#rto

The last time I was in the same state as a teammate of mine was in March 2020. I go into office, no one talks to me and I talk to no one, then I badge out. Depressing.

Only really poor performers who wouldn't travel to office are being let go

The company is stronger without these people

We are office based and a high energy workforce that is growing rapidly

I heard that badge tracking for in-office hours is back. Does anyone know how they’re calculating the hours? Is it based on your first badge-in and last badge-out of the day?

I’m curious because sometimes when I leave for lunch, I use the café door, which is usually open, so I don’t have to badge out. However, when I come back in, I sometimes have to badge in again. Does anyone know how that affects the hours being tracked?

Is it legal for a company of this size to refuse to disclose employee expectations? They say, “Talk to your manager for details about RTO regarding flexibility” and the managers say, “Sorry, we’re not permitted to grant exceptions.” They are playing games with people’s livelihoods never mind causing widespread anxiety and stress. There must be a law which says they must disclose and be clear about what is expected of employees.

Blowout quarter from Fidelity shares (1.73 wow!) I am sure management will spin this as a "RTO" win. Just one more quarter for vesting and I am outta here!

Did folks get the email earlier this week about in-person expectations? Any one have any additional info/insight?

Come on Comcast!! Folks are more productive when they can work office closer to home rather than commuting. Shall we start submitting gas expenses. Put your badging system as one system

It’s comical that here in JAB we’re told to come in 4 days a week while the garage is perpetually closed, and lot spots are full.

Meanwhile the bigwig reserved parking spots are totally empty so we disposable grunts must manage to find a spot. All to get our badge swipe

(Pro tip: I found you can park in those reserve spots without repercussion, just like how people make their own creative spot)

So they think pulling this long roll out, staggering it over another year is going to quell the anger and frustration?
They must be gluttons for punishment.
I think the blowback has been pretty resoundingly negative.
I guess we’re all stymied by the lack of flexibility like pre Covid.
What’s the rationale?!
Have they just capitulated to the potential of being eaten up too?
I don’t get wanting a totally disenfranchised work force unless they know something worse is down the line for the company and all us indentured staff

Companies sometimes use indirect methods to reduce headcount while avoiding the costs, public scrutiny, and legal risks associated with traditional layoffs.

The approaches below are commonly discussed in this context. They are speculative, but patterns of behavior can be revealing: if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it may be a duck.

Volunteer Exit Plan
This offers a one-time lump-sum payment in exchange for an employee’s voluntary resignation. It has been used to encourage older employees with significant retirement benefits to leave the organization. In exchange for the payment, the employee typically waives the right to collect unemployment.

Quiet Firing
This involves deliberately creating a more difficult working environment so that employees either resign or can be terminated for performance reasons. Tactics may include raising performance standards, increasing workload, or issuing formal action-plan memos and documentation. The underlying dynamic is often an unspoken competition among peers. Higher performers are retained for the next phase of the business, while those who cannot meet the new expectations are managed out. Because the separation is framed as a performance issue, the employer generally avoids unemployment liability.

Constructive Discharge
This is closely related to quiet firing but focuses more on making the job untenable through changes in working conditions. Examples include significantly increasing required in-office time (for example, shifting someone from a hybrid schedule of one week per month in the office to near-full-time on-site attendance), altering hours, or reassigning them to a more demanding customer- or agent-facing role such as claims handling. These changes are often presented as positive realignment efforts intended to “help employees keep their jobs.” At the same time, companies may expand the use of business process outsourcing (BPO) firms or hire workers outside the country to lower costs and make it easier to eliminate roles later through automation.

The question that often arises is: if the goal were truly to retain employees, why invest so much effort in making their roles less sustainable?

Formal Termination
When the methods above do not produce the desired result, the company may ultimately terminate the employee. This is typically treated as a last resort because it carries unemployment costs and a higher risk of legal claims. It tends to occur when cost reduction, restructuring, or automation takes clear priority over retaining the individual.

If Tampa doesn’t need to go into the office for the rest of the year, why should any other site? The same security and safety concerns at Tampa apply to all Citi offices

How many people fall below the 3 days in the office metric?

