#rto

Layoff and RTO fatigue. The beatings will continue until morale improves or people quit.

Is anyone familiar with what circumstances must be met to qualify for an exception to remain home based? I’d like to know before submitting my request.

I overhead that all senior level grade 9 and above will be required to be in the office a minimum of 5 (count them) five days. This is to role model full RTO before making this mandatory for the rest of the employees.

Is this being reported on? Four days in the office is too much, the low morale in the office is ki-ling me.

Expectations are becoming so unrealistically high that I'm sure they're setting us up to fail.

Popular Stank Patrick's sayings and their real meanings.

"May the road rise to meet you." – Have fun on your RTO commute

"A best friend is like a four-leaf clover: hard to find and lucky to have." – You'll have a chance to make friends in the office.

"May you live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live." – Stop stealing office supplies.

"May your heart be light and happy, may your smile be big and wide, and may your pockets always have a coin or two inside!" – Two coins. That's your raise.

"Don’t be breaking your shin on a stool that’s not in your way." – You're not getting workmen's comp.

"May your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow." – Yeah, there's a lot of mold in the buildings but we're not cleaning them.

“Innovate, use the latest tech, develop the latest tech. Now hurry up and go into the office instead of working remotely.” Talk about old school. Yet we try to sell that we are on the ‘cutting edge’.

Employees of Intel not in alignment with RTO will begin to be culled starting in April.

They keep selling us on collaboration and team work. Here’s the reality for many of us:

1. Our teams are spread out over many locations. Some of us are now forced to work alone in a small 4x4 cube surrounded by people we dont know or work with at all.

2. Being forced to sit in a small cube constantly distracted by loud employees from other orgs is not collaboration. It's distractive and annoying

3. I waste 15 hours every week driving to a building where the quality of my work is suffering

4. More sick days. I'm constantly surrounded by sick people. I never used my sick time WFH. Now I will use them to their full availability

5. I used to work more than 40 hours WFH because it was convenient and I felt obligated due to being allowed to WFH. That ended with RTO. I'm not going the extra mile any more for a company that treats me like a child and babysitting service, while lying to me about collaboration and RTO

6. I have spoken to so many employees who already have one foot out the door. As soon as the economy switches back to a more friendly employee environment, schwab is going to lose a lot of talent

Nobody likes working for this company anymore. I dont know of a single employee who happy at schwab now. Walt and now Rick have turned this place into a soulless, stale company that only cares about the stock price where the executives get fat stock options and bonuses.

I’m hearing mixed messages. Does y’all have the facts?

Great article on the Hill about how RTO initiatives are sabotaging productivity because the office is a noisy, distracting time-su-k:
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5775420-remote-first-productivity-growth/

But as we all know, BB's motivation for RTO was never about productivity; he's trying to drive attrition so that he can get costs down and sell off the parts for cheap:
https://www.itpro.com/business/business-strategy/business-execs-just-said-the-quiet-part-out-loud-on-rto-mandates-a-quarter-admit-forcing-staff-back-into-the-office-was-meant-to-make-them-quit-but-this-quiet-firing-practice-could-easily-backfire

Has anyone heard anything lately on if/when they are going to push for us to return to office again

Wait being a inflexible employer doesn't get you productivity gains?

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5775420-remote-first-productivity-growth/

" The Flex Index finds that fully flexible companies grew revenues 1.7 times faster than mandate-driven firms from 2019 to 2024, even after adjusting for industry and size. "

It's amazing how many low-IQ people there are at Dell, many of whom are on this board.

For the last time, once and for all, Dell's medieval RTO policy was NEVER EVER EVER intended to increase productivity, improve team cohesiveness, or any one of the lies and propaganda vomited out by executive leadership.

It was ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS intended to make your life a living he-l, so much so that you ultimately quit on your own. This way Dell doesn't have to pay severance, nor does it have to incur any negative publicity as a result of wide-scale layoff announcements.

It's a BAIN trick. It's greed. It's selfishness. It's a lie, but it is today's Dell. Dell is doing everything it can to reduce headcount at the least cost possible. Get that through your heads. It's the only cohesive strategy leadership has right now.

Three hours round trip, every day. I need this job, so I put up with everything RTO has brought. It's pointless, costly, and drains my time and energy. But with so few alternatives, I don't have much choice. Not once did I expect leadership to reconsider. They know most of us are cornered, and they're counting on it.

Supposedly they're cracking down on coffee badgers... anyone here this?

Does Wells have the ability to track hours at the office?

