Hearing more and more chatter that the return-to-office mandate could soon be moving to 4 days a week.
Also hearing that VPN activity is being tracked to see when people are connecting remotely vs being in the office — and that use of company AI tools/prompts may be logged or monitored too, so worth remembering that what you type into work systems might not necessarily be private. 👀
Then this video pops up saying tougher office mandates can sometimes be used to drive natural attrition before bigger restructuring or layoffs…
Coincidence? Maybe. But with everything else going on, the timing is interesting. 😂
9 replies (most recent on top)
OP is stupid. A four day in office requirement would make the executives look stupid. If they did this, no employee would ever take time off or most employees would fail in office requirements every year.
They cannot move the in office requirement for Thrive Together without simultaneously granting greater leniency or guaranteed PTO banks. The first option acknowledges the absurdity of Thrive Together. Why have greater leniency and in office requirements? Self-defeating. The second would show FTO was never about employee benefits.
Thrive Together is a blunt tool to drive attrition. Layoffs are typically expensive. No PTO banks means less realized payout at layoffs. How else will GK needs to get the company to $10 billion?
I still believe 5 days in the office per week for all (including North America and EMEA) - independent of distance to the office is coming in May. With an announcement in January/February. Just makes sense to me. Logical next step after RTO policy introduced this year, stack ranking, Ai taking over more of workload, IT layoffs everywhere, etc etc.
If they go 4 days, they might as well just go to 5 right out the gate. Does that mean we go back to allowing people to WFH when necessary since that was the norm before the attendance policy? The attendance policy has to go. I'm not going to RTO 4d/wk just AND have them enforce this stupid attendance policy. That is the WORST of both worlds. Why are they sc--wing with us so much? If 5d is the case I'm not giving my employer access to my home network anymore and when there is a snow day or to think I can "just work" at home if I'm sick. I'll take the day off. This playing back and forth with the in office time that they dont even honor themselves got out of hand some time ago. This is a slippery slope. If they're monitoring VPN usage they're doing a pi-s poor job of it. This is not negotiable. I am doing them a solid by the WFH 2 days a week because that allows them more access to ME.
So basically, if you do the math and you work 5 days a week already, you're still subjected to an attendance policy you werent before and they can use to strip you of benefits they agreed to pay you to just take this job. You can still be penalized for coming in 5 days a week and taking a 2wk vacation and then having some other important events that keep you from coming into the office in a single quarter.
@2jj It sure makes absolute sense to force employees; who have no local office FLY to the nearest office to fulfil some executive wet dream of fully utilised office in the name of "getting together". Pure BS.
Covid is no longer an excuse, and is far enough in the rearview mirror to get back to "normal." As soon as they changed the mileage definition of a hybrid employee--from 25 miles to an arbitrary 40 miles--I knew the writing was on the wall. As arbitrary as 39 days a quarter.
I remember all the su-kers insisting if we were strong with the initial two-day RTO, then they wouldn’t be adding more.
I knew those claims were mo--nic.
No changes for the rest of the FY. Confirmed in the all hands today.
Well duh, everyone knows that’s coming.. along with another RTO range increase likely. Why fire people when you can soft RIF them via RTO nonsense
I’ll go one better. Total speculation on my part - anytime between now and 1 May 2027 - 5 days a week in the office world wide will be introduced. Just like Dell.