I understand the EC managing expectation with hybrid in office expectations. 2 hours a day for 3 days per week isn’t going to cut it, completely agreed.

But to say leaving in the afternoon isn’t cutting it is too far gone. Just make up your mind. It’s either in office 3 days a week for 8 hours per day or not. If that so then let it be so.

I can’t stand when EC harps down on the plebs like they are less than thee when we all know that the EC is not spending the vast majority of the time in the office.

For those who were unable to attend this morning's meeting:

HR acknowledged a significant decline in employee sentiment: overall NPS dropped 17 points, promoters declined 10 points, and employees’ ability to work in a way that meets their personal needs fell 13 points. Yet the presentation offered remarkably little in the way of corrective action. Several tactics and contradictions stood out.

1. Framing implementation as success while ignoring employee dissatisfaction. HR described the return-to-office transition as having gone relatively smoothly, citing strong attendance and no widespread parking or seating problems. But operational success is not employee acceptance. The survey showed a substantial decline in employees' ability to meet personal needs. Leadership focused on whether the offices were functioning, not whether the policy was working for employees.

2. Promoting flexibility while emphasizing surveillance and compliance. HR spoke about accommodating caregivers, illness, appointments, and weather. In the same discussion, it introduced attendance dashboards for managers to monitor patterns, investigate concerns, and involve HR. Flexibility was presented as a benefit, but the practical message was that employees are expected to comply with assigned schedules and deviations may be scrutinized.

3. Acknowledging uncertainty while avoiding meaningful answers. All info given was on past events that have already taken place. Asked about future return-to-office phases, HR repeatedly said no additional decisions had been finalized. Yet it confirmed that transitions were already underway in New Jersey and Ireland and that workplace and real estate needs were being evaluated across regions. No timeline, decision criteria, or meaningful assurances were provided. Repeating that decisions are not final is not an answer to employees seeking clarity.

4. Reducing transparency while claiming to value employee feedback. Leadership explained that detailed survey reporting would be reduced, arguing that historical results showed little differentiation across business units and leaders. No supporting data was presented. The company is asking employees to trust that feedback is being heard while providing less visibility into the results and limiting employees' ability to assess leadership performance.

5. A significant decline in engagement, but no action plan. Perhaps the most revealing exchange came when leadership was asked whether new action plans or initiatives would result from the survey. The answer was no. Instead, employees were directed toward manager conversations, empathetic listening, and existing culture and engagement efforts. After presenting some of the weakest sentiment indicators, leadership offered no measurable improvement targets, specific corrective actions, or accountability.

6. Deflecting responsibility downward. Throughout the meeting, the proposed solutions centered on managers listening, having conversations, monitoring attendance, and helping employees navigate concerns. There was little discussion of what senior leadership itself would change. The people responsible for implementing and enforcing the policies were effectively made responsible for managing the dissatisfaction those policies created.

Overall: The meeting followed a familiar corporate communication pattern: acknowledge the negative numbers, emphasize positive aspects of implementation, provide carefully worded explanations, redirect concerns to managers, point to published documents, and avoid making commitments. Leadership repeatedly said it was listening, learning, and adjusting, but explicitly ruled out new action plans.

The central contradiction is that employee feedback was important enough to warrant a dedicated company-wide meeting, but apparently not important enough to produce any new initiatives or measurable commitments.

do half days (4 hours) of PTO cause that day to account as a whole day off for the purposes of the in office tracking? I.e. if I work 2 half days it cost me 8 hours of PTO but will the tracking make it look like I should've been in the office those 2 days anyway or will it cause them to not count towards supposed required in office days that week?

I am new to the company so I was curious if the VoiceEX survey really means anything

I see they posted the results on SharePoint where it’s pretty vague but mentions compensation, RTO

Thanks for any insight

With the holiday being in the middle of the week, does that mean we’re still expected to go in three days this week? I just got back from maternity leave, so trying to figure things out

What BS do you think she is going to shovel our way tomorrow morning about the Pulse survey results/ RTO feedback?