• Severance packages out by mid-April
• July must accept severance or not

• September 1st is the start date for Phase II people in the office

• Certain special people will be given the opportunity to stay where they are

• Certain people will be given generous packages to relocate

This is was way more merciful than Phase I...

Why would a company that makes money from supplying computers to home workers mandate a policy that returns all worker to return to the office a minimum of 3 days a week?

You would think that, as a computer company, HP would encourage remote working to be an example for other companies to take note on how they can have remote employees too. HP would then continue to have a sales bo-m (like they did in 2020) on laptops to supply workers.

Bottom line, HP wants to justify having large useless buildings by filling them up again with employees.

I despise coming in 4 days a week. I get to wake up 1.5 hours early and drive for an hour, for what? I get to fake social interaction with distant department members who don't want to be here just like me. I get to spend $20 on parking. I get to spend immeasurable amounts of money maintaining a sh---y professional wardrobe that doesn't get used outside of work.
What benefit does anyone gain from this besides BNY having an excuse to lay some people off?

Before the shill bots come out of the woodwork, prior to COVID, my team was 2 days a week. There's no RTO, it's just increased. I'm not returning to anything.

3 days a week wasn't bad, I'd at least have Friday at home to look forward to, but now to get that I have to ruin my evening on Sunday by dreading going in on Monday. My life has been remarkably more miserable since 4 days started.

WFA days would be a brief reprieve when it got particularly bad on occasion, but they ruined those too.

I don't really know the purpose of this post besides to vent.

See title.

Any actual layoff news or is this now the RTO complaint forum?

We all know that RTO was a completely political kissarse move and not a decision based on any facts but I am completely over it!
I'm in the office more days now than before COVID except now I don't even have my own assigned desk. We promote homeownership and affordability but treat employees like we are vagrants having to pack up our entire work life and take it home everyday and then hope we get a desk tomorrow. One that isn't covered in food crumbs from the person yesterday because they aren't cleaning these desks and the desk wipes are out more often than not!
Now that Trump had destroyed gas prices, between the cost of tolls, gas prices rising, the constant fear of layoffs, and hours in traffic, I'm being pushed way past my limit. I'm naturally a high performer but that's about to change. Being asked to do more work with less resources, all while being forced to come into an office just to sit on Teams Meetings all day is the d-mbest thing Pulte has done to date.
And, unfortunately, it's an employers market, so he can get away with it. #burnout #FDT

I’ve been noticing a lot of new jobs it’s requiring in office work. They just opened up jobs for MDU and SMB. These jobs have a state requirement. So, it seems they might be pushing towards in office work and not remote. I’m just curious what will happen if you’re not in a business office area and they require you to “return to office” when you’ve never worked in an office and do not live near one.

Anyone hear anything about returning to office? I hear rumors we are going to be mandated to become hybrid from fully remote work.

I got an additional bonus today for RTO. My boss said I had the best 'how and where report' score in the group and were rewarding me as such. $$$$

If leadership insists that work is most productive within office walls, I’m happy to lean into that philosophy. Moving forward, my office hours are my only hours. The 'after-hours' emails and evening catch-up sessions from the couch are over. If the goal is a strict office environment, then the work stays at the desk. Naturally, my output will reflect the loss of those extra 'home hours'—my metrics are already showing the dip compared to last year—but I’m simply following the new standard set for us.

How serious are they about this return to office? I’ve been coming in one or two days a week and my manager has never said anything to me about it.

RTO is going to really. hurt now. Glad the recent raise will be useless now.

Is there anyone from HR who thought through this policy and impact on vacation.
Band 5 - you take Thursday/ Friday off - that week counts against you
Band 3. -4/1 posture - you basically are never taking vacation that is less than a full week. Let’s say you have 2 days sick and then 2 days vacation in the same reporting period, you can not miss another single day - vacation or not.
I know they want us to quit, but layoffs would be more humane and effective instead of making everyone miserable.

I sit in my car at lunch just to have five minutes where no one talks to me.

So much hangs in the air. It's all driving me insane.

RTO = More collaboration, problem solving and networking which leads to better raises, bonuses and career opportunities. All of which are raises.

I was one of those laid off last year. After years of declining mental health due to RTO, micromanaging, and “doing more with less,” I was freed. Getting that morning 1:1 was terrible. But almost immediately, I felt relief. Every day since, I have continued to feel overwhelming relief.

