Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

This is nothing new! Must be slow news day

I have the same flex cube since the very beginning. I book it in advance and it is mine every day just like regular cube. Don’t act like a baby. If you cant handle it then leave. Yes, leave. One less whiner to deal with. Put up or shut up!

I look forward to it

Hoteling will be for support teams (finance, technology, etc. Not call centers, revenue producers.

@1rdy+1b8pQq1X is that the extent of your writing and critical thinking skill? Please be a troll. If you are part of the new group of WF employees, the fate of this company is sealed.

Hotel Cubes are cool!

Op must not have heard virtual desktops are coming- makes the argument about have to restart your computer pointless- there won’t be one and you can go sit at any desk and resume your session..the hotel cube concept is also not new, been happening for years and the main reason is something like 60% of workers that are “in office” full time really are only there half the time (unless your whole team is in the same space which is rare except for wfa); which means desks sit empty.. it’s easier for them to allow flex seating for capacity reasons and once Covid is less of an issue it will work better for the company. They don’t care whatsoever how the employees feel about it.

What rock have you been under?? This has been in motion for years! Remember the “2020 Vision”. They got rid of most of the tall cubes in St. Louis HQ years back with the new building updates. Personally I hate them. Hard to focus, noise, no privacy, etc but that’s the wave of the new open communal future in most businesses

The main difference between hotel cubes and hotel rooms, is that hotel rooms actually get cleaned and sanitized between occupants. The cubes definitely will not. We will get to do that ourselves as, “Other duties as assigned”. I guess I can at least add it to my resume.

So my team isn't even guaranteed to sit together because it's first come, first served, but somehow the whole approach is to engender synergy?

It amazes me that they talk about cost cutting yet are spending money to get people back into the office. The company has proved WFH is effective and in many ways more productive. There is a lot of corporate real estate they can get rid of and save millions.

So this just goes to prove their agenda, which is layoffs of Americans to support that cost cutting and moving those jobs overseas.

I'm convinced that every few years CPG changes their office furniture plan / layout just to justify their own existence. There's never really a good reason to change these things, just a lot of excuses and buzz words. Bottom line, we need to sell a lot of our current physical locations, go WFH/virtual desk top for large swaths of the work force, and save billions as a result. Certain LOBs need physical locations. You can't do Operations tasks out of your home office, but a lot of WF work can be done remote and the cost savings are huge, especially once we start using virtual desktops on a larger scale.

In CIC, in Charlotte NC, the majority of desks are not height adjustable. CPG had slowly been converting the 1990's furniture to modern, height adjustable desks. But then they stopped, as the vast amount of furniture that needs to be replaced is quite a cost to the company. Old style cubes must be dismantled and re-installed to adjust height. That won't work for hotel cubes.

Hotel cubes are another stupid decision in a series of stupid decisions by bean counter MBA graduates who never worked a day on the floor as a line employee in their lives.

company has already been doing this for years. While it may change, I. my area, anyone who was in office 4 days per week or more could get a set cube, everyone else would hotel. cpg checks this periodically with badge reports. also, reserving a cube is easy, just go to space finders and reserve it. for desk height, all the hotel cubes are adjustable up and down. once we are 100% vdi you will just have a dummy terminal at each cube so no need to worry about laptop or desktop, just sign in to your virtual machine, they already do this in India. and if you don't want to share a keyboard you can do what I do and bring in your own keyboard and mouse with you. if you need to make a private call they have quiet rooms with phones for you to do so. and if you are worried about your coworker seeing you look for a job or at p0rn, do it from home.

@1oeq+1b8pQq1X, thank you for being kind. The logistics of it all are giving me hives, especially if even half my team comes back into the building. All have desktops and won't be able to just pick up their machines and go. We have no admin in our group (unless I go up 2-3 steps in my food chain and ask their admin but that's 2 time zones away) nor in our building. We sign docs but that's not our primary function so that will need to get figured out too. I'll start knocking on doors to see what I can find out about the logistics of everything.

To the others:
*not sure if it's company wide but they're restacking buildings in at least 5 states that I know of and are moving in this direction.

*I'm well aware if I don't like it, I can move on. Unlike some people, I don't cut and run when things look down or life gets hard. I care about my team and I do what I can to make their working lives easier so they're happier, more productive and efficient so we provide a good customer experience. Doesn't mean I'm not allowed to be upset about it, especially when I know all of the "figuring it out" will fall into my lap. Chance favors the prepared mind.

*Unlike some locations, there are no white noise machines in the ceilings. Heck, we just got wifi. You can hear someone 2 rows away asking what their cube mate wants for lunch when people are on the floor.

*have any of you had to clean up after people when they've left their cubes a mess? It's gross and people will waste time and wipes trying to get things squared away so they can begin their day. What about headsets, mouse pads and anything ergonomic we use? People get possessive of their items, especially their staplers.

