#rto

A few days of this and I'll feel like I'm paying for the privilege of working.

Hey Billie D! Let’s see how well the bank does this quarter coming up with lower productivity because you can’t adapt to modern time and need to save face with all of the real estate you purchased by displacing employees who could manage work life balance for once. How fun!! Can’t wait to hear about it!

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/72971/000119312519256649/d813177dex10a.htm

FTFA: "In connection with your position, you will not be required to relocate or engage in travel that would result in a change to your current state of residence. "

Started back to work and thought I’d take advantage of $5 North Shore Parking with a shuttle to and from downtown Pittsburgh. Because I don’t have the extra money to spend like most of us. What a bust. Shuttles weren’t running every 15 to 20 minutes as promised but rather an hour to an hour and a half long. So much for that. Got into the office and the majority of the floor was empty. Why did I bother? No work got done. I’m sure we are going to see productivity plummet. Wasn’t approved to work from home to be with my epileptic child. Job well done, Bill.

On Workday

By being 6 years into this.
Some were hired as hybrid, and yes I know a company can change their business model whenever they want, but it also breeds bad faith and discontent. Many people were hired as hybrid or having spent 6 yrs wfh have built up an at home office. This maneuver shows zero respect for employees this late in the game.
And I think if/when another situation arises it may not work so well by the powers that be making these life altering decisions.
I sure hope they are sympathetic to employees if they need to be working from home if their kids are sick, on school vacation, doctor appts that don’t lend themselves to driving in and back twice there MUST be some flexibility. Seems to me all “US” companies like the visa payroll better and we’re about to see the ugliest side of globalization we’ve ever experienced coupled with the AI job ki-ling revolution

Good times. 🥵

Yes, State Farm su-ks but half of complaining about “woke” and “customers” don’t even know what you’re complaining about. It’s greed at the of the day, they’re trying to make this place as miserable as they legally can to get people to quit without severance or even the voluntary exit offers. RTO su-ks, i don’t care how much you loved your office back in 1980, times have changes and there is literally nothing that we do at home that can’t be done from office (other than wasting hours of our life in traffic and pointless dribble chatter with coworkers), “customers” are the last thing on the executives mind, much less mine, they can read what they sign up for before they complain. Yes, I am actively looking for other places to work and I can’t wait to leave.

With more and more organizations going to 5-day RTO, I'd expect a mediocre, follow-the-herd company like Cigna to fall in lockstep within the foreseeable future.

Evanko's Town Hall comments about the wonders of having a "best friend at work" just seemed to be laying the foundation.

Anyone with educated guess and/or practical insight and willing to comment?

Management in my BU looks mostly upset about having to come back to the office. No one really seems to think there will be layoffs.

It makes me feel better that the leaders are also unhappy about having to come back to the office.

When will we see it?

If they want me gone, they’re going to have to pay me for it. I’m not playing along with this RTO-driven attrition strategy. Hopefully people see it for what it is and don’t just hand them what they want.

Last week I found out that they're doing an RTO mandate for all of tech. An absolute cluster-fck of infrastructure to get 700 roles back in office. I'm sure this will make less driven employees more productive and the shoe designers who cry foul about fairness happy, but for those of us who actually cared about sh-t getting done, all it tells us is that it's time to hit the remote-first market, where there are no haves and have nots, only fair, trusting work models for competent people.

All of your most driven employees are now in the process of self-selecting their way out of the company. Velocity is going to sink as the people with the most initiative start using downtime to send applications instead of make up for their colleagues' deficits.

Just remember this the next time holiday readiness falls apart or you're dealing with unmaintainable copy paste AI slop. You are asking your best to leave, and a lot of us were perfectly content with your sub-par compensation schemes and nonexistent promotions before this because we didn't have to put up with 699 other guys trying to take Zoom calls from an open office with no privacy or hour long traffic slogs.

But at least it's fair now, and you can backfill those roles in ITC, and AI/ML will print infinite money for you any day now, right?

WFH was a success during COVID and could be at any time, it's the person doing the work, not the location. We sell global connectivity yet we do not want to connect employees who are also customers. We all know right now it's a 'do as I say, not as I do'. I'd respect honesty; yet that is not what the top brass offer normally; it's usually smoke and mirrors.

If AT&T wants to reduce its footprint, what better way than making the employee provide their own office? Case closed!

@rw+1kqf86bry is 100% right.

It seems like the roles impacted are only tech and agile.

What would be the reason to bring the whole company back other than phones, if there’s no RIF impact?

Based on what’s posted here if there’s so many groups with zero impact. Why make everyone miserable just to slash tech?

:(

I will never be available outside office hours again.

Can’t believe it’s here. Is anyone planning to skip this id--tic “mandate”?
I have been remote 13 years in this company. Now I have to go sit in a random office by myself and do the exact same thing I would do at home. Thinking of skipping and letting the cards fall as they may.