Please make it fun, I am slowly dying at work anyway. 🫪😫

Do we know how serious reporting will be around these specific weeks? I am only scheduled to work one day each of those weeks and I don’t mind going in to keep in adherence but it will be two consecutive days off because it’s a Wednesday I am working and then off that Friday. If I’m going to be out of adherence and flagged either way I might as well not go in

I know there was recently a change regarding what counts as in-office but can’t find the email. Do vacation days count as in-office days for a week or no? I only know the holidays no longer do, but not sure how vacation days are counted towards the 3.

Title - Haven't heard anyone in my org get this news, most performance reviews were given out already just hearing SPs and EPs. Few folks were only staying for 4 hours a day with no issues

THE BIG PICTURE: The Financial Mirage and the Destruction of U.S. Bank's Infrastructure

If you’ve been watching the rolling, silent layoffs across tech, operations, and compliance over the last two years, you know the drill. We vent, we stress, and nothing changes. But to truly mobilize and push back, we have to stop treating these cuts as isolated corporate updates and start seeing them for what they are: a high-risk financial strategy that is systematically hollowing out the bank.

When a company slashes experienced domestic staff, forces impossible Return-to-Office (RTO) mandates to trigger forced attrition, and rapidly offshores those roles to India’s GCCs, they are chasing a short-term metric known as the Efficiency Ratio. Lowering this ratio makes executive leadership look like geniuses to Wall Street in the short run.

However, this strategy introduces a critical flaw: it trades irreplaceable institutional knowledge for temporary profitability.

Phase 1: The Short-Term Profit Illusion

Right now, leadership can point to record net revenues and improved efficiency metrics on paper. Cutting domestic workers and replacing them with lower-cost offshore operations looks like pure profit. Executive bonuses are unlocked, stock buybacks resume, and shareholders celebrate. But this profit isn't coming from innovation or market growth—it’s being squeezed out of the workforce.

Phase 2: The "Boomerang Effect" and Massive Regulatory Fines

Banking is not a simple transaction factory; it is a heavily regulated environment built on complex risk management, data security, and compliance pipelines. Documented training manuals cannot replace years of hands-on experience navigating legacy systems, catching anomalies, or understanding domestic regulatory nuances.

As system errors inevitably increase, customer data privacy vulnerabilities emerge, and compliance oversight slips, the bank hits a wall. Eventually, federal regulators like the Federal Reserve, the OCC, or the CFPB step in. Historically, aggressive cost-cutting and rapid offshoring in banking lead to massive, multi-million dollar regulatory fines due to data breaches, compliance failures, and operational breakdowns.

Phase 3: The End Game (Sell-Offs and Forced Mergers)

Once the regulatory fines hit and operational chaos degrades customer service, the "efficient" model breaks. The bank can no longer organically support its own weight. To hide the damage and maintain the illusion of growth, leadership is forced into structural restructuring. They must spin off and sell core business lines to competitors just to raise cash. If the bleeding continues, the ultimate end game is forced consolidation—positioning the institution to be absorbed by or merged into an even larger bank.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Protect Yourself and Strike Back with the Committee for Better Banks (CBB)

We are not just fighting for a remote schedule or an office desk; we are fighting to stop the systematic liquidation of the bank's operational safety. We don't have to reinvent the wheel or risk our jobs doing it alone.
The Committee for Better Banks (CBB) is a national coalition of financial workers, consumer advocacy groups, and labor organizations. They specialize exclusively in helping bank employees organize, safely whistleblow, and expose corporate labor arbitrage without getting fired. They are the crew that helped frontline workers blow the whistle on the massive fake-account scandals at Wells Fargo, and they have the infrastructure to turn our internal corporate nightmare into a public relations and regulatory disaster for executive leadership.
Here is the step-by-step reporting playbook to take action safely:

1. Reach Out Completely Off the Grid

Never use your corporate laptop, phone, Zoom, Teams, or office Wi-Fi to look up or contact outside labor groups.
• The Move: Grab your personal phone, turn off Wi-Fi (use cellular data), and download a secure email app like ProtonMail.
• Where to Go: Send an anonymized message to CBB organizers at staff@betterbanks.org or hit up their secure portal at betterbanks.org/organize. You don't even have to give your real name at first.