*the people in my area don't have laptops, only desktops. The concern about reloading email, mapping drives, etc comes not only from me but from people a lot more tech savvy than me, though I'm usually the one crawling around the floor, checking connections, setting up new computers, mapping drives, etc. 1 or 2 people every so often isn't bad. 60+ people on the daily? It's going to be a mess.

hotel cubes are contaminated

Last time I used a hotel cube, there was some sort of sticky residue on the keyboard and desk. Probably some spilled food or grease. Yuk. It’s like renting vs buying a home. When it is a rental, let the landlord clean and repair it. When you own it, you keep it clean, since it is your place. I guess that’s why the hotel cubes have missing stuff, and spilled drinks.

So hotel cubes have been around for years now. If you have a desktop that requires it to be logged in when you are away, say you remote in from home from your laptop (you may use a Mac and a windows machine) they can't take your machine from you and leave you without the tools to do your job.
CPG are lightweight bullies, if you have an admin on your floor or in your group reach out to them and see what can be done to save your space.
I am not sure which state/city/ building you work in but there are always work arounds.
There is also a risk factor that comes with removing certain desks from certain folks.
I would totally help you but this is anonymous so my hands are tied.
But don't freak out it won't be as bad as you think, plus you can always reserve any cube you need in advance and the admins usually are the ones that will be approving those requests. In the past I have reserved hotel cubes for longer than 6 months at a time because the contractors for a certain group are not allowed to be remote and there were no available perm. Cubes on the floor.

@1kuu+1b8pQq1X. It’s Wells decision. They do not ask for your opinion. Don’t like it? Get another job that suits you better.

@1cmg+1b8pQq1X. If management wants to conserve office space, then stick with WFH. I wS booted out of the office into WFH as a cost cutting measure. My LOB no longer had monthly bills for my desk, phone and LAN connection.

Flex cubes. One more reason to quit.

All the nonsense about productivity, communication, brainstorming, etc is just that - nonsense. And upper management knows it’s nonsense.

The open office configuration is the cheapest way to cram the largest number of people into a the least amount of space. It’s about maximizing real estate. That’s it. That’s all.

If you get sick because the person sitting three feet away from you came to work sick and coughed all over you - that’s what sick days are for.

If you can’t concentrate because the loud guy next to you won’t shut up about his weekend - take the work home and do it at night or over the weekend.

It’s not about you or your comfort or convenience. It’s about how much office space the bank can get rid of. Deal with it.

@lab+1b8pQq1X - speak like an true expert LOL. Opinions are like ….. everyone has one

@zbc+1b8pQq1X - drama queen much? Flex cuber here. I know how it works. Don’t exaggerate!

Come in late, then you can’t find a desk, so go back home and work from there.

If I find a desk, I’ll need at least 30 min or more to completely scrub and disinfect it since who knows if a sick person sat there yesterday? Unpack my stuff from my locker. More time lost. Call CPG to have desk adjusted as it will be the wrong height for me. Etc.

Too much time lost each day, and then wandering around trying to find coworkers, break rooms, etc.

Every day trying to remember where you sit today so you can find your cube again after lunch.

Fire drills will be fun, no one knowing where to go, since you never know from day to day where you will sit.

Shut down early so you can clean up, repack your things, repack into a locker.

Ridiculous.

Our office was retrofitted like this a few years back. There are opaque glass privacy shields on top of the cube walls and pretty decent white noise so it’s reasonably quiet. It’s really not that big a deal.

Why do they bother having us do all the compliance training around classifying information and restricting "need to know" information if they're making the office environment into "everyone can see"?

This is emblematic of how out of touch senior 'leadership' is from the realities of working in an office in the 21st century. The open office floor plan has been widely discredited as being ineffective. There is no such thing as a private phone call/conversation with the low wall environment. There is no way to prevent others from seeing your screens and not everything on all screens needs to be seen by everyone in the area. The need to set up and tear down each day is a productivity loss. Plus, now with the increased recognition to have a more germ free environment, having people move around from desk to desk daily only increases exposure to other peoples' bacteria.

However, since 'leadership' says this is how it is to be, they will not change or more bluntly, man-up and admit that decision (to go with an open office, no permanent desk assignments) no matter what. This is just one example of where decisions are being made based on what 'seems' like a good idea and a refusal to look at objective information to base decisions.

Loads of WF buildings had this pre-pandemic and it’s pretty common in the corporate world. Doesn’t mean I liked it when it was first introduced, but stay at WF or leave… open space hotel seating is coming for you.

On the upside maybe they’ll renovate a bit at the same time.

Go to school, get into debt, find a job to pay off debt, climb corporate us empire ladder, vacation 2 wks per year, pay off mortgage, die.

And the whining continues.. now it is about cubes. LOL

4 - 6 years? That is optimistic, I would say 2 decades for internal wells IT to complete this one

I don’t mind hotel cubes. Been there done that. It’s not the end of the world.

Let's hope our IT will be responsible for developing software for booking cubes. Using previous simple to moderate complexity projects, it'll take them 4 to 6 years to do so - in the meain time, we can continue to use cubes just like have been... This is sarcasam.

Is this company wide or in a certain location?

I guess the OP is not familiar with virtual desktops and roaming profiles.

@OP - Nothing new. It’s like that in my building for years. You need to get with the program

It's not for everyone, so there's that. I'll betcha a pay check I won't be in a cube, "hotel" style or otherwise.