosses.html?s

I agree with some of your comments; however, people over 60 do not qualify for Social Security until 65 unless they take reductions, and they also do not qualify for Medicare benefits until 65. Therefore, I think it’s unfair to expect older workers to give up an income for someone else. Everyone is in the same boat, dealing with different life circumstances, and we all have to make very difficult decisions. Having to sacrifice for "younger" employees should not be another factor in that decision.

I have been working all my life, and I don't really have any retirement funds. I receive $1,350 per month from Social Security and $2,000 per month from Centene. Meanwhile, I pay $3,500 monthly for my mortgage, plus car insurance, electricity, water, food, etc. Each month I short, so I must withdraw money from my retirement account to make my monthly payments. Every time I do, I get hit with a stiff penalty of $400 to $600 just to access my own funds.

They are asking us (the foot soldiers) to retire, but the fat cats are not required to do so. Sarah London gets $20 million per year plus bonuses, commissions, and other perks. I work from home, and back when Neidorff was the CEO, we got paid for our internet, received bonuses, and earned salaries for hitting our monthly goals.

I am not going to retire voluntarily—they must fire me! I am a good, responsible worker with an excellent education and extensive experience. I bring much more than just labor to the company: I bring ethics, the satisfaction of a job well done, and a genuine appreciation for our members. Get out the fat cats who are destroying Centene!

This is very sad that most of the companies are adapting to new tech like AI and laying off due to improvements but at FIS a "BIG BANKING PRODUCT" related company people are being laid off due to poor management

Heard that there is an announcement today. Wonder if it’s going to be massive layoffs??!

we had a huge onsite then my vp lost his job. reorg already done under Brenda and MED. VPs gone, sr dir gone, MED gone. how many leaders are being cut next under Barsam's new vp from ny?

Think about how big companies budget. They basically split their money into two buckets: Running the business (the day-to-day survival stuff like claims, compliance, and basic IT) and Changing/Improving the business (the future stuff like innovation, strategy, and customer experience).

If you’re sitting in that second bucket right now, you need to prepare for a heavy hit—and yes, that includes the VPs. These departments are massive cost centers, and honestly, Centene isn’t worrying about NPS scores or customer satisfaction right now. I mean, that much is obvious after losing 2 million members, with probably more on the way.

Leadership is in total survival mode. They are strictly focused on weathering this massive membership drop and hacking down operating expenses. Customer strategy, future-thinking roles, and tracking NPS are suddenly being treated as expensive, non-essential luxuries for this fiscal year.

HR? Goodbye. Customer Strategy? Goodbye. And if you’re in UX & Design, my best advice is to find your way onto a locked-in, fully funded project as fast as you can.

I'm not sure how they will have US layoffs when July 3 is a holiday. I checked in talent central. I work for SMBC and I think they are still doing financial projections or have a buyer that doesn't want to pay. I hate this company and hope I'm part of this round, but I will probably be spared because of financial year end.

Report layoffs, layoff rumors and insider info here. I'll start: OI big time

https://hrexecutive.com/inside-meta-layoffs-and-ai-shakeups-have-pushed-morale-to-the-edge/

https://www.thelayoff.com/post/@OP+1kvgk40m5

So I am a bit confused why would mass layoffs happen right before open enrollment? Who is going to handle that when 1) people voluntarily leave 2) people are still going to get laid off after that 3) I doubt Centene would get back 2 million members from this enrollment period.

I would. No hesitation.

Unsure who or how many or particularly anything more then a Eisp offer is coming to field in July !!It is confirmed anyone who is of the age along with has the financial ability don’t be a fool take it .The universal tech is coming you will be doing everything /anything .This was a back door agreement mark me

We all know more cuts are coming. But I'm looking at other companies and they're all in the same shape. I'd leave if I could find somewhere better, but I can't. And the stress of all this is really taking a toll on me physically. I honest to goodness don't know what to do.

Leadership doesn’t want to be transparent because you wouldn’t like what they told you if they were transparent.

Mainly, that they are now not trying to manage a “comeback” as much as they are trying to manage “an orderly decline in Nike’s previously hegemonic industry position.”

Nike isn’t going away. But it is also no longer a growth company, and for several reasons I won’t get into here the company likely reached a plateau a few years ago. The market in which Nike was established and grew effectively no longer exists. Or at least, the old rules that allowed Nike to continuously succeed are no longer the rules.

As a result Nike needs to balance “doing what Nike has historically done” with the reality that the company still needs to significantly downsize. If you’re management, there’s no polite, nice, or pep-talk way to communicate that. So they don’t.

Like I said the reasons for Nike’s decline are multi-faceted and in some ways complex. Nonetheless the company IS now just trying to hang on to what it already has. Talk of a “comeback” is sort of what they have to say but make no mistake; leadership is not naive to broader market trends that disfavor any sort of tangible “comeback”.

