If someone was already commuting to an office before COVID, why is going back such a big deal now? I get that it's tough for people hired during the pandemic, but if you did it before, what's actually different? My case is different as I joined relatively recently and I used to work at the place that never switched to working from home (aside for a brief period during COVID).
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@c1 watercooling my a-s. I did rto and tried the collaboration with my female boss and she started acting all weird after just a few conversations and they weren't even about anything but work.
I must give off a vibe. How come it seems that any woman I come across, they all think I'm hitting on them?
There's more to her feelings I guess. Being blocked on social media i hear is a good thing. They cared that much. They could have been indifferent, now that's worse imo.
lol, your bot has obviously never seen a WF admin location in action.
To drive maximum shareholder yield, in-person paradigms optimize cross-functional synergies, catalyze organic ideation, and drive frictionless alignment across strategic operational verticals. Consequently, leveraging collocated human capital unlocks key organizational efficiencies and empowers hyper-agile execution to hit high-impact deliverables.
The real question is: why are you spending billions of dollars for buildings that serve no business purpose. Work can be monitored in an automated way. Someone not getting their work done? Fire them for cause. Problem solved. You don't need to operate a bunch of buildings. They bring net negative benefit. The cost and risk are outrageous. For what, exactly? To sit in a random building and take teams calls with people a thousand miles away? That's really what you want to spend a billion dollars on?
HY doesn't give a flying F if you are working or not. They want you gone regardless. RTO and other nonsense is just a tool to lower their severance costs. That's all it's ever been, and ever will be. We could crush every other bank in efficiency ratio. Instead we D around playing games to avoid severance.
I really hope you don't do anything important for the company.
I remember being so efficient working from during covid, we'd have the shared mailbox with requests caught up and waiting for work to come in we were that fast. Preparing work documents the day before and all had to do is hit send. Login at 8 and be pretty much done with the whole day in 15 minutes.
EST so it was early enough nobody were in any offices out west until after lunch. Where the bulk of the work came from.
Set mail rules so you have the work move to your box and set timers and alerts so you can be away and get back to process the work then go back to doing nothing again.
Many days and weeks were like this. Set a pattern and be efficient.
I once played all the way to world 7 without warpng on Super Mario Bros 3 before work started trickling in.
It annoyed me to have to stop.
Who says naps only happen at home? Some dude has been sound asleep on a couch in a common area under a TV just off the elevator for about an hour now. Not to mention his dirty sandals all over the cushions
Gosh if we were located in office with our managers would this happen?
@b8 "We're still working remotely, just doing it from a cubicle." This really says it all. The company could switch back to everyone working from home tomorrow, and there'd be essentially zero difference from what we're doing now. To me that seems like a complete failure of an RTO push. You may have gotten people physically back, but absolutely no one is sold on it. Compliance is not tye same thing as buy-in.
Look at all of this misplaced, sad anger. The foolish in this thread (all of those who are blanket against HY and RTO because FOR TYRANNY!) make every moment of my life infinitesimally easier due to your low IQ so I thank you for that.
This is precisely how ignorant each one of you in that camp are : If you were paying 12 people $40/hr to run your household 8 hrs/day but it could be done by 3 with no degradation in service, no harm to those employed (other than being held to a standard of actually working) and those 3 people would continue to earn $40/hr, you would continue to pay the remaining 9 because of altruism so all 12 would only have to work 15 minutes a day?
Oh no, no no no, its not the same thing! This is big corp we're talking about, making billions, stealing from the little guy, abusing employees, RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE!!! Undoubtedly all the same people who, as previously noted, were constantly unavailable when remote, magically in appointments, too busy to respond, etc etc etc.
Keep fighting the good fight. I enjoy spectating!
Remember this when thousands start getting downsized do to "colocation strategy". They'll put one guy in India in a team of 25 domestics, and that's never ever a problem, but 1 American is sitting in the wrong WF building? Well, she "has to go". It's a complete load of BS. FHY.
What about when Craven would do National Sales Calls from his car with his phone positioned on his dashboard.
@da yes, this is so true. The ones who did little in the office to begin with only made it worse when they worked from home. Everyone knew who they were. Never available, in their cars during the day when you called them. They lazy POS are the ones that ruined it for all.
Has ZERO to do with wanting people in an office. It's a form of control and means to eliminate jobs via "non-compliance".
Execs told us that we work great with teams in India that we never see face to face. But they also tell us that we are better together in the same office. People are just pushing back because both can’t be true.
@da+1m3rkx9s
If this is what RTO was all about, the same response would be to fire everyone that underperformed and move on. Instead they guaranteed that almost everyone would intentionally underperform due to tanked morale. It's about cutting sev costs and nothing else. HY couldn't care less if we are in the office or being productive or not. They just want us to leave. That's the reality of the situation.