Gas is creeping dangerously close to $5 a gallon yet we’re still expected to commute into the office three days a week. That disconnect is hard to ignore. Between rising fuel costs, time lost in traffic, the requirement feels increasingly out of step with reality.

What makes it more frustrating is that we talk a lot about “delighting customers” and being “customer-obsessed,” but there seems to be far less focus on the growing stress being placed on employees. It’s hard to sustain that level of care externally when internally, people are feeling stretched, unheard, and impacted by decisions of this AI-obsessed CEO. If the work is getting done just as effectively remotely, it’s fair to question whether this policy still makes sense for both employees and the company.

Can you hear me now Dan?

Yeah, I know you don’t care. Your laughing all the way to the bank.

At what point does the company give people driving to work for RTO an official break from coming to the office? Gas is at 4.49 currently out east and I cant imagine what the price is at on the west coast. Its clearly even more of a pay cut now.

It’s Sunday and just a reminder you don’t have to live in fear, deal with RTO, the obsessive micromanagement, the constant nitpicking of everything, the extreme cheapness and duplicity.

Use whatever resources are available for training and development and channel those to an external opportunity.

I did it and I’m better for it. This place will survive without you. Or it won’t. Who cares. That’s someone else’s problem. Not yours.

Put yourself first, get up, and walk out that place, and never look back.

Lack of enough presence in office in Q1 may also be on chopping block next week

This talk of going back everyday, it’s simply trying to downsize the firm. No way around that.

What if the Johnson Je-k Circle realizes this is a really painfully bad idea some time into 2027 when they’re already executing it. There’s a reason only certain places are executing this first.

Let’s say they finally make their alignments exactly how they want them to be organized. Be it making teams colocated, or whatever else they want to do. Then they realize “hey, some of these teams work better remote, and we’re impeding their ability to work”. Like software engineer teams. And then you have other positions who need an office to perform to the best of their ability.

The vast majority of us can say this is a grave mistake Abby is making. What if this is the mistake they need to make to realize that they need to go back to the old way, where there was more freedom for people who only had to go to the office for legitimately boosting work output?

If it took us all one year of doing this experiment, then for the overlords to get their ducks in a row… then the remainder of us who survive the layoffs could be allowed to work to the best of our ability, be it being remote or in the office if we need to be… then, maybe that’s what we just need to power through, if we have the ability to power through it.

It’ll be incredibly annoying of course, but, what if this is what it takes for them to let us go back to a work environment that’s accommodating to all of our individual needs?

RTO - Return-to-Office.

It should be (Mandated) for Everyone (without a Viable Exception) now.

Back-in-the day, employees are (expected) to be at work; not doing other things at home (during work paid hours).

No matter what is the motivation for a firm to announce RTO mandate, is it any worse than HAVING NO JOB AT ALL???

In this current age of AI where everything is automated, consider yourself lucky to have a job in a firm who invests so much in your retirement.

Truth be told, anyone whining in this firm would not be hirable outside of the green walls.

So stop being such entitled snowflakes

That’s what they’re shooting for likely, then why further reduction needed?

But that's not it. It's never been it. The problem is the constant layoffs and the never ending changes. Let us go back to working from home more and maybe people would actually want to work more and be more productive again.

When will we see it on our dashboards? Will it be accurate?

So many of my colleagues coffee-badge or come in less than four days per week RTO. Is this a psychological experiment to see what happens when one groups does not hat they’re told is expected of them and the other does the bare minimum?

Do they even have enough space for everybody at some of these locations? I won't be surprised if they perform a big layoff before or slightly after the rto date.

Always has been. Now with a side of gas price misery.

Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday

Is India affected by any of the RTO mandates? How are they handling for Boston or NH staff the situation in the office? Will these folks not have assigned seats or are they at least dropping that id--tic practice.

in all the chaos today there are now rumblings that with RTO impacting the campus, boston dev ops is first on the block

Getting emails that keep reinforcing rto at four days, notably leadership…

Apparently, they dont want to deal with stupid stuff like the friday trainings we now have and the upslilling that has nothing to do with 95% of our roles…

Are we all going back to the office 5 days a week? Does this mean remote work goes away forever?

Been applying to a few jobs at Fidelity down the street. Heard from a friend today that they’re mandating a 5 day RTO in September. Previously, they were 1 week in one week out (in office every other week). I don’t believe they have wfh weeks either

Been looking to get out of Schwab for a while… Now, idk. The change seems like an extreme jump from the previous policy.

For the love of god, Schwab, please leave RTO as it is. 4 days su-ks, but I’ll take it over 5.

Hi All - do you know how strictly they are monitoring things? What's being evaluated and tracked?