I don’t make as much money as I used to. I’m taking a break before I move into another corporate gig, if I ever do at all. I’m working for a small company now. One that really does feel like family, and does really care. But I chose a job that I’m passionate about, and I don’t even care about the pay cut for now. I kept my cost of living low and everything else fell into place.

I am so grateful to never have to sit through another hour-long slog of lies about how we’re becoming more efficient through some indeterminate means, or how AI is going to save us, or how we do totally care about our coworkers and clients. Sixty minutes of nothing, every time. I don’t think I could have written a single bullet of content gleaned from those Town Halls if I tried. It would have been less offensive if they just told me they loathed me.

I keep checking in on these threads. My heart breaks for those who haven’t been released. They are putting you through psychological torture. They know what they’re doing. You are livestock to them. I’m so sorry. My thoughts are with those who remain. Polish up those resumes, and I truly wish you all the best. An ISP with a fat severance is probably the happiest ending you can hope for at this point.

With the average cost of gas is $3.32/gal , and no end in sight with the war with Iran, will the RTO be loosen especially when gas prices continue to skyrocket the longer we stay in the war? We’ll soon be losing money just to go into the office to sit in our cubes on teams calls.

If you got your letter and you opt not to move, how long until you’re given two weeks notice to leave?
A couple weeks? A couple months? Whenever they feel like it?

The HR IT Team is currently in the process of migrating the RTO Badge Tracking tool from a Tableau report to a full-fledged internal web app.

They are working with Jeff's org CTXO to use Gen AI to do this more rapidly then they'd be capable of doing otherwise.

Once this migration is complete, they will have complete turnstile API access and plan to start showing badge in & badge out times. Currently, managers who have access to the tool can only see whether or not you were in office that day, at home, or took PTO.

These are the facts. My personal speculation, after witnessing how gung-ho this team is about this effort, is that they are going to add a lot more than just time-tracking to the app. I believe that the next thing to go will be the "Half Day PTO" trick that many of us use to have WFH days or manage things like home repairs, doctors appts, etc. Currently, they don't have the access they need from Workday to differentiate between Full Day & Half Day PTO, so they just count it all as In-Office.

I believe that we are in for a very dark year ahead regarding RTO. Leaking this info now so people can plan ahead and stay informed.

Today is Employee Appreciation Day. Based on the survey results, I think most of us would actually feel appreciated if we were allowed to work from home today instead of being handed a snack that doesn’t even equal the cost of many people’s daily commute.

When the feedback from employees overwhelmingly centers on flexibility and RTO, it’s hard not to notice the disconnect. Appreciation isn’t pizza, cookies, or swag. It’s listening to what your employees have been consistently asking for.

We know why.

Americans need to write because we're too expensive.

Outsource and offshore.

Just when I thought the higher healthcare costs and RTO mandates were bad enough at TR and I foolishly believed things couldn't get any worse, they got worse.

Last year I was very unexpectedly put on a “performance coaching” plan. I was already using AI, so that wasn't the issue. I took on some additional responsibilities (basically a “quiet promotion”), avoided a formal PIP and assumed that was the end of it.

Then during my year-end review I was given a “partially meets” rating, catching me off guard since I had never in my 10+ years at TR received anything lower than “achieved” before.

At my recent 2026 comp discussion, I earned a 0% raise and a reduced bonus.

So now I’m effectively taking a pay cut relative to inflation.

It honestly feels like they’re trying to push people out.

Anyone else at TR experience anything similar, earning a $0 pay raise this year? Is this part of a broader trend internally, or did I just get unlucky with my situation?

Rumor is that SM is going to be firing people who don't comply with the mandatory RTO order in Palm Bay the week after the mandate begins...

Welp, there goes my raise. Gone before I even got one payment.

With tensions in the Middle East pushing oil prices up again, gas is likely heading higher. For those of us forced to commute five days a week, it’s money straight out of our pockets.

Do the math. A pretty normal commute is 25–50 miles each way, or 250–500 miles a week. In a typical car getting about 20 MPG, that’s roughly 13–25 gallons of gas every week just to show up and badge in.

If gas jumps from around $3 to $5 a gallon, that’s about $25–$50 more per week, or roughly $1,500–$3,000 per year in extra fuel alone.

And that’s before tolls, maintenance, wear on the car, or the second vehicle many families had to buy because five-day RTO made sharing impossible.

At the end of the day, five-day RTO isn’t just inconvenient. For a lot of people it’s effectively a pay cut for work we’ve already proven can be done from anywhere.

Big F-U to the “leadership”. I hate this place.