AT&T follows Amazon with 5-days-in-office mandate
AT&T is requiring office employees to work on-site a full five days a week starting next month.
The telecom giant previously accommodated a hybrid schedule in its return-to-office push.
The news comes as Amazon has delayed some RTO plans over capacity issues.
AT&T's return-to-office mandate is set to get stricter in the new year.
The Dallas-based telecom giant confirmed to Business Insider that it's requiring all office employees to work on-site five days a week starting next month. The change follows about a year of AT&T accommodating a hybrid schedule in its widely publicized office push.
In summer 2023, CEO John Stankey said workers would be required to report at least three days a week to one of nine corporate hubs: Dallas; Atlanta; Los Angeles; San Ramon, California; Seattle; St. Louis; Washington, DC; Middletown, New Jersey; and Bedminster, New Jersey. The company previously supported more than 300 offices across the US.
Thousands of affected employees faced the choice of relocating or finding a new job, with some 18,000 management employees opting to return to one of the hubs, AT&T's proxy statement this year said.
Now, some workers who may have gotten used to hybrid schedules will soon be required to log eight hours a day, five days a week, at the office.
"The majority of our employees and leaders never stopped working on location for the full work week — including during the pandemic," a company spokesperson told BI.
In multiple social media posts, Reddit users on the AT&T subreddit voiced concerns about whether the offices had enough capacity
for employees.
AT&T told BI it's updating its facilities amid the policy change.
"As we continue to evolve our model, we are enhancing our facilities and workspaces, adapting our benefits programs, and incorporating best practices to ensure our employees are best equipped to serve our customers," the spokesperson said.
This week, BI reported that Amazon was delaying its five-days-in-office mandate for some employees because of workspace shortages at some locations. While the company said most locations were on track to be ready on January 2, internal documents indicated some employee returns would be delayed until as late as May.
"We continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a September memo announcing that employees were expected to be in the office every day of the workweek.
AT&T is also expanding its footprint in Atlanta, where the company signed a lease earlier this year for two office buildings it had previously vacated, CoStar reported.
Shares of AT&T are up roughly 40% this year, outperforming the S&P 500's 27% return in the period. The telecom giant reported mixed third-quarter results in October, adding more wireless subscribers than Wall Street expected but coming up slightly short for overall revenue as the landline business declined.
The RTO push comes as some big-company CEOs say they're frustrated with hybrid-work setups. Many job seekers have also found that it's getting harder to find a remote or hybrid job.
At the same time, some employers appear to have settled into a tentative truce over how often workers are required to show up at the office.
In an October survey of nearly 7,500 organizations globally, the recruiting company Korn Ferry found that the share of employers requiring workers to report to the office five days a week had dropped to 43% from 89% before the pandemic ushered in a global experiment in remote work.
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