My partner will sometimes put on some ugly clothes and ask me, “How do I look?” My partner likes those clothes. So I answer with “You look great!”, and leave it at that.

Should I instead be more transparent? Should I instead engage in “more honest communication”? Maybe. But will that improve matters? Or create a new problem neither of us needed?

One could argue Nike is being kind by not being fully transparent. I’m not claiming that would be a GOOD argument. Just an understandable argument. Because if Nike leadership was fully transparent about the current field of play and what it really means, my guess is that it 100% would not make people feel better.

An on point post, the OP is @20q+1ks86w36m.

Spirit Airlines’ bankruptcy has become a high-profile example of the legal hurdles terminated employees face, even as they argue the mass layoffs were done without the legally required notice.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/spirit-layoff-suit-puts-spotlight-on-labor-rights-in-bankruptcy

I'm exhausted from the constant worry. When can we finally relax? Will we ever again have some semblance of job security?

Has anyone heard anything recent about layoffs?

We're doing amazingly well. I think people are just looking for things to stress over. Enjoy this while you can, I'm sure it won't last forever.

Be mindful of the 20 or so people from sales who will be laid off next week
Thoughts and prayers

I've seen multiple people placed on PIPs in the last six months. It's making me nervous. Is this just how things work here? Or is it a strategy to document people out the door so they don't get severance? I'd really like to know if I'm being paranoid or if this is a legitimate concern.

https://anz.peoplemattersglobal.com/news/ai-and-emerging-tech/ai-layoffs-expected-by-99percent-of-executives-young-employees-could-be-hit-hardest-survey-50418

We keep laying people off, and yet we keep posting openings at the same time. What's the point?

Everyone - and I mean every single person - on my team is job hunting. Not all with the same urgency, but all of them. Leadership doesn't seem to notice or care. I think we'll see a major exodus of talent as soon as the job market improves even slightly. I bet they notice then.

I wonder if there's anything the leadership thinks is truly essential.

Does anybody have more info? Too many rumors circulating to just outright ignore it, as much as I hope it isn't true.

But I'd rather know now if I'm going to be show the door than wait and stress for months. Just expecting layoffs all the time is making me miserable.

Initial unemployment claims in the US fell. This signals that layoffs remain low despite economic uncertainty. Employers continue retaining workers due to skilled labor shortages. The Federal Reserve monitors this employment data. Consistent employment aids consumer spending and economic growth.

Washington, D.C., United States

https://brusselsmorning.com/us-weekly-jobless-claims/99520/

Xbox executives depart while Compulsion Games shuts down

Corporate leadership changes rarely come without internal shakeups, reorganizations, and layoffs, and Xbox appears to be going through that right now.

https://mashable.com/tech/microsoft-xbox-game-studios-layoffs-compulsion-shut-down

https://jakartaglobe.id/business/4000-workers-at-nike-supplier-in-indonesia-sent-home-as-new-orders-dry-up

Whether more cuts will happen next month or later in the year, everybody should know by now they're coming. The best way to stay sane is to be prepared. Start looking right now, even if you don't plan to leave unless you have to. Have a plan B AND a plan C.

I actually think layoffs could be beneficial for this place. We have so many layers of management doing exactly nothing that nobody would miss. Instead of laying off the people who actually get things done, they should for once let go of the right people and everybody would benefit.

The past 5 years have been such a mess for this company. Clients, Staff, and investors have all suffered through what Kelly, Bill-n-Bo (at the time), and the boards though would be a huge payday for them. SunTrust and BB&T were culturally and mission entirely different. Both organizations lost so many good bankers who went on to the new rising stars in banking, Seacoast, Pinnacle, M&T, TD, 5/3rd, Huntington. Clients left too, when they lost their trusted banker (can't name those here). Those people and clients will never return. I hope the organization is now turning the corner for everyone's sake. But...be sure, more changes are coming for clients and staff.

In the last several layoffs, our team lost everybody above 50, and even two people in their late 40s. The rest of us are all here. I don't know if this is the case company-wide, but it certainly left a bad taste in my mouth. Really shows us there's no future for any of us here once we hit a certain age.

Is there somewhere I can check?

Careerminds conducted a new survey on layoff recovery. Organizations average 7.2 months to fully recover workplace culture. Trust in leadership and company future significantly declines after job cuts. These trust levels often remain below pre-layoff averages. Team-building and other strategies can accelerate recovery but are underused.

https://www.hcamag.com/nz/news/general/layoff-recovery-takes-far-longer-than-most-companies-may-realise/579680

This is the perfect moment to think about exiting. Leadership has shown their true colors. We know they don't value people, but only care about their own bank accounts. Our reputation is completely shot and new talent won't touch us. Time for us to start looking out for ourselves.

I'm so over feeling overwhelming dread every Sunday. Give me severance and I'll happily leave. Even being unemployed would be better for my mental health than this constant torture.