1. Lock In Instant Federal Legal Protection

Once you start coordinating with CBB to discuss working conditions, rolling headcount cuts, or forced attrition, a federal legal shield goes up.

• The Law: Under the National Labor Relations Act, your organizing discussions are legally classified as Protected Concerted Activity.

• The Shield: If management tries to track down who is organizing or retaliates against people pushing back on workforce cuts, CBB’s legal team can slap the bank with immediate unfair labor practice charges through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

1. Drop the Truth in the Whistleblower Pipeline

Journalists and regulators don't care about emotional rants; they care about hard data. CBB runs a dedicated Whistleblower Pipeline.

• The Data: Use your personal devices to securely document the consequences of the cuts. Are critical system errors being ignored? Is customer financial data being exposed to unvetted pipelines? Log internal policy shifts, denied accommodations, and metrics showing where U.S. teams are being forced to execute "Knowledge Transfers" to train their overseas replacements.

• The Impact: CBB packages this data to build public corporate scorecards that they drop directly onto the desks of federal regulators, congressional oversight committees, and major institutional investors.

1. Bypass Corporate PR and Wake Up the Public

If you try to pitch a story to a financial or labor reporter on your own, you risk exposing your identity. CBB acts as your human shield and works directly with a dedicated press desk (CBB@berlinrosen.com).

• The Megaphone: They take our anonymous insider evidence, strip out any identifying details, and hand it to top-tier financial journalists at Bloomberg, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal. This forces executive leadership to answer to the national media—and to shareholders—about why they are destroying American banking infrastructure for cheap foreign labor arbitrage.

The Bottom Line: Corporate leadership relies on us being isolated and terrified. They cut one department at a time over a multi-year cycle so we don't all panic at once. Organize off-grid, document the systemic risks, and let's work with CBB to expose this short-sighted strategy before the boomerang hits.

There has been large-scale cultural change in the workplace the last 15 years. It’s not limited to Fidelity. Assuming this is a Fidelity-specific problem and punishing Fidelity’s workers to try to get them to revert to an office culture that no longer exists is short-sighted and cruel. No wonder we are all miserable.

I wish they would offer a package to retire...I would take it.... Tired of the bs, tired of my cr-ppy peers not being in the office and nothing being done about it, tired of lying sales people, tired of getting up early to get a desk, tired of the same lunch options, who else feels this way

Been here 5+ years, stuck with a toxic boss/team for a good chunk of those years. Been trying to leave for the last 2 years with no luck. (And my job search started even before RTO btw, I'd imagine more people here are looking elsewhere now.)

I used to like this place and the growth opportunities it gave me, good benefits, and flexibility. All that went away when I was restructured onto this current team (and restructured again within the team so toxic boss can "better divide his time amongst the few direct reports that he cares more about"), with a toxic boss who tells me frequently, "there are others on this team who are a better fit for this role than you," and actively tries to replace me.

When I tried to interview elsewhere for a lateral move (same role/title, same responsibilities, no title or pay raise), even after I pass all final interviews, companies tell me "Fidelity is such a great place I don't see why you want to leave...", I get rejected for simply being a fidelity employee and this fake perception this place carries externally. And believe me, I've tried to look internally too and failed many times here - either for roles with another internal candidate already lined up or ghost postings that aren't actually real.

There's a perception that this place is amazing (and it is, 4-5 years ago maybe but no longer), and now I get why people have such long tenures here - they can't leave, they are stuck in the same roles with no transferable skillset to go anywhere else. RTO pains just make it all worse.

All US staff back into the office in January, 3 or more days per week. Who cares that you were largely remote for 6 or more years, you have 60 days to change your entire way of life to pretend to get more work done at a temp desk.

Who cares if your entire team is in another state or country, you now need to sit in traffic and spend money to attend Teams calls from the office instead. An effective pay reduction for the entire US NG workforce. Great job!