@c1 Forcing brutal expensive commutes to sit in open plan sweatshops for collaboration. Then being threatened because they expect 7 full hours of typing and clicking instead of collaborating. Do they not understand employees have friends neighbors and community groups where they will talk about what kind of company this is? Sc--w your employees and guess what... no customers.
Like others have said, a lot of us were fully remote before COVID. I resent having to waste an hour and a half of my day to drive to an office where I sit in a cube, talk to no one, and have meetings over Teams. Oh and pay $10/day in parking fees.
Here’s the truth, 10% of the population ruined it for 90% of the population. We had a lateral team in our group that 3 of the 5 people didnt do any work for 3 years at home, including the manager. Blame those who “quite quit” in 2020-2023. Plenty of those people are the ones complaining on this board.
@OP It's like asking, "If you worked 12 hours per day before, why don't you want to do it now?" ~or~ "If you used to work in an office that was gray with cigarette smoke, why don't you want to do it now?" ~or~ "If you used to perform all your math calculations using an abacus, why don't you want to do it now?" Society discovered a better way, one that doesn't involve wasting lots of time and gasoline unnecessarily and exposing people to bodily risk. Going back to the old way is like going back to having coal furnaces in houses. That would be stupid. Also, the only reason for RTO is that large corporations don't want the office buildings they bought or built to become worthless. That's their tough luck, not ours.
Good post, but I think they do understand it, they just don't care because they plan on replacing all of us anyway.
My office changed from a ten minute commute to 45 minute and theres next to zero interaction on site, everything is in Teams
It wastes my time and money for zero gain
It's a dictatorship. They know the benefits of allowing WFH. This only supports the motive of pushing people to quit, or their plans for cutting your jobs whether by AI or overseas. The foundation of the bank is cracking. The powers that be are scrambling to pocket as much cash as they can before the whole infrastructure falls into rubble or gets parted out like a stolen car in a chop shop. It's all temporary.
RTO really did a number on the perception of executives as people at least trying to make decisions based on hard data. Everyone can plainly see the immediate, obvious, tangible benefits of working for home, on both a personal level and for the company in terms of concrete dollars saved on offices and infrastructure. Meanwhile the touted benefits of RTO were never stated as anything more tangible than "collaboration" or water cooler conversations. Add in the fact that companies most vocal about pushing RTO were clearly misrepresenting their real motives with regards to attrition. I didn't exactly have a high opinion of executive leadership but this whole thing has been a real "the emperor has no clothes" eye opener the degree to which these people are just operating on vibes, and straight up lying to employees.
The longer we continue operating this way, the worse that perception gets. I don't think the executive class has really understood the credibility risk they've created by cargo-culting RTO in the face of their employees' lived experience.
Much of these dynamics are also true for AI, imo
Agree working from the office as normal before covid. Covid strikes, work from in my case two years straight.
At that point so much time has passed with life and personal circumstances and even as a business standpoint, they should have just let it continue.
The office in person should have cease to exist anymore. All remote, there was never really a true reason to go back.
People got too coupes up in their houses and just had to venture out despite the mandates.
People in charge noticed. Here we are.
That's one of the weakest straw-man arguments you could have made, @OP
I was working from home since 2013. The whole purpose was that I work off hours, being geographically dispersed made follow-the-sun easier, and needed to be available to do the job. No part of the offer required I use my ar-e to heat an office-location seat.
In Corp Risk and we are now 4 days in office and we know the reason behind that.
I commute to a cube farm to get on Teams calls with people (including my mgr) in different cities/states.
I’m not client facing. There is little to no in-office collaboration happening.
This is a huge waste of time and money.
That's a nice bundle of projection, but if you can't show deficiencies in an employee's work product you have nothing to complain about. If someone can do everything WF asks in 4 hrs, so what? Either give them more actual work or stfu. Either way, WFH isn't the problem. Wasting money and time on offices is a problem though, if we care at all about efficiency. You're literally attacking the most efficient workers.
@b5 that’s not accurate. As long as you get your AVERAGE of 8 hrs you are ok. The report does not give a daily # of hrs you are in the office. Only an average.
@b8 this
I think it wouldn't be as problematic if people actually found value in it. Wells forced people back to office but never actually built an in-office culture. We're still working remotely, just doing it from a cubicle. None of my coworkers are near me. I see my manager face to face like once a year. There's one or two people in the business I support who are also located at my office, and I don't talk to them except on teams calls.
People aren't d-mb. We have a keen sense of when our time is being wasted.
Not able to mow the lawn between meetings.
Not able to do laundry between meetings.
...
...
We had flexibility like not having the 8 hour requirement for “in office”. You could leave early if needed due to weather for example and then work from home. You could adjust hours as needed. You might work 10 hours one day and leave after 7 the next day as work needs dictated. Now you would be in violation.
