There’s a lot of negative sentiment here around Thrive Together. That reaction is completely rational. Many people are trying to rationalize the decision - commercial real estate exposure, leadership being out of touch, or executives undervaluing remote productivity. Those explanations miss the point. Thrive Together is a much larger slight against employees than most people realize.
It’s easy to assume the executive team is uninformed or making poorly thought-out decisions. That assumption is wrong. These are experienced business leaders who understand exactly what they are doing. Whether internal metrics show remote work to be more productive is irrelevant. If those metrics supported the narrative being pushed, employees would see them. They don’t, and they won’t. Leadership knows the data doesn’t support the story, and they don’t need it to.
Their only real objective is increasing the stock price.
Historically, one way companies accomplish that is by reducing headcount. The problem is layoffs come with costs - severance packages and payouts of accrued PTO. Thrive Together creates a mechanism to reduce the workforce without formally conducting layoffs and without paying those costs.
Instead of layoffs, the company now has a framework where employees who cannot comply with Thrive Together requirements can simply be labeled as low performers. That label leads to performance improvement plans and eventual termination. The end result is the same as a layoff, but without severance, without PTO payouts, and without triggering the procedures that normally accompany workforce reductions.
Flexible Time Off (FTO) reinforces this system.
FTO didn’t expand a benefit - it removed one. Under a traditional PTO system, employees accrued time off that the company was obligated to honor or pay out. Under FTO, nothing accrues. Time off is technically “unlimited,” but in practice none of it is guaranteed.
FTO can function in a truly flexible remote or hybrid environment where employees aren’t bound by strict office attendance quotas. That is not the environment being created here.
Under the current policy, time taken under FTO does not reduce in-office attendance expectations. For the average employee, that creates a clear disincentive to take vacation because office quotas remain unchanged regardless of time off.
Leadership recently increased the expectation to three days per week in the office. If an employee takes a week of vacation, they still owe those three in-office days somewhere else in the fiscal year. Two weeks of vacation doubles that deficit.
If the company eventually moves to four or five in-office days per week - as many suspect it will - the system becomes mathematically unsustainable. There will be no practical way for employees to take time off while still meeting attendance expectations within a quarter. FTO with Thrive Together is structurally incompatible with meaningful time off.
What’s happening here isn’t confusion or poor planning. It’s a gradual tightening of pressure on the workforce while removing the company’s obligations that typically accompany layoffs. Even better, some employees will leave on their own to avoid the mess.
The plan was always to make you work more while creating a system that results in less time off, lower performance reviews, and a convenient excuse to fire people without severance.