All year, the talk at our company has centered on Project Aegis, responding to AI, and shifting how we work toward being more Agile and collaborative. What I see instead are tech teams running like it’s the year 2000.

I can’t make sense of how some people on my team have been at State Street for 20 to 30-plus years, deliver no measurable value, and still have no pressure to change. Management feels toxic, and some of the project managers in GTS seem disconnected from the work and the builders. Leadership takes credit for good results but rarely owns the mistakes.

I’m a newer grad who came from FAANG, and this place feels like somewhere careers stall out until retirement. I’ve never worked somewhere this dysfunctional that is also this comfortable with it. The firm doesn’t seem ready for the digital age, and it looks even further behind on AI. People with 20 years of tenure would not survive a single review cycle in tech.

I’m not sure whether my experience is unusual or part of a wider pattern. We’re walking into offices where desk utilization is under 15% on any given day but told to comply for productivity and collaboration (while MD+ are OSL or 2 days a month in office). The messaging is so butt-backwards that I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

If any manager has experience, please let us know what you are looking at the most and what happens if you have attendance issues on your team

Anyone else getting sick of being retired to come into the office, just to spend all day in Teams meetings, never taking to anyone face-to-face?

95% of my day is solo work, email/Teams messages, and Teams meetings, because there's always at least one person in some other location, so every meeting needs to be over Teams.

Why are we in the office if everyone is wearing headphones, only taking to each other online?

How is this improving productivity or culture?

Why is everything so secretive

The article id or link doesn't work anymore. Did someone read it or take a screenshot?

On the central website go to ....com/article/FA_12085

It was stated on today's All Company Gaslight that pools for raises and bonuses are expected to be larger this year and that that should benefit those at the lower grade levels especially.

It was also said that the number of remote roles no longer supports the needs of our customer base.

Subtext:

1) The largest population of remote workers are those at the lower grade levels. They should expect to be sent back to the office in 2027.

2) Percentage wise, increases for those earning less are going to be lower and therefore the company prefers to pay those than to pay those who are at higher levels with larger salaries.

3) Those at lower grade levels will receive higher raises and bonuses than usual as an attempt to keep them from quitting when RTO comes for them.

4) To help cover the cost of those higher raises and bonuses for employees at lower levels, those of us in higher levels with larger salaries should expect to receive little to nothing.

second highest voted question (1st had 102 votes, this one had 96 votes) in Q&A section was related to RTO and got lumped into the rapid fire portion (seems to have been combined with another question about letting local managers decide RTO reqs instead of people much higher in the chain), question was in regards to talent drain in younger employee groups due to RTO, speaker response was essentially nah, you guys are still not showing up a full week, once you do maybe we'll reward you. huh? if the whole company magically starts 5x8 THEN we'll get wfh back? at least stick to the company line and say no way, no debate needed. saying WFH will be restored once we all meet the current policy is a silly answer

If I take one day off in a week, does that mean I get no wfh days that week cuz they said at least 4 days a week in the office ?

Keep working and keep collecting that paycheck. Don’t resign just because they’re forcing RTO. If they want to push you out, make them go through the formal process, including a PIP if it comes to that. Managers hate dealing with PIPs because they’re awkward, time-consuming, and require documentation. Use that time to your advantage.

Resigning voluntarily can jeopardize your eligibility for unemployment benefits, so don’t make it easy for them. In the meantime, start applying for other jobs, guys.

An article is now available on Fid Central about RTO updates for Ireland and NJ. Anyone know what the plan will be for Smithfield RI?

I no longer use MS-Teams, if everyone is supposed to be onsite no need to use it. Sorry GFSE and Dresden team, you know where my cube is.

…for illness. Lots of coughing in the office. Used to be able to WFH due to illness. What’s the current guidance on this? Will I get pinged if I WFH because I’m coughing a lot, yet still able to work?

Rumor going around in BH that total badge swipes will be done end of year to see how many days you came in office minus the remote flexibility days. Not sure how true this is.