When covid happened, companies asked employees to help save their business by working remotely to maintain operations and serve customers. Thousands of Wells Fargo employees worked full-time remote for more than a year, including people who had never done remote before the pandemic. The exercise proved that jobs could be completed through remote work and still accomplish all the necessary goals to serve the business and customers.
What gets people upset is the arbitrary decision once the pandemic ended to not only revert back to being in office but to eliminate full-time remote positions that were previously offered and documented. There's an underlying hypocrisy that remote work was fully acceptable when it served the needs of the company but now we're being asked to come into the office even when it makes no sense for what we need to accomplish everyday (ie we spend the whole day on Teams vs in person meetings).
Before COVID the understanding was I could work remote occasionally and also had the flexibility to get to appointments or flex my time in office as needed.
I always spent time at home in the evenings working and catching up on emails or administrative work. Not anymore My badge swipes and keyboard activities were not scrutinized
Now I am forced to come to office where there is literally not one person that I work with. I don’t have a cube where I can call “home”. I wander around looking for a place to sit. Years ago people could put up family pictures or sports memorabilia that not only gave one a sense of your own space but also encouraged communication as people may connect over a picture. That is forbidden now. Any sense of making a space personal is forbidden.
Instead of reprimanding or firing the coffee badgers management punishes everyone just as if we were in high school. They don’t know their teams well enough to mange them. Many are weak and clueless and don’t really know how to run meetings or manage people.
RTO and location strategy is impersonal and repressive and a huge inconvenience. It encourages little in terms of team building
Thousands of Wells workers had signed full time telecommute agreements in place for years before the pandemic. You may not have been far along enough in your career for that option to be available to you, but for folks with more senior level experience, this was completely normal. My entire team was remote, and no one really thoughttwice about it. Those agreements were quietly and unilaterally invalidated across the company when location strategy was first becoming a thing. RTO at Wells wasn't just reversion to the mean after a temporary pandemic-driven change, it was the fully intentional destruction of what had been a really great working situation for professionals further along in their career. Wells was a forerunner in remote work and that sh-t got tossed in the trash so Charlie could preside over his vision of ruining as many Americans' livelihoods as he can.
Also, I think some people want to treat RTO like it's a one-time, point-in-time event. Like "we RTOed in 2023, that was years ago, why do people keep bringing this up?" But you keep getting the waste and futility of the thing rubbed in your face every single day you drive to the office to talk to no one and take teams calls. I can't NOT see when my time is being wasted. Remote work is never going to stop coming up as a topic , because the wound keeps getting freshly re-opened every day.
Because we learned how much we could do for our personal lives in the time we used to spend commuting, and resent having to give up that time. Life is short, spending it in traffic is a waste.
And not a one of those employees had any management chain to keep them working? Sure...
Yeah. Heaven forbid that society ever advance at all from the way things were done in the past.
Hasn't it been drilled into our heads by now, not to accept that type of complacency? To always question the status quo? To push forward with advances and improvements?
Yet here you are, desperately clinging to what happened years ago.
Its a big deal because all the hard working WF employees somehow managed to sneak in going to the gym, taking/picking up kids from school, shopping, naps, second jobs, and a whole lot more into their designated work days and then that was all taken away from them. This obviously resulted in a decline in their standard of living and they resent being treated the same as the other 95% of society that has to go into work every day and yet somehow manages to get those things done when they arent supposed to be at work.
I was fully remote before COVID. It's a "big deal" because it's a complete waste of time/money and the HY hack executives also constantly lie about the objective of the program. It's to motivate people to quit and nothing more. You can't fire 110,000 people and simultaneously claim you want people in the office. Their obvious true objective is 0 days per week, 0 hours a day, but they want to get their cheap and avoid severance, so they F with people until some percentage quits on their own. FHY. They are nothing but liars and thieves and they don't deserve to get what they want. Hold out for the severance.
It's an example of the fact that the company is focused on the wrong things. WF is notoriously bad at technology. We have an entire department in Corp Risk spending tens of millions to build a document management engine that has (literally) none of the features of 1999 Microsoft Word, yet it's being forced on the business and interrupting their process. What value does this document management engine add? Zero (actually negative). But the business was not consulted on how to improve the process. Corp Risk leaders are mostly focused on "management hygiene," which is code for RTO metrics.
We have another technology department trying to build AI Agents to write Santamossimo's investor relations decks (and failing, because the results need substantial human intervention lmao). None of this saves the company money, streamlines processes, or aids loan growth (quote the opposite). The managing directors are toxic, venting their frustrations downward, which shows up in poor employee morale and poor performance (there is no upside to being a top performer--no raises, flat bonuses, no promotions, and the odds that you will be one of the 10% to get an exceeds are slim). Over half of the employees are doing the minimum to keep their job until they can find another; that's it.